Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin

By Sylvia Martin

Mary Fullerton (1868-1946) and Mabel Singleton (1877-1965) met in Melbourne as suffrage and peace activists in Vida Goldstein's Women's Political Association. They remained together for thirty-five years as loving friends, raising Mabel's son born in 1911. Through her literary friendship with Miles Franklin (1879-1954), Mary Fullerton's last two

• Language: English
• Publisher: Interventions Inc
• Release date: Jan 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645253405

Sylvia Martin

Sylvia Martin is the author of three biographies of women neglected in Australian literary and cultural history. Ida Leeson: A Life, was awarded the 2008 Magarey Medal for Biography. Her memoir, Sky Swimming: Reflections on Auto/biography, People and Place was published in 2020.

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Preface to New Edition

The publication of Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin 20 years ago marked both an ending and a beginning. It was my first book, and it was the start of a new century. It was also the culmination of several decades of fractured study that had started in 1962 when, fresh out of school, I embarked on a Bachelor of Arts degree at University of Melbourne. An early pregnancy, a shotgun marriage, then single parenthood a few years later meant that my degree took many years to complete. I moved states. I changed my subject direction and my sexual orientation.

After beginning my undergraduate degree in Melbourne in the 1960s, I eventually gained my doctorate in Women’s Studies in the late 1990s in Brisbane. Passionate Friends was based on my thesis, but I transformed it for a more general readership by condensing swathes of poststructuralist theory and bringing to the fore a biographical strand that had been hitherto superfluous. So, at the beginning of the 21st century, a book was published and a biographer was born.

My subject choice for my PhD was a deeply personal one. I had found it difficult to situate myself in the narratives that were available to me after I fell in love with a woman in my thirties. The butch/femme story of the 1980s was quite alien to me. I also did not feel comfortable about being asked when I had ‘discovered’ I was a lesbian, as if my heterosexual life had been somehow inauthentic. I did not fit the story of a woman escaping from an awful marriage and turning against men. Everyone was ‘coming out’ then, a process I found had to be revisited and renegotiated according to each situation. I never did come out to my mother. In the 1990s, the search was on for the so-called gay gene; it was never found.

Curious to explore how past women who loved women might have understood their feelings, I wondered what narratives were available to them and how particular women might have taken up some and resisted others in order to create their own sense of identity. For my research project, I decided to examine two important friendships in the life of Australian poet Mary Fullerton (1868–1946). One was her lifelong, loving friendship with Mabel Singleton (1877–1965), which today we would call a lesbian relationship. The other, her literary friendship with Miles Franklin (1876–1954), started in London, where both were expatriate writers in the early 1920s, and continued in 20 years of lively correspondence. By contending that is not possible to simply fit past lives of women into definitional frameworks formed by our own era, I hoped that my historical study would also force us to question those contemporary definitions and frameworks through which we seek to understand our own lives.

The scope of Passionate Friends is broad, although its focus is concentrated. It brings to light the lives of some fascinating women from the early part of the 20th century, active in the struggle for women’s rights in Australia. Mary Fullerton is a minor but important figure in the history of Australian literature who has received little attention from literary critics and biographers. More has been written about the better-known Miles Franklin, but, although her sexuality (particularly her resolute celibacy) has been the subject of some pseudo-psychoanalytical critiques, this is the first time her friendships with women have been explored.

There has been little study of female partnerships such as Mary Fullerton’s and Mabel Singleton’s in Australia, except perhaps to classify them as romantic or passionate friendships and then dismiss them as if that category is either self-explanatory or unfathomable without ‘proof’ of sexual attraction. Although the situation is improving, this trope is still harnessed, most recently in a biography of one of Mary and Mabel’s friends and contemporaries, Vida Goldstein.¹ Reading Jacqueline Kent’s biography Vida prompted me to write an article about Cecilia John, Goldstein’s ‘special friend’ during the years of her Women’s Political Association and Women’s Peace Army in Melbourne.² Vida also appears in Clare Wright’s monumental study, You Daughters of Freedom, as one of five Australian women who played significant roles in the international struggle for women’s suffrage.³ Both books focus closely on the Melbourne suffrage and peace movements, shedding new light on the period, but neither mentions Mary Fullerton or Mabel Singleton.

Many things have changed since I wrote Passionate Friends. The British Museum’s Round Reading Room, where Miles Franklin sat at seat S9 in the 1920s and where I did my research in the early 1990s, still exists, but it is closed to the public and bereft of books since the British Library moved to its new location at St Pancras. There are long-term plans to revive the Reading Room.

