Adelaide Anne Procter by Mary Hitchman
Illustration by Jon McCormack
Mary Hitchman is a writer and medievalist.
‘No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been’
— ‘The Ghost in the Picture Room’
These lines were published on 13th December, my birthday, in 1859. I’d seen them on a postcard in a bookshop, one of those pieces of embossed card bearing platitudes and affirmations, but they stuck. I was drifting then, and not pleasantly: I felt without an anchor, constantly searching for something to ground me, lurching from denial to certainty about who I was. I hadn’t heard of their author, Adelaide Anne Procter, and certainly never imagined her to be queer. And yet there she was, promising me that I could stand up, dust myself off, and start again.
Procter was born in 1825 to a privileged literary family. She grew up in a grand townhouse in Bloomsbury, and spent her early years surrounded by a large portion of the GCSE English Literature syllabus. Wordsworth was a family friend, as were the Rossettis; even Dickens was a constant presence. Procter started writing as a child, and her father (also a poet) recognised her talent for poetry. She would later write for Dickens’s Household Words under the pseudonym Mary Berwick, and he was delighted to discover the identity of his star contributor. Allegedly, Procter was Queen Victoria’s favourite poet. She was certainly successful, and among living poets Procter was second only to Tennyson in popularity.
A radical feminist, Procter championed the causes of homeless women and sex workers, using her poetry to voice the needs of working-class women and devoting her time to charitable projects. She was a founding member of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, one of the earliest women’s groups in Britain, that still runs today. She converted to Catholicism aged 26.
I have a theory that a Catholic can always spot another Catholic. It might be the self-deprecating humour that often strays into the darkly morbid, a fondness for black, references to family in Derry, a profusion of cousins… or perhaps it is the guilt. For me, the atmosphere shifts subtly, and I am overcome with certainty that this person will understand me, even if they are a stranger, even if we have only this one thing in common. Because it is the foundation for everything else. When I found out about Procter’s faith I wasn’t surprised. I felt relieved. There was a reason why she spoke so clearly to me across a vast chasm spanning 160 years.
I am a lapsed Catholic. Churches make me nervous and hymns set my teeth on edge. Thirteen years of Catholic schooling left me with a deep mistrust of authority and a penchant for wildly specific blasphemy. The closest I felt to the faith of my Irish ancestors was whilst watching Fleabag. Kneel.
As a queer person, carrying the baggage of a faith held or discarded is a peculiar burden. Many faith groups are, quite rightly, lambasted for their treatment of LGBTQ+ people. At best this is alienating and offensive; at its worst, homophobic religious rhetoric ends lives. This isn’t news. Queer people of faith occupy a treacherous space between their two communities, tugged in opposing directions, forced into impossible compromises.
Bisexuality is another such balancing act. You are too queer for the straights and too straight for the queers, plagued by a unique brand of impostor syndrome. As the eminent Carrie Bradshaw once said, ‘I’m not sure bisexuality exists. I think it’s just a layover on the way to Gaytown.’ Quite. For weeks that line would rise in my mind, unbidden, after a boyfriend assured me that I was straight, having been cleansed of my queerness by virtue of our relationship. I quietly retreated back into the closet, muttering about phases and hoping that he was right, knowing that he wasn’t.
The historical record shows that Procter had two major relationships — one with a man, one with a woman — and that neither ended well. Little information survives about the former, only that he and Procter were engaged for several years before they separated. Procter’s relationship with fellow writer Matilda Hays, better known as George Sand’s translator and long-term love of American actress Charlotte Cushman, began around 1858. They were a striking pair. Hays dressed in tailored jackets and neckties atop sombre skirts. Procter floated, apparition-like, through the crowds of Victorian London: she wore dresses of dark velvet and lace, often with an accompanying veil, every inch the melodramatic Catholic.
Procter fell for Hays hard. She dedicated a volume of poetry, Legends and Lyrics, to her suave lover. She signed her letters ‘from Max and me’ (Hays often went by Max or Matthew) when they were together. Procter’s poem ‘A Retrospect’ originally bore the title ‘To M.M.H’, and is an expansive, generous tribute to their relationship:
‘At this fair point of present bliss,
Where we together stand,
Let me look back once more, and trace,
That long and desert land,
Wherein till now was cast my lot, and I could live, and thou wert not.’
She was devastated when the capricious Hays began pursuing Lady Monson, with whom she would have a great affair. Always fragile, always slightly apart from the world, Procter died in 1864 after contracting tuberculosis, aged only 38. Hays wrote asking to visit, but was rebuffed. Whether this was at the behest of Procter or her family is unclear. 33 years later, an obituary of Hays in the Liverpool Echo would read: ‘the dear friend of Adelaide Procter, gone before.’
Queer history naturally gravitates towards the out-and-proud, the rule-breakers, the dismantlers of polite society. Procter was none of these things. Yet she threw herself heart and soul into forging a relationship with the woman she loved. I wonder whether Procter, in observing the amorous exploits of Hays, felt the same alienation from the queer community that the more reticent among us experience today.
Her popularity as a poet waned in the years after her death, and by the mid-twentieth century her name was an obscure one. She is a footnote in anthologies and an occasional presence in a hymnal. But for me, this theatrical bisexual Catholic provided the much-needed assurance that I am not a contradiction. I am just as I should be.
‘You may stretch your hands out towards me —
Ah! You will — I know not when —
I shall nurse my love and keep it
Faithfully, for you, till then.’
— ‘Fidelis’
Jon McCormack is an Irish illustrator and storyboard artist based in Barcelona, Spain. His work focuses on surreal imagery, queer identity and absurd humour.
