User:Michael Goodyear/Gertrude Dix

Gertrude Dix (1867–1950) was a British writer, feminist and socialist, known for her avant-garde ideas on many subjects. Her writing positioned her among the New Woman writers. Born in Bristol, England she later emigrated to California. Her works include The Girl from the Farm (1895) and The Image Breakers (1900).

Life
Gertrude Dix was born in Brixton in 1867 to William Chatterton Dix (1837–1898), and his wife Juliet Wartnaby (1836/7–1913). William Dix was an insurance manager, a high church Anglican and composer of hymns. Gertrude Dix's grandfather was John Dix, a surgeon and writer. Gertrude was the oldest child of three daughters and four sons. She was brought up in Bristol, at Colston Cottage, Redland, an inner suburb. and developed an interest in socialism at an early age, joining the local Christian Socialists (later, in 1891, the Bristol Fabian Society) and the Bristol Socialist Society, where she was an advocate for workers' rights during the labour unrest and strike in that area in 1889–1890, joining the organising committee together with Katharine St John Conway. In the Socialist Society, she gave talks on Plato and Havelock Ellis and what she considered their progressive views on women. following this, she left home in 1890 to study nursing, for a year, the harsh conditions of which she described in an article. After campaigning for reform, she turned to writing. She had her first political article published in the Labour Leader in 1891, proclaiming "there is no freedom where poverty and starvation compel", adapting Kant in defining "the essence of slavery" as "the power to use another as a means to his own ends", advocating employment protection legislation. By 1892 she was lecturing in Bristol with Fabians on the need for a Labour Party.

In June 1892 Gertrude Dix's Fabian connections enabled her to take a position in the household of Sydney Haldane Olivier and his wife, Margaret Cox Olivier in Surrey, caring for two of their four daughters, Brynhild and Daphne, then aged five and three. Among their neighbours were Edward and Constance Garnett and their son, David (“Bunny”) Garnett, and William and Margaret Pye, whose children included Edith, Ethel, Sybil and David, as well as Edward Pease and Octavia Hill in what became a hub of progressive Fabian intellectuals. The Oliviers, the "aristocracy of the left", who favoured the Simple life, also had close ties to the Webbs and the Shaws, William Morris and Edward Carpenter. Ms Dix approached her new task with advanced theories on child development, one of whose tenets was "to bring them up on principles of freedom", allowing children to learn through experience rather than rules. She and her new charges would run barefoot through the nearby Chart Woods, hoping that this new generation would grow up to have much greater freedom than her own. Through the Oliviers, she would meet many socially influential figures on the left, as well as proponents of the Simple life including Henry and Kate Salt and anarchists such as Nannie Dryhurst and Charlotte Wilson. The latter found Gertrude Dix a willing listener.

Gertrude Dix's Bristol Fabian circle would soon bring her into contact with the controversial Carpenter advocate, William de Matttos, a proponent of free love, coming under his influence in the faction wars that were dominating socialist politics. At that time she wrote that restraints were "unnecessary when people love each other and absolutely wicked and cruel when they don't". She attacked conventional morality and in particular, marriage as a form of slavery for women. Like Carpenter, she decried the Victorian reluctance to talk about sex, putting forward an alternative ethics that differentiated actions alone from their intent, "actions are neither moral or immoral per se or to be judged apart from spirit & intention". She also attacked religion as a cause of moral hypocrisy, stating that a Christian preoccupation with sin had "mentally hypnotised the world too long", backing her claims with appeals to writers such as Plato, Browning and Ibsen, insisting that a lack of feeling and passion in human relations was at the source of much human failing. Within the Fabian factions she pragmatically supported the formation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, but pursued the moral dilemma of expediency versus revolution in The Image Breakers (1900) which also drew on some of the tensions within the movement.