Jill Roe’s long-awaited biography of Miles Franklin was published in 2008 and, sadly, Professor Roe left us in 2017.⁴ She was wonderfully supportive of my biographies and gave the launch speech for my second book at the Mitchell Library in 2006.⁵

Mabel Singleton’s son Denis, who was brought up by his mother and Mary Fullerton and whom I met several times, died aged 97 in London in 2008. ‘A Lullaby’, a poem Mary wrote just before his birth, was read at his funeral by his daughter, Valerie. She sent me a sheaf of poems written for her father by ‘Aunt Mary’ when he was a child; among them I found a poem titled ‘Mabel’. Dated 1916, it was typical of the poems Mary wrote during the turbulent early years of the two women’s relationship. Coming upon the loose sheet of paper with its urgent message hastily scrawled in pencil was almost unbearably poignant:

Mabel

Life is not long enough for us to quarrel

Life with the rocky pathway rough

Dear love, dear love for us to quarrel

Life is not long enough.

Life is but long enough to keep us loving

Life with its measure full of pain

Therefore we two who love who have quarrelled

Shall not contend again.

Life is so short and you so precious dear

Oh when I thought on how we strove

And looked within my heart for anger dear

I found but love, but love.

M 7.10 pm 28.8.’16

Twenty years on from the publication of Passionate Friends, the cultural landscape is quite different, which confirms my proposition that the narratives around sexuality and gender change and the understandings of the terms used need to be contextualised. The umbrella term LGBT has been created, to which new letters like QI have been added, intended to cover all those who deviate from the heterosexual, male/female binary norm. A convenient catch-all acronym, it is used by the mainstream, perhaps because of its lack of confronting specificities, to widen the notion of what is ‘normal’ and to advocate for greater acceptance and diversity. Although welcome as a positive development by many who fall within the communities covered in the acronym, it can also, ironically, blur the identifying characteristics of people represented by the individual letters, even bearing in mind that those categories may sometimes overlap or leak into each other. At its most banal and ahistorical, the acronym becomes a kind of brand, as in the promotion for the television series Gentleman Jack, which is billed as an ‘LGBTQI trailblazer’. I doubt that its protagonist Anne Lister, who wrote coded diaries in the early 19th century about her affairs with women, would recognise herself as such.⁶

The voices of the ‘T’ and ‘I’ transgender and intersex/non-binary communities have been increasingly heard this century as new narratives of gendered selfhood have emerged, aided by advances in biological knowledge and medical technology. In Passionate Friends, I argue on the basis of her poems that Mary Fullerton, 100 years ago, understood herself to be a member of Edward Carpenter’s ‘intermediate sex’. As an ‘advanced soul’, she saw herself as part of an ‘advance guard’ in evolution. Writing at the end of the 20th century, I constructed her love for Mabel Singleton through the lens of sexuality in terms of lesbian desire. But, as Noah Riseman argues in the terms of more recent transgender research, if we imagine the past through a gender lens, trans possibilities can offer a way to rethink how people may have navigated, challenged or transgressed gender constructs. In a future project, a ‘trans-historicity’ approach could be another way of exploring Mary Fullerton’s understanding of herself.⁷

Even though the process was unnecessarily fraught, one of the most radical changes in the last two decades has been the eventual legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017. It is a situation my ‘passionate friends’ from the 1900s could not possibly have envisaged. Nor did I, in the 1990s. Marriage equality comes out of a different cultural climate from the lesbian/gay liberation movement of the 1970s–80s I was involved in. Then, the sexual politics of liberation centred around resistance to the mainstream rather than a desire to become part of it. Without that movement, led by those who stood outside the dominant institutions of society, the groundwork would not have been laid for marriage equality to become possible.

The advent of marriage equality does not mean that the stories about who we are and how we understand our sexualities have come to an end. There are still parallel, competing narratives surrounding same-sex marriage. For many couples who take it up, it is not a political statement but a means of giving their relationships legitimacy and a way of increasing social acceptance of sexual and gender diversity. Paradoxically, it could be argued that this has led to a more conservative climate, in which the prevailing narrative to accommodate same-sex marriage is an essentialist one that seeks to set all sexual identities as fixed and unchanging. But it can also be understood as consciously subverting the traditional model of marriage. I have lesbian feminist friends who would never consider marrying, but I also have others who have married and proudly use the term ‘wife’ in a conscious attempt to subvert the subordinate position of wives in traditional marriage. Trans marriages disrupt the sex/ gender rule book even further.

