The Technique of the Love Affair, by A Gentlewoman (1928)
By Francis Booth | On May 7, 2025 | Updated May 8, 2025 | Comments (0)
The Technique of the Love Affair (1928) sums up the new attitude toward men, sex, and relationships of the modern woman in the late 1920s perfectly, not to say outrageously and shockingly.
It gives cynical and completely amoral guidance to young women on how to master and dominate men without ever falling under their spell; the woman who follows its advice will always be in control, never be in love and never be subservient to a man, says the author.
Although the book always has its tongue firmly in its cheek, and although it is no doubt intended as comic relief, it still probably presents and represents the thinking of the dedicated 1920s flapper better than any other book of the period, fictional or otherwise.
“The Technique of the Love Affair makes, I am bitterly afraid, considerable sense. If only it had been written and placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful, instead of just successive.” (— Dorothy Parker)
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“Your love affair should be hedged about with flirtations, and your lover should believe – preferably with accuracy – that several others would clamour for his place of favour and intimacy if he relaxed his hold upon you. But, though you should find means to display your admirer to your lover, you must not flaunt your lover before your admirers. (Interpret ‘lover’ in anywhere you choose, so long as it implies the most favoured of those who surround you.)”
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Doris Langley Moore
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Actually written by Doris Langley Moore
The Technique of the Love Affair was originally published pseudonymously as by “A Gentlewoman,” though it was actually written by a young Doris Langley Moore (1902-1989), the distinguished British fashion writer, fashion historian – she founded the Museum of Costume in Bath – and Hollywood costume designer – responsible for, among others, Katherine Hepburn’s outfits in The African Queen.
In a long career, lasting from the 1920s to the 1970s, Moore wrote many other books, including several on fashion and social life, including Pandora’s Letter Box; being a Discourse on Fashionable Life as well as light, enjoyable novels such as Not at Home and All Done by Kindness and biographies of notable women, in particular E. Nesbit, author of The Treasure Seekers, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Railway Children.
She also wrote about Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, as well as four books on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Byron himself. She was awarded an OBE in 1971.
Moore was born in 1902, so she was a young woman herself when she wrote The Technique of the Love Affair and not the hard-bitten, older cynic whose voice the book purports to convey. But the book was nevertheless admired by that epitome of the hard-bitten, older cynic herself: Dorothy Parker, she of Vicious Circle and Algonquin Round Table fame.
Parker herself was only thirty-five in 1928 but she had already been writing acerbic theatre criticism, initially for Vanity Fair, for ten years. A woman not easily humbled, Parker read the book at the time and wrote about it in awestruck, almost reverential terms in the New Yorker for November 17, 1928.
“Well, to get back to me as quickly as possible—when Our Heroine found that she was the bust of the season as a wit and an elocutionist, she decided to turn to that good old stand-by, sex. ‘Let others raconteur if they will,’ I said, ‘but gangway while I go Garbo!’
To that end, I acquired a book called The Technique of the Love Affair, by one who signs herself “A Gentlewoman,” and set out to learn how to loop the Usual Dancing Men.
I have thought, in times past, that I had been depressed. I have regarded myself as one who had walked hand-in-hand with sadness. But until I read that book, depression, as I knew it, was still in its infancy. I have found out, from its pages, that never once have I been right. Never once. Not even one little time.
You know how you ought to be with men? You should always be aloof, you should never let them know you like them, you must on no account let them feel that they are of any importance to you, you must be wrapped up m your own concerns, you may never let them lose sight of the fact that you are superior, you must be, in short, a regular stuffed chemise And if you could see what I’ve been doing!
Despite its abominable style and frequent sandy stretches, The Technique of the Love Affair makes, I am bitterly afraid, considerable sense. If only it had been written and placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful, instead of just successive.”
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A spoof Socratic dialogue
The Technique of the Love Affair is a spoof of a Socratic dialogue, with the older woman Cypria (named after Venus’ birthplace) educating her naïve young friend Saccharissa in the ways of the world. Cypria points out that, since the First World War, there has been a marked lack of eligible men. Women have to fight for them on as near-equal terms as they can; they must “resort to artifice in order to obtain him.” And this artifice must be learned and practiced.
