Instalación hotelera Hotel Encanto Central

By the end of the nineteenth century, an unprecedented number of single women were living and working in London. This change was the result of nearly a century's worth of agitation for equal opportunity in education and employment.1 _{These independent women, as Martha Vicinus's work} on women's communities has demonstrated,

wanted their own space, apart from the domestic world of their married sisters and from the male world in which they often moved. A community was a refuge, a foothold from which to launch into the wider world, but most of all, it was home.2

These homes and their communities are the subject of the present chapter. Yet there are important differences between the social groups that Vicinus describes and those that are examined here. The communities that are the subject of Independent Women (1985) are based on residential institutions such as women's colleges, settlement houses and nurses' residences. In what follows, I examine women's housing that was not organised by pre-existing professional groups but instead developed in response to a need to accommodate the influx of women seeking employment in London. Alison Ravetz points out that such special needs to house women arose in part 'from the fact that, historically, women had no legal or financial identity outside of the family or marriage'.3 Although many women in late nineteenth-century London shared accommodation or established the households that Vicinus identifies, other women resisted their interpolation into the communities that are the subject of her work. This provokes an important question: if these communities did not provide homes for all of the city's working women, what did?

The chapter considers purpose-built housing designed for working women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London and its representation in contemporaneous fiction.

1 See for instance Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women (London: Virago, 1991); Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Lynne Walker, 'Home and Away: The Feminist Remapping of Public and Private in Victorian London', in TheUnknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space, ed. by Iain Bordain et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 296-311.

2 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920(London: Virago, 1985), p. 31.

3 Alison Ravetz, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914-2000 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), p. 44.

These homes were designed to be temporarily occupied, for women were expected to eventually integrate themselves into more conventional households, yet many women lived in such buildings throughout their adult lives. As such, these women remained outside the social and architectural conventions of the family and challenged its centrality as the dominant organising principle of society. Like other new forms of domestic architecture discussed in this thesis, working women's dwellings were one of a number of forms of new housing constructed during this period that would effect shifts in ideological understandings of gender and the conventional family unit.

'The Ideal Method of Living': Purpose-Built Housing for Single Working Women

In an article written for London Society in 1888, an anonymous author whom readers know only as 'a Frenchwoman in London' chronicles her attempt to find suitable lodgings in London. The task is nearly impossible. Although the streets are lined with houses, and there are spare rooms to be let, each is rendered ineligible – or she herself is ineligible – on account of a failure to comply with certain social expectations. For instance, boarding houses that are tolerably clean enough for consideration 'don't take in ladies' for the reason that they might 'go out late in the evening'.4 _The alternative, the less respectable lodging houses, are patrolled by dishevelled women reeking of spirits and offer second-hand furnishings that are 'really too disgusting to think about'.5 _Although the Frenchwoman eventually finds a draughty garret with an unremarkable landlady, the flame once fanned by the chimera of independence has been snuffed out. Her disillusion comes not from an inability to evince a spirit of independence, for that is what motivates her to seek employment and accommodation in London, but rather from the disappointing realisation that there exists in the city no social or material infrastructure to support women's self-determination. The author remarks that if a woman is lucky enough to find respectable and affordable lodgings, unlike a man she suffers from (among other unpleasant experiences) isolation:

4 'A Frenchwoman in London', London Society, May 1888, pp. 489-505 (p. 492). 5 Ibid., p. 493.

[A] man more often works in the company of his fellows, and can always spend his evenings at his club or with his companions; he can frequent his pet restaurant, his favourite theatres and music halls, or any place his fancy selects where he can meet friends and acquaintances. How different must be the woman's life.6

The author here makes an important point, and one which is crucial for my argument: women were living and working independently in the city, but social convention and architectural practice had not yet expanded in a way to sufficiently accommodate them. The author notes that 'there are many thousands of women working for their daily bread' living in poor conditions, and suggests

how great a boon it would be if some nice places could be built containing suitable apartments, in which large numbers could live under one roof and have suitable attendance provided. There is a set of buildings in Oakley Street, Chelsea which answers to this description – but it is like a drop in the ocean. Many more such places are wanted, for there are thousands of women living in London who would gladly avail themselves of such advantages [...].7

The rhetoric used here is akin to an advertorial in its desire to highlight need as a justification for existence. However used in this way, the technique is as much a social appeal as it is a marketing strategy. During the late eighties, a series of articles on women's housing appeared in journals and newspapers. These ranged from personal accounts of the city's unsuitable accommodation to polemical essays accusing the government of insufficiently confronting the dearth of housing available to women. It was in the pages of publications like the Englishwoman's Review, the

Englishwoman's Year Book and Work and Leisure that women campaigned for suitable homes for '“Educated Working Women”'.8

The building that the author refers to in 'A Frenchwoman in London' – the Oakley Street Flats, Chelsea – was the earliest purpose-built residence for working women in London. The project had been financed by the Working Ladies' Guild, which was established by Lady Mary