In my concluding remarks to Passionate Friends, I noted that ‘a queer perspective’ had emerged during the 1990s when I was undertaking my research, ‘a diverse concept that is less a new identity than a critique of identity, or at least of the politics of identity.’ I believed then that, if such identities as ‘lesbian’ could be understood queerly ‘as shifting and unfixable’, they had not reached their ‘use-by date’. It seems all the more important today to maintain that perspective.

Since the publication of my first book, I have continued to write biographies of queer women who have been neglected in Australian literary history, including Mitchell Librarian, Ida Leeson, and poet and political activist, Aileen Palmer. Passionate Friends was first published in London by Onlywomen Press, a small lesbian feminist press that closed down in 2010. My thanks to Graham Willett and Queer Oz Folk for making this timely new edition of Passionate Friends possible. In order to preserve the integrity of the original book as a historical record of research into lesbian sexuality at the end of the 20th century, revisions have been kept to a minimum. It contains additional images and an amended bibliography.

Sylvia Martin, January 2021

Prologue

Recently, in London, I stood in front of 181 High Street Kensington – Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton’s address in the 1930s. Miles Franklin stayed with them there for over a year when she visited London in 1931. Flat C in this elegant Edwardian building now houses a firm of solicitors. The pizza joint and gas showroom on either side of the entrance are obvious newcomers, but the sullen stone cherub above the door leading to the floors above would have glowered down on the women who passed in and out of it all those years ago. From my vantage point on the pavement opposite, I imagined that I could see the outline of a woman’s head at one of the upper windows. What might it have been like inside that room then?

A woman sits by the window, tapping the keys of a portable typewriter. The light falling on her short grey hair momentarily silvers it. Her profile is sharp. Hair combed back from a high forehead, jutting cheekbone, straight nose, thin mouth. A face that in its spareness shows everything yet reveals nothing. The eyes are hidden. She stops typing, removes the page from the typewriter, and reads aloud what she has written:

Seven Thirty A.M.

The mad woman is passing down the street,

Shouting foolishness

As she does every morning

While I eat my early toast,

Drink my cup of tea,

And open my paper

Beginning my decorous day...

I put up a prayer:

Oh good Grey Matter

Guardian of dignity,

Be true, stand true.¹

Her slightly flattened vowels betray Australian origins, although she is sitting in a large, airy living room two floors above Kensington High Street, London. It is now 8.30, and the mad woman’s early morning cries have given way to blaring horns and screeching brakes, the sounds of a city bustling towards another working day. But here, those sounds are muffled. The woman dips a pen in the pot of black ink that stands beside the typewriter and signs the poem with her name – Mary E. Fullerton – in a flowing hand that is a surprising contrast to the angular planes of her face. A flourish on the ‘n’ and then the date, 1st September 1934.

Footsteps mount the wooden staircase that can be seen through the open doorway, and the poet raises her head, revealing startlingly blue eyes. Her face softens as she greets the woman who strides in, cheeks pink and glowing from the cold morning air. This woman looks younger than the seated poet, full-figured where Mary is thin to the point of gauntness. Her presence fills the room.

This is Mabel Singleton. Mary had met the young Englishwoman in Melbourne in 1909 when they were both active in the Women’s Political Association, campaigning for suffragist Vida Goldstein in her bid to become the first woman in federal parliament. It is not difficult to imagine Mabel haranguing the crowds that gathered on the Yarra Bank, at the place known as the Trafalgar Square of the Antipodes. Just as the mob jeered at the members of the so-called shrieking sisterhood who spoke out for women’s rights in the London square, so Mabel and Mary were heckled by the crowds that flocked to the Melbourne river bank. Mabel found the challenge exhilarating, and she was a persuasive speaker; she enjoyed the thrill of battle. Charm was a natural gift that she had learned to use well. Mary preferred speaking at the WPA’s regular ‘At Home’ gatherings, where her quiet wit and literary talents were appreciated. Her shyness made every political public address a terrifying challenge to overcome, although her audience would not have suspected it. This woman’s strength was tenacity.

‘How was your walk?’ Mary leans back against the comfortable bosom of her friend, who now stands at the desk by the window, one arm lightly encircling the older woman’s shoulders.

