Its prime concern was to dwell on what the writer [John Glassco?] of the dust jacket called “... the crepuscular world of the dominated ...,” and, in effect it is a work devoted with near-chilling excess to the pain expressed upon the body of a willing submissive. Underlying it, of course, are the subtle pathologies of those who derive sexual pleasure from inflicting pain, as well as those who receive it. And of course there are the fetishes: leather, foot worship, etc., all of which add spice to a multi-layered experience. Richard Lovel, the central character whom one readily identifies with the author—and [Glassco’s?] note on the dust jacket which encourages us to “... assume its composition to be autobiographical...”—is an individual who learns to equate the torture of the body with the love he feels for his governess, the lovely but stern Harriet Marwood. There is also a striking aside which is voiced [again by Glassco?] on the flap of the dust jacket, and which is intended to summarize the book’s intention.
It says:
“A curious exploration of the Puritan ethic carried to its extreme conclusion, Harriet Marwood, Governess is a work which should be in the hands of all those who are deeply concerned with the problems brought about by the alarming ascendance of woman in modern Western society.”
Finally, nine years later, the ill-kept secret of the identity of the author of The English Governess/Harriet Marwood, Governess was revealed. The Canadian edition carried Glassco’s name on it. The text was that of the sanitized Grove Press edition of 1967. The present text—unexpurgated and corrected in keeping with Glassco’s notes in the National Archives—is that of Under the Birch: The Story of an English Governess by Miles Underwood published in Paris by the Ophelia Press in 1965.
Michael Gnarowski
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
In London’s Great Portland Street, not far from All Souls Church, there is a row of gloomy mansions which have not changed appreciably in the last half century: the same tall narrow windows, the same grey and sombre stone (only darker now from the encrustations of fifty years’ soot), the same recessed and pillared doorways confront the passer-by as in the final quarter of the last century; and the same impression of sternness and secrecy prevails. Who lives there now? one asks. But that does not matter. The neighbourhood is still respectable, but the whole street has an air of exhaustion, of having played out its part, of being, in every sense of the word, finished, — and this impression seems to become intensified to the south of the great church, where stands the row of houses we have mentioned. They seem, somehow, the saddest houses in the world. Can it be that their sadness somehow springs from a mysterious discrepancy between the vigorous, blazing life they once contained and the embers and ashes they now suggest? It may well be: these houses have seen better days. Happiness, you would say, has at some time made her home here, and has now gone elsewhere.
Happiness, yes: and more than happiness, romance. For here, more than sixty years ago, in that great gloomy house opposite, – the third past Langham Street, to be precise – there blossomed the romance of Richard Lovel and Harriet Marwood: a story so bizarre in its beginnings, so fraught with suffering and ecstasy throughout its course and so fantastic in its outcome, that the old house which witnessed its birth and infancy might well look melancholy with the despair of seeing such a story ever matched.
And it is true that such loves as Richard’s and Harriet’s have gone out of style, like the habits, manners and costumes of the past: laws and customs change, carrying away with them the very conditions of such a romance, its climate and source; so now these old love-stories can only serve us as fictions, as dreams maybe, of something that is gone forever but which still holds up before us an ideal towards which we can yearn though we cannot follow it, and which we can enjoy with the added knowledge, at once sweet and full of boundless regret, that such things can never happen again. For there are loves which are impossible in the world as it is these days.
In the year 188–, when this story begins, the Lovel family, one of the oldest in the county of Hampshire, had for two generations its seat in the great house in Great Portland Street. The move had been made in the late ’fifties by Mr. Richard Lovel, the first of his line to distinguish himself in any way other than by the exercise of an enlightened self-interest and an adherence to principles of the most orthodox conservatism. This gentleman had speculated in railway shares to such advantage that within ten years, by the employment of methods into which we need not enquire too closely, he had realized the comfortable fortune of nearly £50,000. This sum had been enough for his wants; he had then sold most of his patrimony near Christchurch, reserving only a cottage built on the site of the earliest Lovel holding, and settled for good in Great Portland Street; where, as if the transplantation had not agreed with him, he had died within less than three years.
He had had only one child, a son remarkable during his youth for the elegance of his manners and the habit of dissipation, and also for the size and vigour of his virile member which was almost a byword in the demimonde of dancers, courtesans and smart masseuses whom he frequented. But these distinctions had been accompanied by considerable shrewdness in business affairs; and on his father’s sudden death young Arthur Lovel, without curtailing either his pleasures or his life in society, had soon settled down to the life of business, at which he proved so adept that the family fortune increased rapidly under his hands. At the age of thirty he had married the Lady Edith Belsize, the fourth daughter of an impoverished peer who was delighted with Arthur’s waiver of the question of settlements. He had undertaken this marriage for two reasons which seemed highly sensible to him, –the beauty and the title of the young woman. He received no more than these; his wife had never been in love with him; indeed it is doubtful if the emotion of love could ever have found a place in the bosom of that cold and beautiful girl, while the curious sexual behaviour of her husband did nothing to attach him to her. Arthur Lovel, congratulating himself that at least she would fall in love with nobody else, had returned to his business and his pleasures with an easy mind. The fruit of this happy union was an only son.
Richard Belsize Lovel was fourteen years old when his mother died. He was at this time, when we first make his acquaintance, a rather insignificant boy, small for his age, shy, of a reserved disposition and a sweet and even temper. Outwardly, his was a timid and passive character; even the delicate beauty he had inherited from his mother recalled the frail and affected grace of a girl. At school his comrades at first called him Sissy: Sissy Lovel. He had blushed at the nickname, but made no attempt to deserve any other. But it was not long before his most striking trait emerged in an inordinate sensuality of both mind and body; and this earned him the only distinction he enjoyed among his schoolmates: he was then admiringly called Smuggy: Smuggy Lovel; in recognition of his sexual prowess at the nightly sessions of onanism in the dormitory, where he displayed a singular felicity in producing repeated erection and orgasm. The distinction was shortlived, however; for his proficiency in this field had led to his being publicly expelled from the school only a few months before his mother’s death.
For the rest, he was far from being stupid, and the depth and swiftness of his intelligence, allied to his shyness, sensuality and tendency to self-effacement, would have combined to assure him – at least in the world’s view – a future either full of unhappiness or of a rich and rapturous fantasticality. Of him, as of the young Hartley Coleridge, it might have been said at this time,
Nature will either end thee quite, Or, lengthening out thy season of delight, Preserve for thee by individual right Ayoung lamb’s heart among the full-grownfloats.
His father, as we have said, was a man of business and a man of pleasure; he had never attended closely to his home, much less to Richard’s upbringing. The boy’s expulsion from school, and the sudden death of Lady Edith, left him in a quandary. He had known of his son’s solitary habits, which he deprecated
