Clemence Dane and the Queer-Coded Regiment of Women

The English novelist and playwright Clemence Dane was born Winifred Ashton in Blackheath, Kent in 1888. After studying art in London and Germany and tutoring in Switzerland and Ireland, she began acting on stage under the name Diana Cortis in 1910. That career only lasted so long before the First World War came along and put the kibosh on those ambitions, and she picked up a pen and started writing.

Her first novel Regiment of Women was first published in 1917, and her second, Legend, was published in 1919. It was such a rousing success that folks encouraged her to turn the book into a play. She did, and it was called A Bill of Divorcement, and that was a success, too, so much so that it was turned into a few films, including a 1932 production starring John Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn.

Clemence would go on to get pretty familiar with Hollywood through her writing. She wrote a few detective novels with her fellow Detection Club (which also featured members like Agatha Christie and R. Austin Freeman, and G.D.H. and Margaret Cole) friend Helen de Guerry Simpson, and their book Enter Sir John was turned into the Alfred Hitchcock film Murder! (1930). She co-wrote the screenplay for Anna Karenina (1935) with S.N. Behrman and Salka Viertel, and she won an Oscar in 1946 for co-writing the original screenplay of Vacation From Marriage (released as Perfect Strangers in the UK) with Anthony Pelissier.

She was also pals with the famous playwright Noël Coward, who called her his “lesbian muse” and was so struck by her eccentricities that many folks think Clemence inspired the Madame Arcarti character in Blithe Spirit (1941).

Clemence didn’t just write plays and novels and movies. She was a vital contributor to Time and Tide, which was then a left-leaning feminist magazine that advocated for more women’s rights in the United Kingdom. She was also the book editor for Good Housekeeping from 1922 to 1933, and she was even president of the Society of Women Journalists between 1939 and 1959.

Back to Regiment of Women, though. It’s a pretty remarkable book for something published more than a century ago, particular for how queer-coded it is in its depiction of female relationships. There are intense attachments between its women — what with the possessiveness and jealousy and mentorship and desire and emotional dependency and all — that give the novel a psychological dimension that comes off as striking as it does modern. It’s also a product of its time, and when the book touches on same-sex desire, it can come off as uncomfortable, if not hostile. It’s kind of wild, how Clemence was able to explore female relationships in a society that was decades from finding the willingness (and language!) to discuss.

Clemence Dane basically reinvented herself twice before she turned 30, first as an actress and again as a writer. She wrote more than 40 plays and novels, and was even awarded the CBE, that prestigious Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, for her life’s work in 1953. She passed away in 1965, leaving behind an important and underrated legacy in writing.

Click to buy Regiment of Women!

Cover Image Credit: Background image is by J.J. Williams and part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Image of Clemence Dane is also part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

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