Vignette: ‘Have you tried it with three?’

Summary

What role do you think sexual fantasy played in her writing? Three, that's it. Three. Three. Three.

Do if you possibly can go & see Marat/Sade it is fascinating – a dream within a dream (well mine anyway!).

When life in London became too intense, Quin escaped and caught the train to Axminster, in retreat to Carol and Alan Burns's Swain's Lane cottage in Dorset. The cottage had no running water or elec-tricity, water was drawn from a well, and there were oil lamps and a garden with an apple orchard. Here, Quin dreamt of meeting a farm labourer like Mellors from D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, spent time with her married friends Carol and Alan, reading and talking, walked for miles along the coast, and saw her then lover Henry Williamson.

Quin was promiscuous and sexually adventurous, and her permissive libertine fantasies and desires often transgressed boundaries. Her role as third to several of her married friends’ twos – including Carol and Alan Burns, Robert and Diane Sward, and Bob and Bobbie Creeley, for example (the latter of whom Three is dedicated to) – reveals a wish to access and open up the boundaries of intimate relationships and the perceived intimacy of two, and to experiment with different forms of sexuality and sexual experiences. When in conversation with John Hall, Quin describes herself as bisexual, but her interest in the performativity of gender and her resistance to binaries could be seen to position her as queer. Throughout her life Quin's desire was mobile and sometimes taboo: as a young adult she met with her father in London and ‘pretended he was my lover’; her first and long-lasting love was for her half-brother who she met at fourteen and fell ‘desperately in love with’; and towards the end of her life she fell in love with her nephew, his son. Like S, then, in her intimate and fantasy life Quin was interested in playing at and blurring distinctions between roles such daughter/sister/lover/other. As she expressed it to Brocard Sewell: ‘I have often found myself at my best, a kind of security when with two other people, most of my friends are couples, & I suppose automatically I play the role of the child.’