Susan Miles

Nonfiction Writer and Poet

• Born: September 16, 1888
• Birthplace: Meerut, India
• Died: May 12, 1975
• Place of death: Moggerhanger, Bedfordshire, Sutton, England

Biography

Susan Miles was born Ursula Wyllie on September 16, 1888, in Meerut, India, to British army officer (and first bishop of Rangoon) Lieutenant Colonel Robert John Humphrey and mother Emily Titcomb Wyllie. Soon after she was born, her father packed up the children and moved them back to London, returning himself to India. In London, Wyllie began her education both in schools and by tutors, as well as by attending lectures at Redhill. One of the lecturers was novelist John Cowper Powys, who wrote her a letter of recommendation for scholarship at the University of Cambridge. Although her application for a scholarship was denied, she would later earn a degree (with high honors, in philosophy) from London University in 1918.

Also at this time, the twenty year-old Wyllie traveled to Germany to visit relatives. There she met thirty-four year-old Anglican Deacon William Corbett Roberts, whom she would wed a year later. They married on February 13, 1909. Because she was admittedly a liberal feminist, however, and because she had left the Church, Wyllie and Roberts were forbidden communion on their wedding day.

Like his wife, Deacon Roberts was liberal. As a result, his newly accepted position in the rural Crick, in Northamptonshire, was challenging. The couple not only felt displaced but were also treated as such. After a local dance, for instance, townspeople used weed killer on every plant in the church conservatory. Also, the local paper came out with the news that “the deacon’s wife was a suffragette.” The young Mrs. Roberts took responsibility for the upsets, noting the fact that she was young, outspoken, and neglectful about attending to the town’s ways and mores as the reason. These and other attitudes and events may have been the catalysts to her first acknowledgment of the need for social reform in the church.

Her main concerns were female suffrage in general and the role and position of women in the church in particular. These moved Roberts to publish her first piece in 1912, a pamphlet titled The Cause of Purity and Women’s Suffrage. The pamphlet was published by the Church League for Women’s Suffrage as well as by the Honorary Treasurer and Honorary Press Secretary of the East Midland Federation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

After this, Roberts would write under her pen name, Susan Miles, to protect her husband’s parishioners from recognizing themselves in her writing. After World War I, the poet’s efforts as a key member of the Anglican Group for the Ordination of Women and also the interdenominational Society for the Ministry of Women in the Church saw her giving voice to the women’s movement some time before it could be considered as such. A suffragist and pacifist, Miles campaigned for the right for women to be ordained as priests in the Church of England.

While her efforts were great, the town’s willingness to change was not, so Miles and her husband moved first to Delhi, India, where William taught English at St. Stephen’s College. While Miles and her husband enjoyed their new home, they did so briefly, for heat negatively affected her there. They soon returned to England. Back home, Roberts accepted a position as rector of St. George’s, in Bloomsbury, and Miles went to work teaching at Bedford College for Women. But Miles felt “incompetent” as a teacher, and soon stopped teaching in order to write.

Throughout these times, Miles wrote mostly poetry—twelve volumes—and an epic novel, which she took fourteen years to complete. She contributed consistently to such periodicals as Nation, Punch, Sewanee Review, New Leader, Challenge, New Age, Observer, Weekly Westminster, Time and Tide, Art and Letters, Women’s Leader, New Witness, Englishwoman, London Mercury, and Link. Most of her work was received with favor, eliciting such responses as those by The Times Literary Supplement reviewers who named it “a very considerable success,” or work with a “comprehension [that] moves us.”

Miles wrote to change the power and the role of women. She wrote that “men’s power had established labor unions, which raised their pay, but that until women were given the right to vote, they would not enjoy appropriate compensation.” She wrote that “increasing women’s pay would help end prostitution.” She also wrote on the ordination of women, as she worked alongside those very women she had in mind. She kept in fine company in this endeavor: Laurence Binyon, T. S. Eliot, H. H. Munro, John Middleton Murry, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edith Sitwell would speak and read from their works at the church, and such well-known figures as painter Wilfred Maynell and poet Herbert Edward Palmer were close and influential friends.

By 1938, Roberts had taken a post at All Saints’ Church in Bedfordshire, Sutton, so the coupled moved once more. By the outbreak of World War II, Miles and her husband supported the transformation of the rectory into a shelter for refugees. These years would provide material for her diaries, which she kept to record the events during the bombings. The diaries provided material for her second novel, which was experimental in both content and form, and for her self-published essays, which were extremely cynical and therefore, as she had noted in her diary, those which “pacifists refused to publish.”

Roberts died in 1953, and Miles devoted the rest of her life writing mostly in dedication to him, with a well-received work on the war years in addition. Susan Miles died almost twenty years later, in 1971, and was buried in the Sutton Church cemetery, beside her husband.