6 Ibid., p. 502.

7 Ibid.

Fielding who in 1877 had acquired a block of workers' flats in Kensington which she converted into accommodation for retired professional women (known as the Campden Hill Chambers, Kensington). The rooms were let at an affordable rate, between 2s. 6d. and 4s. per week, which ensured they were constantly over-subscribed.9 _{Due to their popularity, the Trust proposed a} purpose-built building designed to house working women and to be built at Oakley Street, which was eventually completed in 1882.10 _{Although the rooms were let at the lower end of the market the} scheme was self-supporting, and looked to model dwellings corporations for its financial blueprint.11 _{The model dwellings movement, which began roughly at mid-century, saw private} companies build subsidised housing with a promise of a small dividend for investors.12 _{Just as} companies like the East End Dwellings Company or the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company sought to ameliorate the condition of the city's artisan and industrial classes, so did companies such as the Ladies' Residential Chambers Ltd. and the Ladies' Associated Dwellings Company seek to improve accommodation for the city's working women. However organisations such as the Working Ladies Guild, which financed housing chiefly for middle-class women, were represented as self-sustaining businesses and not charities. At this early stage of women's increasing social and professional opportunities it was crucial that women and their organisations be seen as self- sufficient in order to off-set criticism of their unsuitability for these new roles. As Emily Gee notes, these women would have also wished to distance themselves from 'the urban poor who needed philanthropic or municipal assistance in housing themselves and their families'.13 _{This was a class} of women who were defined in part by the bestowal of charity, not its receipt. The model dwellings movement, in its insistence on profit margins in order to avoid criticisms of pauperising the poor, thus at least offered a prototype for funding women's housing schemes. The principles of their design, however, would be very different.

9 Emily Gee, 'Where Shall She Live?' The Accommodation of Working Women in the Capital 1875-1925 (unpublished thesis for diploma in building conservation, Architectural Association, 2007), p. 40.

10 Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women (London: Francis Boutle, 2002), p. 207. 11 Gee, p. 40.

12 For a more extensive consideration of the model dwellings movement, see Chapter 2.1 of the present work.

The earliest appearances of purpose-built women's dwellings in literature are representations of housing for middle-class women.14 _{The rather simple explanation for this is that financing was} more easily secured for middle-class women's housing and as a result these buildings began to crop up with regularity by the early eighties. Furthermore, the campaign for women's housing that was launched in the periodical press was initiated by, and written for, middle-class women; this market was closely aligned with the audience for the novels in which we find these residences represented. Perhaps to disassociate these buildings from the model dwellings movement, housing for middle- class and upper-middle-class women was most often described as 'Ladies' Chambers', whereas homes for working-class women were usually referred to as women's hostels or lodging houses. While there was interest in financing projects for housing independent working-class women in the city during the same period, the trajectory of its development was somewhat different. There existed from about mid-century a number of hostels for working-class women operated by charitable Christian organisations like the YWCA or the Girls' Friendly Society. However these were not residences, but rescue homes, and accommodation was to be let temporarily during a period of crisis or emergency. There were a small number of homes for working-class women that developed at the same moment as residences for middle-class women, such as Maude Stanley's Soho Club and Home for Working Girls (1880), but it would not be until after the turn of the century that large-scale hostels – free from moral constraint and religious obligation – would be established for single working-class women.15 _{In what follows, I first consider the representation of} middle-class women's dwellings in Evelyn Sharp's The Making of A Prig (1897) and Annie S. Swan's A Victory Won (1895); I then examine a fictionalised portrait of the exchange between the working-class Soho Club and Home for Working Girls and 'Rooms for Ladies' in 'High Class Residential Mansions' in Julia Frankau's The Heart of a Child (1908).16 _{To review these}

14 Zimmern, p. 97.

15 The use of 'girls' rather than 'women' in this instance is consistent with class-inflected language – for instance 'shop girls' or 'factory girls', or a more recent example, 'call girls' – that seeks to diminish women's socio-economic, political, and sexual power. See, for instance, Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Republished 1999).

representations in parallel reveals that purpose-built housing for independent working women responded to a need for domestic security across classes during the period, but also suggests that this demand was not always met evenly.17

I

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the single woman living independently in the metropolis was a familiar figure in both the pages of novels and on the city's streets. Once equally the subject of derision and recipient of pity for her unmarried status, the middle-class woman who earned a living under her own steam gradually emerged from under the caricatures of her independence to attest to the advantages of these new social freedoms. She was no longer an old maid, but neither was she a New Woman. According to Emma Liggins, this new figure was the 'bachelor girl' who was 'a permutation of the figure of the Glorified Spinster christened in the

