Anomalies: Woolf’s Geraldine and Jane; Margaret Oliphant’s Marriage of Elinor; Eileen Atkins’s A Room of One’s Own

Elizabeth Nourse (1859-1938), The Closed Window Shutters

Dear friends,

About two years ago now (how time flies) I chaired two panels whose topic was supposed to be single women living alone befoe the 19th century. Single did not mean unmarried necessarily: rather a woman living as a single woman without a man as husband, father, brother, uncle, or some form of “guardian” cousin. I did not specify that the women had literally to be living alone but was looking rather for someone who had the highest authority in the house, was not with someone else as her peer. I was aware that out of six papers accepted for this panel “as near enough,” only one was about real women living alone — and in these two cases, the woman, Charlotte Lennox and Charlotte Smith, were married and separated from their husbands, with children and servants and other people as burdens in the household too. The others were about fictions, nunneries, a love affair in letters (two young people being forbidden to marry), and my own on widows and widowers in Austen, where only a few in the fictions could be described as living alone for any considerable period of time, with the exception of the impoverished (Mrs Smith, Miss Bates). The fact of non-marriage as shaping their living conditions was not brought up except explicitly for Miss Bates.

I was encouraged by editors scouting about to develop a prospectus for an anthology of essays on this topic, but I was immediately confronted with the reason for the lack of papers. I had no study to fall back on, only individual books part of which might swirl around this topic (single women — meaning spinsters — in a given period, or widows in 18th century France). Studies were done of fictions because there at least the topic was defined and individuals clearly described — there is a problem of definition itself as the unacceptability of the state led many women to keep their state invisible (Felicia Hemans springs to mind). On the one hand, I felt there were so many women of this type when I began to look, and on the other how a firm conception to bring them together had not been developed. You could get articles or chapters on the pressure on women to marry, but then what was discussed was marriage. No one wanted to look; this was not interesting unless the woman was seeking power and it was this search for gaining power that was the interest. I asked friends who had more status than I to join me as an editor (to ask other people to write essays is to need status oneself), but all were busy with other projects. I am a retired adjunct lecturer aka independent scholar. A second obstacle was finding people; this requires a circle of close friend-scholars with the same interests who see somke advantage to themselves in appearing in this anthology. One last: one friend said I might find it becomes “too lesbian” (in effect) and so be sure to cover a wide range of types! (contact people privately before resorting to the CFP).

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), Modern Women

But I had not quite given up the topic. It’s too close to my heart now. Last term (at the Oscher Institute of Lifelong Learning at American University) I taught a class I called 19th century women of letters and my proposal to do it again with a different set of books has been accepted at OLLI at Mason for the coming fall. It hadn’t taken long for me to realize that the typical women of letters was a woman supporting herself, often living alone if I used the expanded definition. It does seem as if living truly alone, literally (though still an anomaly), is a phenomenon only found in the 20th century: essentially it requires that a woman have a good paying job or income (I thought of Virginia Woolf’s desideratum of £500 per year, the equivalent today would be $35,000 per year); and that the norms or mores of the community do not allow male thugs to molest her on the supposition she must be a prostitute (in effect). Before the 19th century there was no large general literary marketplace, few circulating libraries, few magazines. All this was the basis for the 19th century woman of letters:

19th Century Women of Letters

We will ask what did a woman writer’s career look like, what genres and journalism women published, what were obstacles & advantages women experienced, like & unlike today. We’ll read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance,” and Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen, and “The Library Window.”  We’ll also read brief on-line excerpts from Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, Caroline Norton’s English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century, Emmeline Pankhurst, “Freedom or Death” and Virginia Woolf’s “Professions for Women”.

