The complex and unusual life of Constance Maynard, a pioneer in women's higher education in Britain, is overdue for a contemporary in-depth study. With Constance Maynard's Passions: Religion, Sexuality, and an English Educational Pioneer, 1849–1935, Pauline Phipps goes a long way toward giving us a more comprehensive understanding of the life and work of a woman who was in the first generation to attend Girton; went on to teach at two girls’ schools, Cheltenham and St. Leonards; and then made her biggest impact as founding principal of Westfield College for women (once a constituent college of the University of London and now part of Queen Mary University of London), which she intended as a religious alternative to the more secular education she had received. An earlier biography, written by Maynard's former student Catherine B. Firth and published in 1949, was necessarily more reticent about aspects of Maynard's private life that Phipps foregrounds. Both biographers had access to a rich cache of Maynard's papers, including a spiritual diary, a daily diary, and three sets of journals linked to specific themes in her life: one about the child she adopted, another devoted to her travels, and the last devoted to her life after retirement from Westfield. Phipps appears to have relied primarily on juxtaposing the spiritual and daily journals and autobiography to piece together Maynard's reflections on public and private aspects of her life.

In the book's first chapter, devoted to Maynard's early life, Phipps offers valuable insight into Maynard's upbringing in an Evangelical Anglican family that derived its upper-middle-class wealth from South African investments. Maynard and her four siblings were raised according to their mother's “fixed life Principle ‘turn from the world’” (24). While the sons were educated and prepared for the family business, the girls were, not unusually, largely educated at home. More unusually, their parents’ asceticism, which Phipps suggests was most akin to early nineteenth-century Evangelical atonement theology, meant that the girls were forbidden to attend dinner parties, dances, theater, or concerts. Well into their early twenties, they had only limited interactions beyond their family circle. Having won her parents’ reluctant permission to attend Girton, where she often felt at odds with her more secular peers, she dutifully returned home after completing her studies in 1875 as she had promised her parents she would do. Phipps effectively builds on recent scholarship about mid-Victorian religiosity to convincingly make the case that Maynard's “repressive” religious upbringing helped to forge her career, giving her confidence in a sense of greater purpose that fueled her ambition and passions.

The rest of the book, which Phipps largely organizes in terms of Maynard's personal relationships during her years as an educator, include chapters titled “Crisis, Restraint and Liberty, 1869–1872,” “Caught in the Current, 1872–1875,” “An Unhappy Marriage, 1876–1880,” “A Man or a Woman? 1880–1883,” “Years of Gloom, 1883–1884,” and “Glorious New Spring, 1896–1913.” In these six chapters, Phipps argues that religious faith, possibly the most influential late-Victorian discourse available to her, shaped Maynard's sense of empowerment that proved crucial in an often lonely pioneering role and served as belief, worldview, guide to conduct, justification, and expression of love. Phipps makes extensive use of queer theory to explore how Maynard reconciled her faith and professional obligations with a series of impassioned relationships, first with a married man and subsequently with women colleagues and students. She carefully examines how, as Maynard moved through various academic roles—from student to assistant teacher to college principal—her roles in passionate relationships shifted as well. According to Phipps, in both her professional and intimate roles, which were often inextricably linked, Maynard's actions were both of a piece with and challenges to gender, class, and sexual norms, and her confidence in challenging these norms invariably grew out of her sense of religious faith and purpose.

In grappling with these aspects of Maynard's life, Phipps seems sometimes to feel compelled to pass judgment on Maynard as someone who “toyed with and manipulated” others (125) but was nonetheless deserving of “great praise” (164). There are important aspects of Maynard's life and writings—including her agonized rejection of her adopted daughter Effie and her tumultuous emotional and erotic relationships with students—that challenge an historian's capacity for objectivity. For example, in briefly mentioning the long saga of Maynard's adoption and then rejection of Effie, Phipps describes the child as an interesting project for Maynard, one ultimately to be “admired, controlled, and discarded” (142). The full record of Maynard's relationship with Effie raises many important questions about how Maynard and her peers understood adoption, motherhood, parent-child bonds, and child development. This record also provides a nuanced perspective on the agonizing challenges Maynard faced as a single professional woman, poorly equipped to understand her adoptee's needs and unevenly supported by the colleagues and family members upon whom she depended most to shape her views on what was right and to deal with the practicalities of childrearing. In her decision to judge Maynard's motives, Phipps misses some opportunities to explore the complexities and downright messiness of a life lived beyond the norms of Maynard's family and generation.

On the whole, though, this book adds in important ways to our understanding of this late-Victorian generation of pioneering women's educators, the networks and rivalries that connected them, and the role that religious faith played in shaping Maynard's choices and sense of purpose. Phipps also does important work in capturing the challenges of this generation of professional women's lives as they navigated new roles and relationships that often left them unmoored from traditional identities and largely dependent on bonds within college walls that could alternately be sources of comfortable companionship, ecstasy, and loneliness.