*Celibates by George Moore (Brentano's 1915; originally published MacMillan 1895)
I became interested in George Moore after reading his novel Esther Waters (1894), which is a classic Victorian novel about a fallen woman: the heroine, a maid at a country estate, is seduced by a stablehand, becomes pregnant, is fired, and decides to move to London and raise the child by herself. It is an engaging book about an incredibly resilient and sympathetic woman who struggles her entire life against impossible and punishing odds.
Brentano's republished many of Moore's books in 1915 (he was prolific, publishing more than 40 novels during his life), Celibates among them, which was originally published a year after Esther Waters in 1895. Celibates is an odd book -- it isn't really a novel but a collection of a novel (250 pages) and two novellas (both 100 pages) that share only a theme: characters who have chosen to be celibate.
The first of these, Mildred Lawson (all three books feature titular characters) is the longest and most dynamic and interesting. Mildred is a young lady of means in Victorian England. She lives with her kind but extremely dull brother Harold in a near-suburb of London. She is engaged to an equally dull man who is not as well off as the Lawsons and must work for his money. Mildred, realizing how dreary and unfulfilling married life can be (for a woman) decides to break off her engagement and use her moderate income (Harold controls the family fortune) to learn oil painting and become an artist. She begins by taking drawing lessons with Ralph, a talented but indigent painter at the National Gallery, who soon falls in love with her. Mildred likes him, but realizes that she does not want to be married to anyone, because she does not want to have sexual relations with any man. She likes men but has no physical desire or even attraction to them.
So she abandons Ralph and travels to Paris, where she begins two years of relentless study in a painting studio under the tutelage of M. Daveau, a successful French artist. She makes friends with two other English girls who are also studying at Daveau's studio. Ralph follows her to Paris and proposes marriage, but Mildred rejects him and he returns to London, devastated.
With her English girl friends Mildred travels to Barbizon for the summer to paint en plein air. She enchants Morton, a young English painter, and steals him away from his drab and devoted girlfriend Rosa. But of course Mildred doesn't want to marry him either, and decides that only two options are available to her: commit suicide or join a convent. Since neither of these options appeal to her, she enters into a strange menage a trois with an older French aristocratic couple, flirting with the husband and befriending the wife. She begins to write and publishes essays in a Socialist newspaper in which she invests most of her money, which she loses, and so she returns to England and resumes her dreary life in the suburbs, resigned at last to getting married, as there seems to be no other possible alternative for a woman in her position. She attempts to charm her spurned fiancee, who is now a successful businessman, but he has lost his motivation for marrying, now that he is rich and she is poor. Fortunately, Harold suddenly dies of early onset heart problems, and Mildred inherits the family fortune, making her independent at last -- but alone and passionless.
The second book, John Norton, is about a young man of wealthy family who has converted to Roman Catholicism and flirts with the idea of becoming a monk, mostly because women disgust him in every conceivable way. He lives as a sort of benefactor/hanger-on in a Catholic men's college, where he gets all the advantages of monastic life with none of the duties or obligations. But on a return visit to his widowed mother, he finds himself falling in something perhaps like love with a flat-chested young lady who he thinks has the appealing figure of a (male) Greek youth carved in marble. Despite knowing that he feels no sexual attraction to this lady and would much rather return to his pseudo-monastic life, he proposes, and is accepted, but his new fiancee is accosted by a tramp while walking home from the the scene of their engagement, goes mad, and conveniently and mortally flings herself out of her bedroom window. So John, who knew he could never "be her husband" or "fulfill their marriage" decides to convert his ancestral home into a monastery.
This third book is the story of Agnes Lahens, a 17-year-0ld girl who was sent to a convent at an early age to shield her from her scandalous mother, who spurns her deadbeat husband (she banishes him to a maid's room in the attic) and begins a public affair with Lord Somebody. The girl loves the convent life and wants to take vows, but before she may do this her parents insist she spend one year in the "outside" world. The plan is for the scandalous mother to bring her out into society and marry her off to some old rich pedophile. Well, the poor girl is so shocked by her mother's amorality and the cynical decadent crowd that hang around their home day and night that after a failed attempt to liberate her father from his abusive treatment hightails it back to the convent before the first month has ended.
All three of these character are not only celibate but virginal, although allusion is made to some naughty fun John Norton had with older boys at school. He tells himself that he has conquered his youthful struggles with himself and vows to never again let these thoughts enter his mind. Of the three, his celibacy is most clearly the result of homosexual suppression. Mildred seems to be asexual, and Agnes seems to be unaware of her sexual nature. The portrait of Mildred Lawson is particularly complex and interesting because her aversion to men is portrayed as a form of self-protection; she knows that if she marries she will become a less fulfilled and less happy person. She is the most spirited and admirable of the celibates, and is aware that she must act cruelly and ruthlessly to protect herself from the clutches of matrimony. John believes his only options are becoming a monk or becoming a husband, and knowing that he would fail at both, turns his home into his prison.
The illustration above is Geroge Moore as caricatured by Walter Sickert in Vanity Fair, January 1897