Mary Wakefield | Thomas Baty / Irene Clyde | Dora Marsden | Bloomsbury Connections

Early 20th Century

By the turn of the 20th century people were beginning to raise questions about traditional ideas of gender and sexuality. Feminists questioned the role of women in society and were calling ever-louder for their rights. In learned circles, concepts of a third gender and sexual inversion (a female soul in a male body, or vice versa), developed in Germany to explain homosexuality, became more widespread. Artistic types broke away from heterosexual, monogamous models of relationships. For a privileged few, at least, it seemed like the 20th century could bring about a whole new world of sexual and gender freedom.

Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield (below) was a musician, music collector and writer, best remembered in Cumbria today as the founder of the eponymous music festival held ever year in Kendal. Born in 1853 to a local banker and American mother, she was firmly Victorian by birth but modern in outlook. She never married, preferring to devote her time to music, and moved in artistic circles that included many other independent women and free thinkers.

Throughout her life she had many close friendships with women, which may or may not have had a queer element. She certainly drew women in with her interest, humour and kindness.

In the 1870s she met composer Maude Valérie White, who was immediately taken with her — “I remember how much Mary Wakefield interested me. I longed to know more of her,” she wrote — and agreed to the first of many happy visits to the Wakefield family home in Sedgwick.1 She described Mary as “very different from her own people [her family] (she had the artist’s temperament to a quite unusual degree),” although “she got on splendidly with them.”2 Maude would later describe Mary as her “special friend” and dedicate the song Espoir en Dieu to her.

Another dedication came from the queer writer Vernon Lee: a ghost story called A Wicked Voice. She also stayed in Sedgewick House in 1886 and took an overnight pony-and-trap trip with Mary to Ullswater. Although often snobbish about Mary’s Westmorland accent and background, Lee was enchanted by her:

For all her superficial vulgarity of intonation (I find it’s universal up here) and manner, Mary Wakefield is one of the most original & in some aspects interesting women I know. There is an astonishing strength about her, physical and intellectual, an energy, an uncompromising frankness, a brightness & good humour, even a courseness which make her quite different from everyone else. What the woman really is, it is extremely difficult to tell, a strange puzzle to me, but attractive with the attractiveness of extreme individuality. — Vernon Lee’s Letters, 4 August 18863

Mary was particularly close friends with the actress Marion Terry, who “constantly accompanied Mary on her long drives across country” and on a trip to Venice in 1886.4 The pair often dined together with Vernon Lee, who described them as “the inevitable Mary Wakefield and Marion Terry.”5

In 1895 Mary moved to Nutwood in Grange-over-Sands with the author Valentine Munro Ferguson, who dedicated her final novel Life Again, Love Again to her new companion. Valentine was often sickly and her death from influenza two years later impacted Mary greatly: “It is needless to touch upon a sorrow which, even ten years later, Mary Wakefield could hardly endure to allude.” Around this time Mary “became one of the earliest supporters of the Women’s Suffrage movement. She was in all things on the side of progress”.6

Thomas Baty / Irene Clyde

Thomas Baty (right) was born in Stanwix in 1869 and trained as a lawyer at Oxford and Cambridge, spending much of their life and career in Japan. Before this, however, they were already known as a gender-critical thinker and radical feminist.

In 1909, under the name Irene Clyde, they published the novel Beatrice the Sixteenth, which imagines a utopian genderless (although not classless or slaveless) society, where same-sex relationships are common. Although the work didn’t sell well in Clyde’s life, it is now regarded as an important early work in queer literature. A later work, Eve and the Sour Apples (1934), contains essays that attacked the gender binary, traditional masculinity and marriage.

With a keen interest in the suffragist movement, Thomas founded the Aëthnic Union in 1911 to promote ideas of non-binary gender, equality and pacificism. In 1916 the society began circulating their gender critical journal Urania for “those who are firmly determined to ignore the dual organization of humanity in all its manifestations”.7 It continued to be printed until 1940 and included articles on same-sex relationships, sex-changes and androgyny.

Although they lived publicly as a man, Thomas sometimes privately wore women’s clothes and accessories. One acquaintance described them as “an active transvestite; even when having guests for dinner he would sometimes appear in a flowing and low-necked gown.”8 Friends later noted the distinction between the outward-facing, more aloof Thomas and the gentle and intelligent inner Irene. Thomas/Irene themself wrote that “From earliest days,” they had “longed passionately to be a lady — and have continued to do so.”9

After World War II, Thomas’s British passport was revoked for assisting the Japanese government and they narrowly avoided being tried for treason. They continued working for the government until 1952 and died two years later, at the age of 85.

Dora Marsden

Although women had been fighting for their rights for over a century, the early-20th century brought louder and more widespread calls for equality, most notably with the suffragettes, and raised questions about long-held beliefs about gender. A particularly outspoken and influential voice was that of Dora Marsden, whose disaffection with Emeline Pankhurst’s suffragette organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union, led her to found the radical feminist magazine The Freewoman in 1911.10 Although it ran for less than a year, the magazine was influential. H.G. Wells, Bessie Drysdale and Edward Carpenter contributed articles and it included frank discussions of sex and morality, free love, homosexuality and the benefits of remained unmarried — ideas that we associate more with the 60s and 70s.