“In the love affair, as in sculpture, poetry, and every other fine art, no lasting success can be achieved without skill.” But, Cypria caveats, she is by no means advocating promiscuity – like a true artist, the woman must be selective in her pursuits; “An artist, whichever Muse he follow, must be exquisitely selective.”
One of Cypria’s first lessons is about chastity, or rather the need for a lack of it in the modern woman. In Victorian times, she says, women were “too delicate and romantically honourable for words . . . physical purity and innocence were then highly fashionable.” But in the modern, post-war world, these virtues have necessarily been greatly diminished.
Cypria: Money, birth, rank, respectability – they are all worth less than they were. It was not man, but woman herself, who relegated chastity to a more reasonable position among the virtues. Far be it from me to insinuate that she has discarded it, but she no longer vaunts it as her proudest boast. It is no longer her main-stay, her protection, her chief allurement.
Cypria also warns her young friend of the dangers of falling in love and thus losing control. For the woman of 1928, “the one thing essential is self-confidence.” If a young woman like Saccharissa is afraid of losing a man, he will soon gain “an importance in your thoughts quite disproportionate to his merits.”
Cypria tells her, “if you are unwaveringly sure of yourself, and are free from all the alarms of a woman troubled with a sense of inferiority, your judgement will be cool and clear, and, in short, you cannot become infatuated.” Also, says Cypria, the young woman must make sure not to give up her friends and interests in favor of a potential love interest:
Never will they be more useful to you than now, when you will need all the diversions at your command to prevent your mind from fixing to firmly on one object. Remember also that as often as your lover, or prospective lover, sees you engrossed with people and things to the apparent exclusion of himself, he will be stimulated to a fresh effort to win you. And should the affair eventually fall through, how much lighter will be your pangs if it is only one attachment severed among many that remain.
Another of Cypria’s lessons is in the use of flirtation to attract a man, this being another of the arts that a woman needs to master in the modern world of 1928; she needs to know exactly to what degree she can respond to the man’s advances. Saccharissa asks how much of a response she should give. Cypria implies that it is permissible to go the whole way, though only in very limited circumstances.
Cypria: As long as you do not respond as much as he would like – as long as you almost seem to be doing so under protest (not the protest of disinclination, mark you, but of modesty, or conventionality, or any other obstacle you may have chosen), you might make a little show of surrender.
Saccharissa: And that is called coquetry, I suppose. How long must I go on with that kind of thing?
Cypria: Almost for ever, I am afraid. You dare not cease to give a little less of yourself than is wanted, a little less than satisfies, save on the rarest occasions, and those should decidedly be foreign to the period of approach.
Cypria devotes considerable time to schooling Saccharissa in the art of capturing a man and making him want to marry her. But, even after marriage, she insists that a woman has to stay attentive, attractive and alluring. Cypria maintains that a married woman is perfectly entitled to flirt with other men, even if they themselves are married.
The word adultery is not used, but Cypria’s Machiavellian amorality comfortably encompasses it. She even advocates that for a married woman, as for an unmarried one, encouraging multiple suitors to compete with each other and even to compete with her husband, is a positive thing.
Cypria: Do you know, I’m beginning to believe that a wife ought to gather together a little circle of admirers in order to ensure the happiness of her home. It’s positively altruistic!
Saccharissa: You are joking now.
Cypria: Well, perhaps I am, but there’s a grain of truth in the jest.
Saccharissa: I suppose you would never pause to consider the men whose feelings are to be played upon for the diversion of the married woman?
Cypria: My dearest Saccharissa, after all the trouble I have taken with you, how can you be so naïve? I will not even ask you why such an unfortunate, handicapped creature as a woman should be expected to consider the feelings of the sex which has her at a disadvantage: I will merely put it to you that the men who take part in the flirtations we are discussing may derive easily as much pleasure and benefit from them as the woman.
Although Cypria’s views are obviously exaggerated for comic effect and to cause deliberate outrage, even offense, they probably do represent very closely the views of the twenty-six-year-old, independent-minded fashionable flapper that her author was and beautifully, hilariously capture the feelings of many characters in the 1928 novel.
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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England.
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