Fatal Glamour Read Online Free PDF

was this restraint that allowed the Neo-pagans to continue as a stable group of friends for several years. Rosamund Bland and Amber Reeves, two less inhibited Fabian daughters, both found themselves married in 1909. Given the current state of contraception, and of middle-class morality, any sexually active young woman became a loose cannon that had to be quickly tied down. For women, the cycle from licence to confinement was bound to be short.
    Nonetheless, the Neo-pagan ideal of comradeship was bound to clash with the realities of sexual desire and possessiveness in young men and women alike. Was a young woman to be looked on as a soulmate or a bedmate? Was she to be an untouched nymph, a mistress, or a wife? The Victorians had firm answers to these questions, but the more thoughtful young Edwardians would not accept them. They were determined to make new rules, out of their own imagination and experience. But rules there still would be.
Comus
    It seems right that Rupert and Noel’s first shared activity, and the project that made the Neo-pagans into a group with Rupert as its leader, should be a production of Milton’s
Comus
in July 1908. Here was a masque about a young virgin who loses herself in a forest, is accosted by a silver-tongued seducer, but is saved through the intervention of an Attendant Spirit – played by Rupert. The production was sponsored by Christ’s College to celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of its former student and Cambridge’s greatest poet. Justin and Rupert were enlisted as directors, but Justin also had finals to think about, so Rupert found himself both stage manager and playing the longest part.
    Justin had begun a revival of Elizabethan drama at Cambridge the previous autumn, with a production of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
for the new Marlowe Dramatic Society. Justin wanted to do at Cambridge what his Headmaster Badley had already done at Bedales: to present Elizabethan verse as living, rhythmic speech (instead of stilted recitation), and to cast women in the female roles. Unfortunately, the fellows of Newnham were not yet willing to let their young ladies take part in such a dubious venture. Nonetheless,
Faustus
was performed on 11 and 12 November 1907. The general verdict was that it was odd but effective, despite having no music, scenery, or footlights. Rupert played one of the leads, Mephistophilis, though he made no great impression. In everyday life he was theatrical to a fault and could read poetry brilliantly to his friends, but on stage he tended to choke.
    Because
Comus
was a masque rather than a play, and was being produced out of term, Justin and Rupert could cast their net more widely than previous student directors and even have women in the femaleroles. Francis Cornford, a young classics don from Trinity, played the seducer Comus; Jane Harrison recruited young ladies from Newnham, including Dorothy Lamb as Sabrina. Albert Rothenstein came from London to paint the scenery. Two cousins, Frances and Gwen Darwin, were given the job of designing the costumes. Neither of them was at Newnham, but as granddaughters of Charles Darwin they could claim deep roots in the Cambridge intellectual aristocracy. Frances’s father, Francis, was an eminent botanist and a fellow of Christ’s. She had inherited from her grandfather the prognathous jaw and vaguely simian features that inspired the famous Victorian cartoon of the ape blending into the man. Her looks were comely enough, though more striking than winsome. She was already sensitive, artistic, and a poet when Rupert met her, and her photographs suggest that she liked striking a pose almost as much as he did.
    Frances was a year older than Rupert, but when the production of
Comus
began she had just returned to Cambridge after four years in limbo. Her mother’s death, when Frances was seventeen, had caused a series of nervous breakdowns. She had been shuttled from one cure to another in Cannes,