Now suddenly a thought has occurred to me which I had not been able to reach before: I could do a book on this topic if I chose 6 women I could write about myself. I had so worried myself over the obstacles to an anthology. But I can write a book on my own. I have the Library of Congress and Folger nearby, and access to two university libraries, one with the database. I can now see an introductory chapter; the body of the work; and a conclusion. I don’t know why I couldn’t break through to this before. Maybe need. I need absorbing work I can genuinely respect and look at as useful to others beyond giving myself some kind of meaning. I have now faced that I will be alone most of the time for the rest of my life. I can blog, teach, write and read to participate with others, but I want some overarching goal to guide me. An introductory chapter, a chapter on a specific woman and outline and I could try to send this to one of those editor-publishers whose names and presses I still have.

Another possible candidate: Julia Kavanagh (1824-77), disabled, she supported herself and her mother by her pen

So I’ve begun reading again Norma Clarke’s Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love, The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans and Jane Carlyle. I’m in the second half, the chapter on the relationship of Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and remembered a brilliant portrait of them by Virginia Woolf in her Second Common Reader.

Woolf’s essay is a delight. She manages to convey Geraldine and Jane’s lesbianism without openly showing it — so this is a kind of post-James text. I refer to how Eva Sedgwick says lesbian and gay texts around the time of Henry James were using various subterfuges but coming out much more to show gay and lesbian experience. Carter takes another step into transvestism and gender ambiguity which except for the high-jinks of Orlando I don’t see in Woolf.

I was drawn to the pathos of these women in Woolf. Clarke’s Ambitious Heights rather brings out how hard Jane Carlyle was on her women servants — she worked them like semi-slaves, and also made them be a personal comforter to her. Let me say that was wrong of Jane Carlyle; Clarke made me wonder if other women did this. I know that male masters did bugger their male servants, and the only control was fear of blackmail. Woolf doesn’t have the space to explain why Jewsbury lived far away, how she came to London to live close. There were two visits of living together, and the first a disaster, the second a reinforcement. Paradoxically for us a disappointment because the letters stop when they live around the corner from one another. Today they might start to text and tweet at one another. Then Jane’s need of Geraldine but after her sudden death (from fatigue? from stress? from repressive years and years of wearing down her organs), Geraldine spends 20 years alone. The one photo we have of Jewsbury shows her quietly reading, all dressed up. Unlike Woolf who is daring for her time, Clarke does not bring up or out the probable lesbianism of Carlyle and Jewsbury (Jane and Geraldine). It was published in 1990; Clarke doesn’t even discuss the possibility. 26 years ago maybe it was verboten to get an academic respectable if feminist book published.

Geraldine Jewsbury

I also started Kirsteen, which I am relieved to say is as excellent as Oliphant’s Hester, The Ladies Lindores and Lady Car: A sequel (about the later years of one of the heroines in the first book), or long ago now (I don’t remember it as well any more) Cousin Phoebe. I just love Oliphant’s books and she would be one of my subjects. I need to narrow each one of six to the trajectory of women living alone, why, how, with what results. I have been wanting to blog on her powerful if flawed The Marriage of Elinor and thinking about this novel in terms of this perspective, brings out what Oliphant is meaning to say by this book, and its continued effectiveness today.

My reading of The Marriage of Elinor went on late at night; I turned pages feverishly because like other of Oliphant’s novels I couldn’t predict what was going to happen, and only towards the middle became aware (as is so common with Oliphant) that it’s not centrally about the character of the young heroine, after whom it is name, Elinor, or she’s secondary; the center is shared by her mother, Mrs Dennistoun whose first name was finally uttered: Mary.

The book is about a woman who gives all to a daughter who continually makes very bad choices. And why are they bad? because she chooses what the world says is admirable. Elinor marries Philip Compton, a macho male handsome man who takes her into expensive society and she finds herself emotionally corroded, among hollow people, a target for monetary fleecing. The book’s true hero, John Tatham has not been passionate and aggressive enough in his proposal to her. He is a kind of Henry James male who does not commit himself emotionally until it’s too late. Sheltering Elinor destroys her life. No one is willing to tell her (including her mother) why she should not marry Phillip Compton who turns out to be (not to put a fine point on this) far more than promiscuous and a gambler: he’s a downright criminal whom her world protects from censor because of his rank and family. The way the story is set up it seems to be about the young heroine — which is what happens in Hester and why it gets off to a very slow start, with us realizing only gradually the young heroine, Elinor, is a doppelganger to the older her mother (Hester is this to her aunt-in-law, Catherine Vernon). It’s very much both and about how destructive is the norm which will not allow a girl to know anything about the world, try to support herself and not be a helpless hanger-on, but find some fulfillment of her own.