In one issue of The Freewoman, a contributor noted that “It apparently has never occurred to [critics of women’s emancipation] that numbers of these women find their ultimate destiny, as it were, amongst members of their own sex, working for the good of each other, forming romantic — nay, some times passionate — attachments with each other.”11 This seems to have been the case for Dora, who had a number of close relationships with other members of the feminist movement, including co-editor Mary Gawthorpe and fellow activist Grace Jardine, who she lived with in Southport.

After her later, more literary, magazine The Egoist came to an end in 1919, Dora moved to the remote cottages of Seldom Seen near Glenridding (above) with her mother, where she began writing a seven-volume series on philosophy. Only two volumes were ever published and their critical and commercial failure impacted her mental health severely. After the death of her mother in 1935 she was sent to a hospital in Dumfries, suffering depression, and she remained there for the last 25 years of her life — a sad end to an inspired woman.12

Bloomsbury Connections

The Bloomsbury Group was a collection of well-to-do artists, writers and intellectuals, whose work embodied the new, more liberal, attitudes to art, gender and sexuality in the early-20th century. They were famously said to ‘live in squares, paint in circles and love in triangles’. Although the core members of the group, like Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and E.M. Forster were based in the south of England, there were some connections with Cumbria.

Roger Senhouse, the son of a long-standing Maryport gentry family, was a translator and publisher who met the Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey in the mid-1920s.13 The two began a romantic and sado-masochistic affair that would continue until Strachey’s death in 1932.

In 1930, Lytton wrote to Roger “I think of you a great deal, dearest angel, with wonderful happiness and more love than can possibly be got into this (or indeed any) envelope. My love is old-fashioned … [it] goes on in a straight line for ever.” But he was never entirely sure that Roger’s affection was so straightforward and he often bore the emotional and (consensual) physical scars of their unconventional relationship. In another letter, Strachey wrote teasingly “Have you been a good boy? I hope so. I have been a good boy. If you have been a bad boy you must have the rod. Bad boys have the rod. And so do good boys too.”14

Strachey himself was no stranger to Cumbria, having visited for a walking holiday in 1912 with the painter Henry Lamb. He would later return for a visit to Watendlath Farm near Derwentwater in summer of 1921 with his siblings Marjorie and James, sister-in-law Alix, and friends Dora Carrington, her husband Ralph Partridge, and Gerard Brenan. Lytton wrote to Virginia Woolf from their holiday cottage that “the rain and cold have been fairly continuous.”15 Dora, whose father was born in Penrith in 1830, would immortalise the cottage in an oil painting now belonging to the Tate Collection (right).

Another person connecting the Bloomsbury set to Cumbria was the author Hugh Walpole, who was a close friend of Virginia Woolf. Hugh was well travelled, having been born in New Zealand and lived in New York, Durham, London, Cornwall, Russia and Germany. But childhood holidays at Gosforth and a family trip to the Lakes in 1922 convinced him to make Cumbria his home. In 1924 he moved to a cottage called Brackenburn overlooking Derwentwater. He quickly fell in love with the landscape and the community here, which often inspired his novels. He remained at Brackenburn until his death in 1941 and is buried at St John’s church, Keswick.

Hugh was aware of his attraction towards men from his teenage years and in 1904, at the age of 20, wrote “Meanwhile I still wait for the ideal friend. … I’d give a lot for the real right man.” Throughout his life he threw himself headlong into new friendships, often with older men, in the hope that one might be the real right one. Although he had made many great friends, it was only after his move to Brackenburn that he came close to the ideal. Harold Cheevers was a stout and trustworthy London policeman in his early 30s who left the Met to become Hugh’s chauffeur. The two became practically inseparable for the rest of Hugh’s life, although there’s no suggestion that Harold was ever unfaithful to his wife and two sons. It seems his faithful companionship was enough to satisfy Hugh’s life-long desire.

⮜ 19th C: Persecution
20th Century: War ⮞

Notes

  1. White, M.V. (1914). Friends and Memories, London: Edward Arnold, 113 ↩︎
  2. Newmarch, R. (1912). Mary Wakefield: a memoir, Kendal: Atkinson and Pollitt, 187. ↩︎
  3. Lee, V. (1937). Vernon Lee’s Letters, privately printed, 228. ↩︎
  4. Newmarch (1912), 25. ↩︎
  5. Lee (1937), 217. ↩︎
  6. Newmarch (1912), 111. ↩︎
  7. ‘To Our Friends’, Urania, No 13., 1919, 1. ↩︎
  8. Keenleyside, H.L. (1981). Memoirs of Hugh L Keenleyside: Hammer of the Golden Day, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 331. ↩︎
  9. Oram, A. (2001). ‘Feminism, Androgyny and Love between Women in Urania, 1916–1940‘. Media History. 7 (1): 57–70. ↩︎
  10. All issues of The Freewoman are available at The Modernist Journals Project [accessed March 2026] ↩︎
  11. Birstingl, H.J. (1912). “Uranians” in The Freewoman, Vol. I, Issue 7, 128. ↩︎
  12. For more on Dora Marsden see Spartacus Educational, Marsden History Group, Wessyman and L. Garner (2019) A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden, 1882-1960, Portland OR. ↩︎
  13. Roger Senhouse apparently had a ‘fleetingly’ homosexual schoolboy affair with Michael Llewelyn-Davies, who was one of the brothers that inspired J.M. Barry’s Peter Pan stories. ↩︎
  14. Levy, P, (ed.), (2005). The Letters of Lytton Strachey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 635, 583. ↩︎
  15. Levy (2005), 496. ↩︎