Faith, Desire, and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard's Atonement for Passion

The unpublished writings of Constance Louisa Maynard (1849-1935), first mistress of Westfield College in London, provide a significant window into the past sexual experience of a late-Victorian English educational pioneer. Maynard, who authored a considerable number of both published and unpublished writings, began what she called her "green book" in 1866 at the age of sixteen primarily to document her progress as a Christian. By 1871, however, it had become an outlet for her outpourings about love, usually analyzed within the context of faith.¹ Interestingly, as Maynard's green book evolved into what she called "my Friend," she began a parallel daily diary, begun in 1871, in which she recorded social and educational events of her life, usually without comment.² She continued to add to both until her death. Maynard's autobiography, written between 1915 and 1927, represents a significantly different resource and, at first glance, seems of less value because it presents a selection of entries from her green book and diary.³ Nonetheless, it proffers more insight into her experience, since she tended to analyze her personal history within the context of contemporary discourses and her later understandings of her own feelings together with nineteenth-century concepts and values and her earlier ideas of herself.⁴ Together, Maynard's writings reveal her complex negotiation with faith, desire, and sexual identity.

Maynard's frankness in revealing her feelings lends poignancy and thus great historical value to her personal accounts, and their variations reveal deep reflection on those feelings. The juxtaposition between Maynard's diary and green book finds provocative voice in written entries in both books on 19 February 1886, the day she turned thirty-seven years old. In her diary she expressed pride in her four-year success as mistress of Westfield College: "We stand apart from most other English women's colleges," she wrote. "Westfield students are the first to gain the B.A. degree."⁵ In sharp contrast, her green book entry of that day mused at great length on her "failure with 'love'" for another woman at the college, a theme that would evolve during her thirty-one years as Westfield's mistress: "God has taken [her] from me because I have loved her far too well, or, rather, in too earthly a fashion. Go, my Love, Go! In my folly, I drank in your beauty. I did not know that your hands would keep me from my work and paralyze my will. . . . I promise to relinquish You in order for Him [Christ] to speak to my heart."⁶ Remarkable here is Maynard's adoption of faith as a means of understanding and resisting her same-sex desire. Her biggest sin, as far as she was concerned, was in choosing human love over divine love. This concern persisted throughout her lifetime despite her later awareness of changing ideas about same-sex eroticism.

Suffering for the "sin" of human love also justified what we today would call Maynard's tendency to engage in emotionally abusive relationships. Maynard was raised by extraordinarily devout Protestant parents to repress worldly sentiment, and her lifelong yearning for passion provoked in her a corresponding form of evangelically inspired "atoning" for such earthly sin.⁷ Atonement in Maynard's life profoundly affected her intimate friendships. In her early adulthood she assumed a submissive feminine role in her relationship with the highly esteemed Professor Lewis Campbell, a man twice her age who was married to her older cousin Fanny. She played a similarly submissive role in her first significant relationship with a woman, a senior

Figure 1.

Constance Maynard at the age of thirty-one, ca. 1880. From the Queen Mary College Archives, University of London, reprinted with permission.

student whom she met while attending Girton College.⁸ After becoming mistress of Westfield in 1882, however, she reversed her role. She initiated passionate relationships with two young Westfield students, Margaret Graham Brooke and Marion Wakefield. Just as Campbell had toyed with and controlled her, so Maynard played upon Brooke...