The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
narrative structure constituted the benchmarks of piety, the discursive
‘good’ against which the discursive ‘bad’ of male piety was to be measured.
Men had lower religious credentials than women, and the life narrative of
each was structured around this discursive understanding. While men were
the religious problem, women were the religious solution.
In the inter-war period, Grace Pettman was a prolific evangelical novelist.
One of her short stories in the late 1930s was The Unequal Yoke. 74 The
story was told in the first person by Peggy, and started:
Had not Guy Wilbraham come into my life – never, never to go out
of it again? An elder brother of my old school chum, Guy had gone
to Northern India tea-planting some years before. But Mollie had
chattered incessantly of her absent brother, so I was quite ready to
join her in her hero-worship, even before he came home on furlough.
And then? – Well, the first meeting changed everything. What he saw
in me to love I can’t imagine, but as for Guy – well, every girl in the
place was ready to lose her heart to him, and no wonder. Before I
realised it, I had given all the heart I possessed into his keeping, with
all the freshness and pureness of a first great love, unspoiled by any
senseless flirtations to take the bloom off the gift.
From the outset, widely appreciated evangelical codes were deployed
to establish binary oppositions: empire and home, worldliness and innocence,
experienced man meets young woman with no ‘bloom off the
gift’. The couple became engaged, and Guy returned to India waiting for
Peggy to join him. Meanwhile, Peggy was asked by a Sunday school
superintendent to take a difficult Bible class of ‘one or two clever highschool
girls, and three or four young women who were engaged to be
married’. There she tells Solomon’s warning of taking ‘a heathen wife’,
frightening one woman in the class whose fiancé was far from godly. This
in turn frightens Peggy: ‘I had all along known quite well that Guy and I
could never walk together in the ways of God, and marriage between
us would be an unequal yoke indeed.’ Guy wrote from India urging her
to give up Sunday school teaching, saying: ‘The Sunday School type doesn’t
work among the set I’m in here . . . I have got more sick than ever of the
whole religious show.’ Guy was, Peggy says, a ‘free-thinking sort’. She
then broke off the engagement, Guy got married (in a registry office,
not a church) to ‘Fanny Farne, of the Frivolity Theatre, London’, and
Peggy heard no more of him. She took to doing mission work in a small
rural village, finally moving to Cornwall where her mission work had great
resonance:
...a great work commenced. Men and women who could remember
the Cornish revivals in the days of old, said that the former times
had come back again. Night after night rough lads and young girls,
73