Charles Robert and Janet Ashbee's Queer Familiar Marriage
Anna Shane (she/her)
On 23 August 1897, Janet Forbes (1877-1961) received a letter from her fiancé, Arts and Crafts designer Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942), in which he explained ‘the whole philosophy of my life as far as I am able to formulate it’:
Comradeship to me so far, — an intimately close and all absorbing personal attachment, ‘love’ if you prefer the word, — for my men and my boy friends, has been the one guiding principle in life… Some women would take this, and perhaps rightly as a sign of coldness to their sex, and they would shrink from a man who revealed himself thus, and fear a division of affections. That depends upon the woman. I have no fear that you will misunderstand and thus, not fearing feel that it were almost superfluous for me to tell you that you are the first and only woman to whom I have felt I could offer the same loyal reverence of affection that I have hitherto given to my men friends (AC, Ashbee to Janet, 23 August 1897).
Today, Ashbee’s ‘comradeship’ reads simply as a code word for same-sex love, and Ashbee was indeed emotionally and sexually involved with men throughout his life. But what would Janet have made of this letter? Biographies and studies of Ashbee’s life and work have tended to present Janet as a quite conventional woman who had little to no understanding of what Ashbee wanted of her and how it differed from her own expectations of marriage. However, Talia Schaffer’s recent study of the paradigm of ‘familiar marriage’ can help situate Janet differently, as an active agent in negotiating a marriage that she was aware was based on differing desires. The ‘comradeship’ that Ashbee calls his ‘guiding principle’ was not a code-word for homosexuality; instead, it was expansive and comprehensive, and included women, their desires, and reproductive sexuality, while offering both men and women a queer way of living that resisted patriarchal norms and the oppressions of standard heterosexual relationships. The Ashbees actually repudiated developing paradigms of homosexuality, and instead embraced a queer mode of familiar marriage.
Ashbee and Janet married in 1898, and there followed a period of several years during which the marriage was perfunctorily and unsuccessfully consummated and during which Janet increasingly wanted to have children. Around 1905, she fell in love with a friend of the family, Gerald Bishop, and had a relationship that continued until 1908, though Janet refused to be physically unfaithful to Ashbee (who knew of the affair). In 1912 (with Janet’s knowledge), Ashbee embarked on an affair with a young guardsman, Chris Robson, who was later killed in World War I. In 1911, Janet and Ashbee had the first of their four daughters, and their close and supportive marriage continued until his death. Shortly before he died, Ashbee told his daughter Felicity that his marriage had been ‘made in heaven’ (Ashbee, Janet Ashbee 229).
Romantic love and sexual attraction were not operative factors in Janet and Ashbee’s decision to marry. As Janet wrote in her diary shortly after their engagement, ‘neither of us will, I firmly believe, ever be “violently in love” as the phrase goes… and I expect we shall make the soberest, staidest, most gravely comic pair of lovers the sun ever looked on!’ (AC, diary entry, 26 August 1897). Their marriage cannot be regarded as a romantic coupling, but can productively be understood as a ‘familiar marriage’.[i] Talia Schaffer defines familiar marriage as a pervasive but critically overlooked nineteenth-century ideal — a partnership based on a range of considerations outside romantic or sexual attachment, an ‘ongoing negotiation’ that ‘takes a chronologically long view’ and constitutes a ‘shared project of… a home, a household’ (2). Familiar marriage ‘[provided] participants with certain kinds of life choices that romantic marriage failed to offer’ (3). This was especially true for women, who could, through entering such a marriage, be ‘a full person in interaction with a varied world over the course of a lifetime’, not the ‘intensely desiring subject in a blissful moment of encounter’, which the romantic marriage paradigm ‘reduced’ women to (14). Ashbee voiced this exact sentiment to Janet: ‘what I feared most was anything in the nature of a display of sentiment one had not grown into, and that I had seen many cases unfortunately of hot emotion at the outset, that had led after many years of gradual disillusionment to a barren and hopeless ending.’ (AC, Ashbee to Janet, 23 August 1897). Janet’s attraction to the socially engaged and active life that marriage to Ashbee offered her (she lists ‘our hopes for a better, more healthy and practical social state’ to herself as a crucial argument in favour of their marriage (AC, diary entry, 26 August 1897)) exemplifies the way familiar marriage can orient women ‘away from the private conjugal dyad toward a larger public’ (Schaffer 4). This form of marriage also allowed Janet to feel respected and appreciated for herself, not just as a desirable sexual partner: ‘[t]he demonstration of affection, even when actually felt, had always bored her… It was refreshing to find someone fond of you… who was content to be just with you and talk’ (Rachel 13/9). The familiar marriage model suggests that both for Janet and Ashbee, marriage was a way of fulfilling desires for usefulness and agency that single life did not offer, as well as for intimacies that were domestic and idealistic rather than sexual.