Merryn Williams who wrote the best of the three recent books in English on Oliphant says the point of The Marriage of Elinor is to show us how little sexual passion and the reasons for marriage out of love last a very short time; what women care for is motherhood. Men cannot understand these feelings. Elisabeth Jay reminds her reader this is a late novel and she concentrates on the woman in it I’ve not mentioned: dissolute, amoral, endlessly in society (a sort of Helene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) who is represented as repellent. Jay does not respect this novel, mentions it because it is not romantic and shows the real psychology of a desperately bad marriage (in terms of either party getting any fulfillment).

As Elinor sees how bad her decision to marry Compton is, she does all she can to hide the truth. There are hints Compton hits her. Her happiest times it now seems to her were when she was left by this husband to live with her mother and her boy. Finally she separates heself him for the sake of her son, so the son shall not be brought up to become another amoral man. Her mother has given up a great deal of money to Philip as a kind of bribe. Meanwhile Elinor allows her fear of what the world might say adverse to her pride drive her decisions: say to move from the comfortable home her mother has lived in most of her life (it appears to be near Dorking, so Sussex) way up north. She will not send her precious son to a school where he is surrounded by peers because is determined to keep from him who his father was for real, and his background. In court Elinor gives a testimony literally true, but false in what it implies, and the ne’er-do-well husband is himself let go, and returns to having nothing to do with her once he gets his hands on enough money to live luxuriously. But by the end of the novel she has silently conceded the man she married is a criminal type even if he has a title, and she goes to live alone up north, leaving her son with Tatham whose advice she has finally relied upon. The crucial last turn of the book is the question of whether her son will turn against her when he realizes all his life he has been kept away from others, gone to a school where he was not with his own class or boys of his own intellectual level; he does not partly because John Tatham has stayed by his side and provides the explanation and continuity the boy needs. The two women end up living alone in peace at the book’s end

Oliphant reminds me a little of Charlotte Smith: not finding a new radically changed structure on which to plot her story. She often wants us to see her characters confronting hegemonic norms of other people and unable to break them down — in many areas of life and death too. We are supposed to heavily criticize Elinor. I am so used to the conventional stance of pro-heroine, but in these latest scenes what Elinor wants to do (flee the law) is so egregious. Each time flight: each time refuse to cope with what she has created and wrecking havoc on those she says her actions are protecting. The book critiques the passive romantic supposedly super-virtuous heroine; she must come out and she must engage with the situations she’s created. The power of the book comes from what seems a skewed POV divided between Tatham and Mrs Denistoun who anguish over Elinor

How did Kavanagh, Jewsbury, Oliphant manage it? Woolf? I end on Eileen Atkins as Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Eileen Atkins as Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

So, added to Austen and sheerly the 18th century, woman artists, and foremother poets, I hope blogging here by thinking through work I do towards a book by me to be called The Anomaly. I’m an anomaly by the way. Not because I fit the definition of nearly living alone (which I do): a widow, with my unmarried daughter, a librarian and two cats, but because I’m a very learned scholar with no rank and no income except my widow’s annuity and social security, and the money my mother and Jim left me; because I teach at a place where I don’t quite fit either as a student (yesterday I became aware of how many of the women at AU went to elite or Ivy League colleges and studied to be lawyers and other professionals — they can have no idea who I am, from a free university, getting there by bus, studying English Literature) or teacher (I overdo), and because my social life such as it is is here on Net. Is this enough to be getting on with? I’ve got many rooms of my own and for now more than the minimum income …

