Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle 1820–1960 (review)

In 1886 Blanche Athena Clough, daughter of poet Arthur Hugh Clough and niece of the founding mother of Newnham College, Cambridge, recorded hating her fellow creatures so fiercely that she went about longing for "the sensation of a long knife going into my left side" (115). Besides this and her father's black depressions, the Cloughs encountered bankruptcy, abandoned their religious faith, enjoyed both spectacularly long and spectacularly short lives, and produced two women activists for higher education. The story of "Annie" and "Thena," as Gillian Sutherland fully demonstrates, merges with the evolution of women's professions and university access; their experiences, though highly idiosyncratic, reflect the wider developments of their society. Sutherland concludes: "A study of the Cloughs and their circle is an exploration of the slow emergence of middle-class women from the private domestic sphere to which the dominant ideology of the first half of the nineteenth century had confined them" (212). By the time the last Clough woman, Thena's adoptive daughter, Kitty Duff, grew up, the family assumed she would go to Newnham College and work for her living, whereas the first, Anne Jemima, spent half of her life wondering how to survive, both financially and psychologically, with no clear path ahead of her. In the end, she established a series of small domestic schools for girls, while Newnham began as a safe and chaperoned house for women wanting to attend open lectures in Cambridge. Once Arthur Hugh died in 1861, the story of the Cloughs is essentially that of the family's women and their widening circle of close friends and supporters. The 140 years spanned by the dates in the subtitle remarkably cover only two lives—the start of Annie's and the end of Thena's—but the changes they witnessed mark the end of Victorian attitudes towards higher education for women and the start of something recognisably like the modern age. The "Faith, Duty, and the Power of Mind" of the book's title aptly summarize the changing priorities of the family.

Histories of influential families like the Cloughs, the Stephens, or the Stracheys (all were intertwined) remind us of how the English establishment was run by networks of cousins and siblings who between them shifted ideological ground in ways that had a lasting impact, though they often had a hard battle to change public opinion. It was her brother's marriage into a family that included Florence Nightingale, Barbara Bodichon, the Bonham-Carters, and her own connections with the "Langham Place set" that helped steer Annie towards the founding of Newnham, and Thena to a continuation of her work amidst diehard opposition. Sutherland describes the anti-women riots that broke out at Cambridge in 1921, when Senate voted to exclude women from full membership of the University and the gates of Newnham were vandalised in celebration. Despite their temperamental differences, both the Clough aunt and niece persevered and presided over a steadily growing institution whose academic success proved that women deserved to be full members of Cambridge University. The Clough family had largely failed its women: the men had left them financially unprotected (Thena never even saw her father, who died in Italy three months after she was born), whereas the institution of Newnham became an alternative family made up of substitute sisters and mothers, including Philippa Fawcett, with whom Thena travelled to India, Japan, and Canada on what must have been a truly liberating tour. Sutherland asks the question she supposes must be lurking in her reader's mind: should these intense friendships between women be seen as lesbian? Admitting that some did have what she calls "a powerful erotic charge" (201), she argues that such friendships operated on a model more finely nuanced and emotionally rich than their equivalent today, especially for women whose family connections had failed them in some way.That the...