ABSTRACT
On 4 February 1872, the “pretty, witty and well-to-do”1 Henrietta Octavia Rowland received a letter that “surprised [her] very much.”2 It was a marriage proposal from a singularly unattractive older clergyman named Samuel Barnett. He conspicuously lacked those qualities that a fashionable young woman was taught to cherish in her suitors: wealth, social standing and personal ambition. It was not, however, the unsuitability of this particular match that shocked Miss Rowland. She was troubled by different matters. She had heretofore interpreted his interest in her as entirely dependent on their common work to improve the lives of the London poor in Marylebone. What place could there be for private passion and sexual desire among men and women joined together in the “passionless”3 comradeship of social reform? Was matrimony compatible with female independence of thought and action?
