Regiment of Women: The 1917 Novel Nobody Prosecuted

The book opens with John Knox, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it means to be read.

The monstrous empire of a cruell woman we knowe to be the onlie occasion of all these miseries: and yet with silence we passe the time as thogh the mater did nothinge appertein to us.

That is from The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, Knox's 1558 pamphlet arguing that female rule is against nature and God. "Regiment" there means rule, not a body of soldiers. Winifred Ashton — writing as Clemence Dane — took her title from it for a novel about a girls' school where every position of authority is held by a woman, and published it in 1917.

Nobody prosecuted her. Eleven years later Radclyffe Hall wrote a considerably gentler book and Britain destroyed it. The difference between those two outcomes is the most interesting thing about Regiment of Women.

Clare Hartill

Clare teaches literature at a large private girls' school and she is the most alive thing in the book. She is brilliant in a way the novel takes entirely seriously — her classes are the ones girls remember for the rest of their lives, and Dane never undercuts that.

She also selects people. She finds someone with unusual promise, makes them the centre of her attention, lets them reorganise their entire inner life around her, and then withdraws. Not cruelly, exactly. Just at intervals, and without warning, for reasons the other person is left to construct on their own.

Alwynne Durand arrives as a young mistress — eighteen, popular, good at the job — and becomes the current one.

The thirteen-year-old

Before Alwynne there was Louise Denny.

Louise is thirteen, roughly three years younger than everyone else in Clare's class, and a genuine prodigy — Clare "discovered her, as she phrased it, in the limbo of the Lower Third." Dane puts real weight on how much being seen by Clare means to a child like this.

Then Alwynne arrives, and Clare's attention moves.

In Chapter 24 Louise goes out of a dressing-room window. The school settles very quickly on an account of it: a deplorable accident, the old-fashioned windows were always unsafe, somebody really should have taken precautions. There is an inquest. The younger mistresses spend the day telling each other, "a trifle too insistently," that supervising that room at that hour was nobody's particular job.

Clare does not believe a word of it:

not for one instant did she share the general belief in the accidental nature of her death. Her conscience would not allow her the comfort of such self-deception.

She says nothing. Dane gives her no confession scene, no exposure, no consequence. The most she extracts from Clare is a bad night — "she lay awake till sunrise, considering her position" — and even that is described as "above all, intensely and quite selfishly frightened."

A child dies, the adult responsible understands exactly what she did, and the institution around her closes over it. That is a hundred pages into a 1917 novel, and it is not the climax. It is setup.

Why this one was safe to publish

Put Regiment of Women next to The Well of Loneliness and the asymmetry is hard to miss. Hall's novel has one euphemistic sentence about two women spending a night together and was declared obscene and destroyed. Dane's has a manipulative woman driving a child to her death and passed without incident.

The reason is not explicitness. It is what each book asks for.

Hall wrote a plea. Her whole argument is that Stephen Gordon deserves a place in the world, and the magistrate at Bow Street said outright that the plea was the obscenity. Dane wrote something the establishment could read as a warning: here is what happens in a closed world of women with no men in it, and look at the damage. You can prosecute a request for tolerance. You cannot easily prosecute a cautionary tale.

Whether Dane meant it as a cautionary tale is a different question, and the book is genuinely slippery about it. Clare gets all the wit and all the intelligence. The school's women are drawn with far more interest and attention than anyone outside it, and the novel is markedly less curious about Roger than about the woman he is rescuing Alwynne from.

There is also this, which is either nothing or very strange: Ashton had not taught school when she wrote the book. She took a post at a girls' school afterwards, once the war was over.

The ending, which is the hard part

Alwynne is extracted. Her aunt Elsbeth engineers a stay in the country, where Alwynne meets Roger Lumsden, and the novel's resolution is a young man pulling her out of Clare's orbit and into an engagement.

Modern readers tend to find this unbearable, and it is worth being straightforward about why: the escape route the book offers is heterosexuality, and the danger it rescues her from is another woman's love. Read as a thesis about what women are to each other, it is ugly.

Read as a book about one specific predatory person, it holds up much better — and Dane's final page suggests she knew which one she had written. Clare is left alone. The fire burns down. The last sentence of the novel is:

When the dawn came, she was still sitting there, thinking--thinking.

Then a dateline: March 1914 — September 1915. She started it five months before the war began and finished it thirteen months into it, in a country that was being emptied of men and was about to be run, in a great many places, entirely by women. It was her first novel. She was twenty-six when she began it.

Read it

It runs to 47 chapters and almost nobody has written about it, which means going in without the plot spoiled for you — an increasingly rare thing with a century-old novel.

• Regiment of Women — complete, free, including the Knox epigraph and Dane's dedication.
• The Well of Loneliness — Radclyffe Hall, 1928, frequently cited as owing something to this one. What happened when it was prosecuted.
• Carmilla — Le Fanu, 1872. The same dynamic of fascination and consumption, with a supernatural alibi. Our close reading.