The Oliviers also introduced Gertrude Dix to their Bloomsbury circle of avant-garde intelligentsia, where she came to the attention of the diarist, Olive Garnett who wrote "Miss Dix was of an extreme socialist, modern young woman type, dress, hair, eyeglasses & all". Dix soon made friends with Olive and her father, Richard Garnett, going to hear Annie Besant speak and being introduced to their circle, which included William Michael Rossetti

1895 saw the publication of Gertrude Dix's first novel, The Girl from the Farm (1895), and she adopted bloomers among her clothing choices. Her journalism, nursing research and authorship of a morally subversive novel was making her a minor celebrity, including invitations to speak at the recently formed Socialist Club in 1896, together with Isabella Ford. Gertrude Dix, who by now considered herself a bohemian Londoner, included in her circle a broad section of radical reformers and independent thinkers.

Subsequently she moved out of London to Witley, Surrey to work on her second novel, her home becoming a focus for her writers' circle, a home she shared with a like minded writer, Esther Wood. While her novel, The Image Breakers (1900), met with some success, details of her life are sketchy after 1900. Somethin happened in early 1902, to make her abandon her political and artistic life and emigrate to America.

Dix became a member of the Fabian Society, and the Bristol Socialist Society

[Introduction]

where she met Robert Allan Nicol, a former medical student, whom she later married. In Bristol she was influenced by the socialist writer Edward Carpenter. Moving to London, she moved in bohemian socialist circles and worked with the Independent Labour Party. She identified as avant-garde, advocating free love and interest in sex psychology. She became a journalist and started writing novels, including The Girl from the Farm (1895), a New Woman work and The Image Breakers (1900). After she and Nicol married, they moved to California in 1900, where they had three children, and she took to writing western novels. Gertrude Dix died in San Francisco in 1950.

on the cusp of many [Liberal and Socialist] causes” (297). Berke

siblings

Clement

Hilda Amaryllis

Phyllis daughter

Margot Her Father's Daughter

Work
Gertrude Dix is known for two major novels.

The Girl from the Farm (1895) was published in the avant-garde Keynotes Series by John Lane’s press. Keynotes was considered deliberately controversial, named after George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright)'s 1893 collection of short stories celebrating women's "eternal wildness", with covers by  Aubrey Beardsley who had just become notorious following the conviction of Oscar Wilde (1895). The book is prefaced by a quote from Hegel, hinting at Gertrude Dix's ethical awakening, in which she refers to the moral dilemma, the clash between unconscious natural morality and that derived from the consciousness of reason. In the novel, Katherine is a recent graduate from Cambridge University, who returns to her home town having acquired "New Woman" attitudes. She believes in women earning their own living and discards the "uncessary draperies" of Victorian attire in favour of loose gowns. Edward Carpenter appears as her friend "Mr Gardener". When the families moral rectitude is exposed as hypocrisy, Katherine's rebellion is legitmised. The Hegelian theme lies in the dialectic between a conscious individual choice versus duty to family. the novel was generally well received, despite reservations about her "modern facts" and rebelliousness, with comparisons to Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) in its portrayal of the seduced and abandoned woman (The Girl from the Farm). A second edition was required and Roberts Brothers published it in America in their Famous Women Series, where the Chicago Times and Herald described her as "A modern of moderns". The Image Breakers (1900) is considered a feminist-socialist work, exploring "the overlapping ethics of socialism, anarchism, free love and feminism". A much more ambitious work, The Image Breakers features two new women, Rosalind and Leslie (the image breakers) who more explicitly embrace socialism, freedom, love and sex as well as passionate female friendship. Into the narrative Gertrude Dix inserts her discovery of emerging psychology and Symbolism as well as drawing on the contemporary political scene. She tries to express the complexities of life that women like herself, seeking both independence and sensuality experience. Reviewers included Arnold Bennett who wrote that the book would be "the forerunner of some really notable work" and G. K. Chesterton who praised it, wishing that "all novels of Socialism and vague unconventionality were as good as Miss Gertrude Dix's work, in which she shows a genuine sense of beauty and delicacy and a comprehension of that nameless aesthetic hunger". Again, the book was reprinted in America where it was described as "a new realistic study of modern socialism".

In her work, among other ideas she explored evolving ideas on women's dress culture.

She also wrote short stories, such as Veronica's Mill.

Selected list of works

 * (full text)
 * (text at) Hathi Trust



Books

 * (full text at Internet Archive) see also Lectures on the history of philosophy
 * (full text at Internet Archive) see also Lectures on the history of philosophy