Free Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson

Alan asks Herminia to be his wife.But his plane is not as high as hers, for Herminia has made up her mind never to marry.Instead she proposes that they should be ‘very dear, dear friends, with the only kind of friendship that nature makes possible between men and women’.
    I know what marriage is – from what vile slavery it has sprung; on what unseen horrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed; by what unholy sacrifices it is sustained and made possible… I can’t be untrue to my most sacred beliefs.
    Alan takes some persuading, but at Herminia’s insistence eventually agrees to live unmarried for the sake of her principles.A dramatic confrontation ensues when Merrick senior, Alan’s wealthy father, finds out.Spluttering with revulsion at his son’s disgusting defiance of decency, he promptly disinherits him.Soon after, Herminia becomes pregnant.Rather shamefully, they go to Italy to have the baby in Perugia, and there Alan regrettably diesof typhoid contracted from bad drains.Herminia is left a penniless unmarried mother.She returns to England and, as a fallen woman no longer acceptable to society, is faced with a struggle for survival.In her hour of need a kind editor gives her a small sum for some journalism; with hard work and a few friends she manages to scrape a living for herself and her child.Déclassée, bereft of respectability, soiled goods, yet still refusing to compromise those ‘sacred beliefs’, Herminia finds a natural home in the only community tolerant enough to give her refuge – Bohemia.A hospitable country, it had long permitted freedom of choice in sexual matters.Its doors had always been open to sexual transgressors, to unmarried mothers, to the unrespectable, the unfortunate or the plain immoral – all the casualties of bourgeois censoriousness.Although Herminia is a victim, ostracised and outlawed, by giving her unshakeable convictions Allen claims moral pre-eminence for his heroine.
    The Woman Who Did made an eloquent if rather over-effusive plea for the values of tolerance and freedom in love, but perhaps their most sensational manifesto came with H.G.Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909).It is hard now to understand quite how affronted polite society was by this novel, but the reaction was one of implacable hostility to the book’s liberal message, and Wells had to endure humiliating persecution from public and critics alike.The book tells the simple story of its eponymous heroine, a ‘new’ woman (largely based on Amber Reeves, H.G.Wells’s mistress at the time).As the daughter of a dull suburban business-man, Ann Veronica is impatient with the dreariness of her safe, sheltered middle-class life.Her aspirations of independence – (‘I want to be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things…’) – become reality when she runs away to London.There she experiments with various emancipated movements – Fabianism, the suffragettes – but discovers true freedom only in the arms of her college tutor, Capes.Together they flee to Switzerland.Despite, or because of, the hostile reaction to the book, thousands of readers were mesmerised by Wells’s daring in depicting this love affair, in which the hero and heroine seemed to breathe the purer air of a parallel morality:
    ‘If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.Will you be moral and your species, or immoral and yourself?We’ve decided to be immoral.’…
    ‘Look at our affair,’ he went on… ‘No power on earth will persuade me we’re not two rather disreputable persons.You desert your home: I throw up useful teaching, risk every hope in your career… all our principles abandoned… Out of all this we have struck a sort of harmony… and it’s gorgeous!’
    ‘Glorious!’ said Ann Veronica…
    Later they loitered along a winding path above the inn and made love to one another…
    For a time they walked in silence.
    ‘I wonder,’ she began presently, ‘why I love