Macmillan's article of 1888 [and who] indicated the new associations of singleness with Bohemianism, professional work, access to higher education, ladies clubs, and new living space for women in the city', though not generally all at once.18 _{Evelyn Sharp's The Making of a Prig (1897)} features a protagonist whose personality and experiences in many ways fit this template of the bachelor girl. The novel follows the personal development of the young, country-born protagonist, Katharine Austen, who moves to London in search of employment and who resides in one of the city's new purpose-built homes for working women. The 'tomboy daughter of [a country] parson', Katharine Austen is introduced to the reader through her aunt's remonstrance of her tendency to 'lie on the rug like a great boy' while reading.19 _{The attention to Katharine's casual gait, the 'latent spirit}

17 Martin Dines makes a related argument about the need for domestic security in postwar novels that confront queer domesticity, and I am grateful to Martin for having brought this theme to my attention. See Martin Dines, 'Bringing the Boy Back Home: Queer Domesticity and Egalitarian Relationships in Postwar London Novels, Literary London Journal, 10.2 (2013), n.p. <http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/autumn2013/dines.html> [accessed 20 November 2013]

18 Emma Liggins, 'Having a Good Time? The Bachelor Girl in 1890s New Woman Fiction', in Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 98-110 (p. 99). See also 'The Glorified Spinster', Macmillan's Magazine, 58 (1888), pp. 371-376.

19 Evelyn Sharp, The Making of a Prig (London: John Lane, 1897), p. 48; p. 1. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

of revolt in her tone' (2) and her penchant for sitting on furniture unconventionally is strikingly like George Bernard Shaw's gentle caricature of the New Woman, Vivian Warren, who is seen 'striding' about the lawn and who wrangles garden chairs into submission in Mrs. Warren's Profession

(1893).20 _{The little scholarship that exists on Sharp's fiction positions her work in the mode of either} Suffrage Fiction or the New Woman novel.21 _{In the present analysis I set aside both conventions in} order to look afresh at the ways The Making of a Prig intervenes in debates about the social status of independent working women at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, I examine how this novel creatively reimagines women's dwellings in order to comment on the incongruities that emerged during this period between conventional domestic forms and new social practices.

When Katharine's aunt questions her at the opening of the novel, 'Can you never remember that you are not a boy?', Katharine rejoins, 'I am not likely to forget' and continues in an explanation that introduces the novel's conflict between necessity and expectation:

I should not be sticking around in this stupid old place if I were. I should be working hard for daddy, so that he could live with his books and be happy, instead of grinding his life away for people who only want all they can get out of him. What's the use of being a girl? Things are so stupidly arranged, it seems to me! (3)

Yet Katharine's spirit of independence – which eventually propels her to London where she finds a home in ladies' chambers – is compromised by her experience of independence. If her character is here relentlessly self-assured, living out this self-determination unfurls the mythology around bachelor girls and new women. Both Emma Liggins and Wendy Parkins suggest that many novels which pivot on women's experience of the city, in Liggins's words, 'use much more depressing descriptions of urban living than the supposed “reality” to underwrite their heroines' struggles for

20 George Bernard Shaw, 'Mrs. Warren's Profession', The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Odhams, 1934), pp. 61-92 (p. 62).

21 For instance, Jane Eldridge Miller discusses Sharp's 'Suffrage Stories' in Rebel Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.127-128. Angela V. John also refers to Sharp as a suffrage writer in Rebel Woman, 1869-

1955 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)and in 'Behind Locked Doors: Evelyn Sharp, Suffragist and

Rebel Journalist', Women's History Review, 12.1 (2003), 5-13 (p. 6).Kate Krueger refers to Sharp as a 'New Woman' novelist in 'Evelyn Sharp's Working Women and the Dilemma of Romance', Women's Writing, 19.4 (2012), 563-583 (p. 564). If Sharp is considered otherwise, it is as a children's writer.

independence and the new forms of subjectivity this will entail'.22 _{These 'depressing descriptions'} are a central aspect of The Making of a Prig, and yet their inclusion does not romanticise the struggle for independence, nor does it generalise women's experience in order to present its protagonist as heroic or triumphant. At the novel's centre is a concern with what Liggins refers to as the development of 'new forms of subjectivity'; but more precisely, new subjectivities that cannot be reconciled to conventional forms.23 _{In many instances in this novel, these new subjectivities} remain formless or half-formed on account of the persistence of behavioural expectation and social habit. In a consideration of Sharp's Yellow Book short fiction, Kate Krueger makes the related comment that these narratives investigate 'the personal challenges women face when they transform themselves into career women'.24 _{In The Making of a Prig, the protagonist's self-assured} independence is compromised (and a new subjectivity evinced) by the failure of broader social systems to support her self-determination.

Like her historical counterparts, Katharine Austen's relocation to London is made possible by changes to the labour market. Emily Gee, who has produced the only extended study of women's housing during this period, notes that the number of women engaged in work was comparable to statistics from a century earlier, but the kinds of work women were doing changed.25 _{As a number} of scholars have indicated, more women were involved in clerical and professional positions; however Gee makes the important point that this 'burgeoning community of women workers'