Ashbee borrowed the term ‘comradeship’ from his friend Edward Carpenter, for whom it signified the potential of homosexuality to ‘become a positive spiritual and social force, breaking down the barriers of class and convention, and binding men together in comradeship’ (Crawford, CRA 20).[ii] For Ashbee, however, ‘comradeship’, besides being a signifier of same-sex attraction, also includes the kinds of intimacies and affections that are characteristic of familiar marriage. In a letter to his mother, he deplores ‘emotional love matches’ that ‘mistake a sentimental or physical attraction for the big comradeship that has to build and guide through life. Where the woman is entirely the handmaid of the man, they may succeed, but they are not fitted for English notions of the higher chivalry and communion between men and women’ (AC, Ashbee to Mrs H. S. Ashbee, 2 August 1897). He uses the term ‘comradeship’ here to designate a particular kind of relationship between men and women, one that values the independence and aspirations of the modern woman. Ashbee’s 23 August 1897 letter to Janet goes on:
The enlarging of sympathies moreover, does not imply that one will give less to the woman of one’s choice, but more. Nor does that choice which puts her on the same footing of comradeship as one’s men friendships, mean that the circle of sympathies for these may not be still further widened. Each new link forged in the chain, makes the chain stronger.
Again, Ashbee emphasises that heterosexual relationships can be a mode of ‘comradeship’. Janet responded several days later that ‘I hope very much to be able to enter... into the circle of your comrades, myself being one of them, and help ever to widen that circle, and strengthen the chain of sympathies’ (AC, Janet to Ashbee, 4 September 1897). She agrees with Ashbee’s scheme for their marriage by presenting herself not as his exclusive partner, but one of ‘the circle of your comrades’. Although, as biographers point out, she almost certainly did not at this time have an understanding of homosexuality (Crawford, ‘Introduction’ xxi-xxii; Potvin 69), I do not see this as especially salient; what is important is that Janet was aware that she and Ashbee were not a ‘romantic’ couple whose partnership was based on conventional understandings of heterosexual desire and gender roles.
Ashbee’s idea of ‘comradeship’ was not limited to male same-sex affections and desires. His invitation to Janet to share in ‘the same loyal reverence of affection that I have hitherto given to my men friends’ and to become a ‘new link’ in the chain formed of such affections, is an invitation to share in the queer bonds of comradeship. Ashbee was searching for a way to express his homoerotic desires not by excluding femininity and family, but by including and integrating these elements. As he put it, ‘the word “comradeship” meant much more to me, and indeed contained that old, dear, beautiful word “love” that may be so noble or so base in accordance as we sanctify or play with it’ (AC, Ashbee to Janet, 23 August 1897).
Through their expansive queer concept of ‘comradeship’, the Ashbees rejected the paradigms within which homosexuality was beginning to be conceptualised in the late nineteenth century. Between their engagement and marriage, both Janet and Ashbee went through a period of uncertainty about their decision, and Ashbee shared his concerns with Janet in letters. Ventriloquising his anxieties through ‘Demon Doubt’ that comes to haunt him, he wrote,
Soon after marriage a woman claims a sort of proprietary right over her husband’s heart — she lays a kind of embargo upon it, she brooks no intrusion of others… Your friends will drop off one by one, you’ll lose your influence over others… the boys will shrink from you as from an old mentor who no longer understand them, for you will be their young friend no longer, in short you will lose your magic, the most sacred thing you possess — your power over men and why? — When the wife comes in at the door, the comrade flies out of the window… A man of your temperament and principles in life, ought never to marry… (AC, Ashbee to Janet, 11 December 1897)
Here Ashbee is clearly referring to an early model of a distinctively homosexual identity which his friends Edward Carpenter and George Ives articulated and subscribed to: an identity based on the exclusion of women (‘wife’ and ‘comrade’ cannot coexist), the rejection, even the denigration of heterosexual unions (stressing the ‘proprietary’ and greedy nature of marriage), and on a pathology shared with other men (‘a man with your temperament’). Ashbee, however, refuses this newly conceptualised model of homosexual identity, answering the demon that ‘she knows that the position I offer her is one of complete equality with all my other comrades, and beyond the fact of her being my only woman comrade, I can offer her nothing better in the world!... the principles of love and comradeship are the same all the world over, and all time through, the same for men and for women, I believe in her, and I trust in her as I do any of my friends…’ (AC, Ashbee to Janet, 11 December 1897). He insists that a wife can also be a ‘comrade’ (in his own erotically significant sense of the word) and can participate in the bonds shared by ‘all my other comrades’. Ashbee here demonstrates that he is aware of and rejects the idea that he is defined by having a particular ‘temperament’, and instead emphasises the more expansive and inclusive reach of queer comradeship. It is as though he is explicitly defying Michel Foucault’s famous argument that ‘[t]he nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality’ (68).
