Miss Marks and Miss Woolley

The Portrait of a Lifelong Relationship between Two Prominent and Independent Women

Plot

The portrait of a lifelong relationship between two prominent and independent women.
A portrait of the relationship between two prominent and independent women who struggled with each other and their professional lives--one an English professor and a writer, the other President of Mt. Holyoke College--through the course of an emotional involvement that continued for fifty years, altering with time but steadily deepening until death parted them. Mary Emma Woolley retired from the presidency of Mt. Holyoke College in 1937 following a full and illustrious career as a pioneer in higher education for women. During her 36 years as Mt. Holyoke's President, Woolley had been active in feminist causes and world peace. She also had a life separate from her public self. This she shared with Jeannette Marks, an author and English professor at the college, in a love affair that lasted half a century. Their relationship began and flowered in the late 1890s at Wellesley, where Woolley was a professor of Biblical history and Marks her student. It reached fruition before either woman suspected that there was anything socially unacceptable or abnormal in love between women. That realization probably came first to Marks, and she made an effort to break away. The failure of that effort, and the subsequent attempts to conform to social norms without relinquishing their binding affection, was costly for both women. Based on letters recently discovered among the Mary Emma Woolley Papers willed to the Mt. Holyoke Library by Marks--letters still in their original envelopes, addressed in Woolley's hand or Marks's difficult scrawl, neatly wrapped, labeled and dated for all the years of their involvement--this book recreates a relationship that caused enough gossip at the time to insure the appointment of a man to succeed Woolley, thus outraging every feminist in the land. Within this history biographer Wells provides a view of women alone during the first half of this century, of women compelled by their emotions to confront a sexuality that they were totally innocent of, at the same time that they were charged with the education of young women. Finally, Wells offers a moving story of love between two people who managed to survive together in spite of society, time, and the demands of their careers, as well as their own strongly independent natures.--Adapted from dust jacket