‘Bracing, to say the least.’ Mabel massages Mary’s shoulder. ‘A squirrel scampered right up to me in the Gardens – Miles would have loved it.’ She reminds her friend how Miles Franklin used to fill her pockets with bread to feed the squirrels when they went walking, how she’d once taken out her handkerchief at a literary afternoon tea at Henry Handel Richardson’s and showered crumbs onto the Persian rug. ‘She probably made it worse by chuckling like a kookaburra.’ The women smile at the memory of the Australian writer who had visited in 1931 and stayed at 181c High Street for over a year. Miles Franklin was not unlike a squirrel herself with her darting movements, her always watchful eyes, her unstoppable energy. But sometimes she’d retire to her room for hours, occasionally even days at a time without warning, as if retreating out of reach, to the high branches of an oak tree.

Mary is brought back to the present sharply as Mabel picks up the page lying on the desk beside the battered portable.

‘What’s this? A new poem?’

‘Nothing much.’ The poet tries to reclaim it but her friend quickly moves out of reach, glances over the piece, then kisses the top of Mary’s head.

‘You’ve got more grey matter than anyone I know, my dear. And it’s not all visible. Now I must get downstairs to the office.’ She whisks the breakfast tray off the desk and is gone.

Mary stares out of the window for a few moments, but her eyes do not take in the rooftops opposite with their forest of chimneys outlined against an almost colourless sky. What she sees are the grey-green eucalypts of the Gippsland bush, the memory of whose summer scent can still make her mouth dry with longing. Today, September 1st, is the beginning of spring there. September is a month of great significance for Mary: it was the month she met Mabel in Melbourne on the campaign trail, Mabel’s birthday too. In a birthday poem Mary wrote for her in 1910, spring, September and new love are intertwined:

’Twas last September – in Australia’s Spring –

But almost in my heart the Autumn time;

Its Spring seemed flown, its Summer withering;

Thou cam’st and set the bells again a-chime,

And made my heart September... ²

Mary sighs as she adds her latest poem to the pile in the desk drawer, then inserts a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter. Her eyes are not sad, however; she has found a different sense of home in London. She has maintained the threads binding her to Australia through her letters to her sisters in Melbourne, but she is especially nourished by her friendship with Miles Franklin, who understands those bonds more than anyone else. Her fingers move swiftly over the keys:

Dear Many Miles Away...

1.

The Women Behind the Words

‘I only wish for means to be a recluse and get away from everyone and what they say, and don’t care if I’m never mentioned after my death. I don’t want the scavengers and malicious muck-rakers romancing to show off their talents at my expense’, wrote Miles Franklin to Mary Fullerton in 1930.¹ At the risk of being labelled a scavenger, I must at the outset declare that I love delving into library archives. My particular passion is exploring the papers of women who led unorthodox lives, who did not marry or who sustained significant friendships with other women. Deciphering impossible handwriting, attempting to make sense of incomplete letters, trying to fit undated letters into a time scheme, identifying people listed casually in diaries by a first name or even an initial – these are some of the pleasures and frustrations involved in such a project. Sometimes the detective trail leads to other library collections across the country, even overseas – as in my research for this book. Knowing that, unlike a detective novel, the story can never be complete, case solved, ends tied up neatly, part of the intrigue lies in the very fragmentary nature of the exercise; like life itself, these lives are all the more intriguing for their gaps and silences.

My interest in the little-known Australian writer, Mary Fullerton, began when I dipped into the large correspondence left to the Mitchell Library in Sydney by her more famous colleague, Miles Franklin. That writer’s first book, My Brilliant Career, is still read avidly by young women in Australia almost a century after it was first published, and Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film added another dimension to this feminist classic. Miles was also a prolific letter writer who kept copies of her own letters and stored up the replies. There are thousands in the Mitchell, and about 800 of these are between Miles Franklin and Mary Fullerton, written between 1922 and 1946 when Mary was living in England.

It’s a fascinating correspondence that ranges widely: they chat about daily activities, discuss the highs and lows of the writing process and cook up convoluted schemes to maintain the secrecy of their pseudonyms, particularly Miles Franklin’s Brent of Bin Bin persona. Analysing the position of women writers, especially those from the ‘colonies’, is a favourite topic. Philosophising is interspersed with gossip, and the letters are peppered liberally with witty and often scathing comments about fellow authors and recalcitrant publishers. Of particular interest to me is the fact that Mary