Janet’s understanding of her husband’s same-sex desires works against another developing paradigm of homosexuality: secrecy and exclusivity. Janet never sought to deny, refuse or reject her own or her husband’s needs and inclinations, and the keynote of her attitude was acceptance. She became firm friends with her husband’s homosexual friends, such as Edward Carpenter, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and Laurence Housman, with the explicit understanding that it was their sexual orientation that constituted the common bond between them and Ashbee. In 1899, she recorded a conversation (‘a real good talk’) she had with George Ives, founder of the super-secret homosexual organisation, the Order of Chaeronea:
“When did you join “The Cause?”[iii] I ventured. “Oh as far back as I can remember, when I was a small boy, and I could not understand why such a wonderful thing should not be sanctioned…” “Let’s see the ring,” I said, “you promised to tell me about it.” “Well it’s all symbolism you know,” he said diffidently, handing me the heavy silver ring with the name of the battle of Greek lovers and the little device like a double fork — “do you understand it? you see it’s 3 links of a chain — and the end links are open — d’you see? I can’t possibly tell you more than that.” — I only half-saw the meaning, but I felt the spirit, and I loved the Cause, so it was all right… (AJ, diary entry 1 November 1899)
Janet’s attitude rejects the sort of understanding of same-sex desires that is articulated in Harold Beaver’s 1981 article, ‘Homosexual Signs’: ‘[t]he homosexual is beset by signs, by the urge to interpret whatever transpires, or fails to transpire, between himself and every chance acquaintance. He is a prodigious consumer of signs — of hidden meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality…’ (104-5). Janet’s conversation with Ives demonstrates that, like her husband, she does not regard homosexuality as a discrete identity, inaccessible to those who do not share it. With his symbolic ring, Ives puts forward a model of homosexuality as a secret system of signs which can only be ‘read’ by those who are ‘in the know’. Janet, however, questions this model by offering ‘half seeing’ instead of a straightforward reading of arcane signs. In an echo of Ashbee’s promise of ‘complete equality with all my other comrades’, Janet favoured a queer, open understanding of homoerotic desires, in contrast to the exclusive model of homosexual identity that was becoming prevalent.
As a queer familiar marriage, the Ashbees’ relationship demonstrates how both marriage and same-sex love could be understood and lived in the late Victorian period in ways that differ drastically from the stereotypes of the oppressive Victorian marriage and of shame, secrecy and repression surrounding homosexuality. Both Ashbee and Janet worked to negotiate varied and not exclusively sexual desires: Ashbee’s desire for other men and Janet’s to have children, her desire for physical intimacy and tenderness and his for comradeship and understanding, as well as their shared desires for social progress and improvement. Instead of contributing to the narratives of homosexual identity being proposed by campaigners and medical experts at the time, the Ashbees challenged the paradigms such narratives were establishing, and instead promoted more inclusive and expansive understandings of both same-sex relationships and of family life.
End Notes
[i] Although Schaffer’s study of familiar marriage concerns fictional representations specifically, I have found it a very productive paradigm when applied (advisedly) to this real-life relationship. I adopt Schaffer’s term because it clearly identifies the differences between the ‘familiar marriage’ paradigm and the eighteenth-century ‘companionate marriage’, as well as the ways in which familiar marriage (as ‘a structure characterising novels’) reflects real-world developments that occurred throughout the nineteenth century (2-4).
[ii] See Potvin 58-68, Cook 55-61, and Koven 233-6, 264-9 for specifically homosexual readings of ‘comradeship’ in Ashbee’s work and life.
[iii] Ives used the term ‘The Cause’ to refer to his political goal of bringing an end of the stigmatisation and oppression of homosexual men.
Abbreviations Used
AC: Correspondence: C. R. Ashbee and Janet Ashbee, 1897-1935: typescripts of letters between C. R. Ashbee and Janet, also containing some typescripts of diary entries.
AJ: the Ashbees’ journal (1884-1941), containing diary entries by C. R. and Janet Ashbee, letters to and from both, photographs, postcards, newspaper cutting, etc.
Works Cited
Ashbee, Charles Robert and Janet Ashbee. Letters between C. R. Ashbee and Janet Ashbee. GBR/0272/CRA/28. The Papers of Charles Robert Ashbee. The Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge.
Ashbee, Charles Robert and Janet Ashbee. Memoirs and journals. GBR/0272/CRA/1/1-GBR/0272/CRA/1/57. The Papers of Charles Robert Ashbee. The Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge.
Ashbee, Felicity. Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage, and the Arts and Crafts Movement. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
Ashbee, Janet. Rachel (typescript of an unfinished autobiographical novel). GBR/0272/CRA/27. The Papers of Charles Robert Ashbee. The Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge.
Beaver, Harold. ‘Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes)’. Critical Inquiry 8.1 (1981). 99-119.
Cook, Matt. Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Crawford, Alan. C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Crawford, Alan. ‘Introduction’. Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage, and the Arts and Crafts Movement. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002. xix-xxix.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Classics, 2019.
Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Potvin, John. Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870-1914: Bodies, Boundaries and Intimacy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
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