“Uncovenanted Joys”: Catholicism, Sapphism, and Cambridge Ritualist Theory in Hope Mirrlees’ Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists

Abstract

This essay examines how Hope Mirrlees, in her 1919 novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, constructs a lesbian ancestry by drawing on Catholic as well as ancient Greek paradigms. Her configuration of these paradigms is conducted under the aegis of the theory of tragedy developed by her partner, classicist Jane Harrison, in collaboration with fellow Cambridge Ritualist Gilbert Murray. By writing the story of her lesbian protagonist Madeleine as tragedy with a capital T, Mirrlees dignifies the then-emerging narrative of the doomed homosexual. Although she does not use the words “lesbian,” “invert,” or even “Sapphist,” Mirrlees inscribes Sappho into her narrative as a central and ever-proliferating trope, thus also reinscribing into the classical and Christian past the homoeroticism which Harrison’s scholarship determinedly ignores.