Lady Bruton’s apathetic, and perhaps even antagonistic, attitude toward the wives of her male friends, such as Clarissa Dalloway, reminds me of the attitude Gertrude Stein takes toward her partner Alice B. Toklas and the “genius’ wives” who she expects Alice to entertain while she talks to the male geniuses in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

“Thus, when [Lady Bruton] said in her offhand way ‘How’s Clarissa?’ husbands had difficulty in persuading their wives and indeed themselves, of her interest in women who often got in their husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, ‘How’s Clarissa?’ was known by women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost silent companion, whose utterances…signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway” (106)

We sense at the end of this passage, however, that Lady Bruton is also a self-identified, card-carrying woman, and her loyalties lie with women as well as, and apart from, her bonds to their husbands, “beneath masculine lunch parties.” Lady Bruton, like Gertrude Stein, insists on creating a female-mediated space, where she holds authority, even if the other most powerful people in the room are all men; in Stein’s case, those men are artists like Picasso, and in Lady Bruton’s, they are men like Dalloway and Whitbread. It’s an odd in-between place that Lady Bruton holds, between feeling a kinship to her female “comrade[s]” and dismissing them in favor of their husbands, considering them to be mere accessories to their husbands’ more important trajectories. Nevertheless, her unmarried, self-empowering, gender-ambivalent societal status is certainly radical.