Remedios Varo, Spiral Transit (1962)
By contrast? Carrington’s Artist Home and Garden
“as woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” – Woolf, Three Guineas
Dear friends and readers,
As I’m just coming up for air after having attended three conferences in a row (Charlotte Smith, her place in literature at Chawton Library, a Francis Burney conference on Burney and Global and other politics in DC, and a JASNA AGM on Emma also in DC), and about to attend a fourth (an EC/ASECS at Mary Washington College which is billed as “the Strange and Familiar”), I’ve no time to begin doing my conference reports on Smith or Burney or the JASNA. will begin them by the end of November’s first week. I’m also working on 2 coming woman artist blogs: Dora Carrington (1893-1932) and then Remedios Varo (1908-63); not to omit eventually a brief appreciation of a paper by Maureen Mulvihill on Anne Killigrew and return to the poetry of later 17th and early 18th century women poets (aka Anne Finch, who used to be known as Countess of Winchilsea).
But in the meantime I don’t want to leave the impression this blog is falling into desuetude. Rather a brief hiatus.
Paradise Cats — my favorite of all Varo’s paintings
Carrington: Woodcut for bookplate, a stylized or semi-artificial image of a particular cat she knew
So I thought for now I’d share just the paper I gave at the Smith conference by placing it on academia.edu. (I will add a select bibliography in due time.)
Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde and her Emigrants as Post-colonial texts
My argument was that Charlotte Smith’s work placed alongside post-colonial writing, from the 18th century into our own era, reveals post-colonial patterns. Smith’s disparate range of forms and digressive reflections come together to make sense once we regard Smith as helping to invent the post-colonial text. Her writing also belongs to in an unhappy tradition of texts by women who have been abused. She participates in the creation of the post-colonial text in the later 18th century. Her novel, Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, can be seen in conversation with, parallel to, texts like Adhaf Soueif’s Map of Love (1999, short-listed for the Booker Prize); her poems, The Emigrants helped to give rise to Grant’s The Highlanders and shows uncanny likenesses to the poetry of the Israeli poet, Dahlia Ravikovitch and Margaret Atwood as well as the writing of the 19th century Canadian memorist, Susannah Moodie.
Remedios Varo, Souls of Mountains (1938)
Carrington – another house, with graveyard (there is a lot more known to be by Carrington than is realized)
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
“I find your paper very interesting, Ellen, and can definitely see how post-colonialism can be equated with being an abused woman. I’m not familiar with the works you refer to, but it made me all the more anxious to read Ethelinde and more of Smith.
Good show.
Tyler
Thank you, Tyler. I tried to make the paper as readable (aloud as well as by a reader reading silently) as possible, and kept it short. Ethelinde has some of the same problems you felt in Emmeline: too long, too much sentiment, repetition, but it is in some ways an ambitious vast improvement. I was hoping to interest Valancourt with Marchmont but he seems not to hear me. Myself along with Ethelinde (one of three “heroine’s texts”), I prefer the later more overtly political books of which Marchmont (with its depiction of debtor’s prison, of the chilling effect of censorship at the time, a seige in France) and The Banished Man (Napoleonic wars, deeply pessimistic about exiles and refugees) are the most gripping at moments. It’s ever moments with her or stretches as the opening of The Old Manor House and the depiction of the French-and-Indian or 7 years war in the US in the third section of the book, or the story of an imprisoned abused woman who is treated so badly during pregnancy her baby dies (it takes place in the Highlands in Scotland) in the third section of The Young Philosopher.
I will try to make sense of the papers I heard and post on them. I do this partly because if I don’t take notes, and then don’t write them up I will forget most of what I heard and not get some of it — by looking at what is written down I often realize I heard something more interesting than I realized.
Ellen
[…] were a kind of platforms for conversation with the mother. The following morning I gave my paper on Smith as a post-colonial writer: we see this in her Ethelinde, comparable to Adhaf Soueif’s Map of Love; I compared her […]
[…] second conference devoted just to her at Chawton House Library in Hampshire this past October, gave a paper on her as a post-colonial writer, and after a five-year effort published the first affordable paperback […]
[…] in Guildford where Charlotte Smith was baptized and lies buried. The first I told of my paper on the post-colonial Ethelinde and Smith’s The Emgrants (as well as plans for women artist blogs, Anne Killigrew, Dora Carrington and Remedios Varo; the […]