Constance Maynard’s Passions by Pauline A. Phipps

Constance Maynard (1849-1935), founder and first principal of Westfield College at the University of London, championed women's university education. A devout evangelical whose theology demanded resisting carnal feeling, she nonetheless formed a series of passionate relationships with college women, imagining love as both God's gift and a test of faith. Drawing on Maynard's diaries and autobiography, Pauline A. Phipps shows how the language of faith let her build an independent career and a distinct same-sex sexual self-consciousness at a time when middle-class women were expected to stay at home and defer to men.