Ellen

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Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81): foremother poet and biographer

Lucy Hutchinson with one of her sons

‘Yet after all this he is gone hence and I remain, an airy phantasm walking about his sepulchre and waiting for the harbinger of day to summon me out of these midnight shades to my desired rest — Lucy Hutchinson, Final Meditation’

I write not for the presse to boast my own weakness to the world — Lucy Hutchinson

Dear friends and readers,

This past Friday afternoon the Washington Area Print Group (a small offshoot of Sharp, the Book History people) held its last meeting of this semester. The editor of Lucy Hutchinson’s four book epic poem, Order and Disorder (a retelling of the book of Genesis, and comparable to Milton’s Paradise Lost), David Norbrook spoke to us about what was printed and not printed in Lucy’s lifetime, with a view to show how Lucy resisted print culture in order to write candid truth about her and her husband’s lives and to find release in writing poetry. His talk renewed an old and still today continuing interest I have in the remarkable generation of English women in the mid- to later 17th century who were actively involved in the English civil war, several of whom wrote memoirs, letters, and poetry out of their experiences. I did an etext edition of the autobiography of Anne Murray Halkett; my first published paper was on the poetry of Katherine Philips; one of my first foremother poets was Margaret Cavendish; and I devoted years of my life to studying and editing texts and writing about the translations of Anne Finch, wrote part of a biography. I’ve published reviews of books which contain chapters on her (e.g., Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature)

The most brilliant and learned of these women was probably Lucy Hutchinson, and way back in 2008 with a small group of friends on EighteenthCenturyWorlds @ yahoo (now a defunct listserv), we read and discussed Lucy’s brief autobiography and her magisterial biography of her husband, which is of course an autobiography, but also a history of the civil war and its aftermath for those who fought against the monarchy. I read a copy of a new Everyman edition by N.H. Keeble, based on the manuscripts, and the original introduction by Julius Hutchinson in an old Everyman. Here is an excellent website citing and explaining all Lucy’s writings, where the manuscripts are located, recent editions, good historical information and bibliography of Lucy Hutchinson.

Prof Norbrook told us (as everyone who writes about the memoir does) that the book was first published in 1806 by a descendant, Julius Hutchinson, in an attempt to make money on it (he was badly in debt from, among other things, gambling). Julius Hutchinson was concerned to separate his family from the radical Jacobin politics of the 1790s, and so refused to allow Catherine Macaulay (the historian) to see it, and cut passages of religious and political enthusiasm. This was the text that the early 20th century Everyman edition published. If you obtain this one, you can read Julius’s preface which is at times unconsciously funny because he lectures readers on how to react to his ancestors. Lucy’s biography even when cut by Hutchinson projects an intense indwelling religiosity; her fragment of an autobiography, written much earlier and broken off, show she came from a cavalier, upper class family (her uncle was keeper of tower) and reveals an intense and bitter struggle with her mother who tried to stop Lucy from cultivating her mind (her father encouraged and supported her in this), and favored Lucy’s non-reading sister. In the 17th century parents regularly openly favored one child over another (primogeniture and gender were factors in this kind of behavior). Lucy’s autobiography frustratingly ends on an early intense love Lucy had for someone other than Hutchinson, someone of whom her mother did not approve. It has a refreshing immediacy lacking in the biography.

John Hutchinson with another of their sons

I’m not going to go through Lucy’s memoir of her husband’s life phase by phase. The reader may find a good summary and evaluation and large swatches of the biography reprinted with connecting explanations and contextualization, respectively in Margaret George’s lively (and Marxist!) Women in the First Capitalist Society: Experiences in 17th century England and Roger Hudson’s The Grand Quarrel (which also includes selections from Margaret Cavendish’s life of her husband, Hutchinson’s royalist rival in Nottingham, and letters and journals by Ann Fanshawe, Brilliana, Lady Harley, Alice Thornton and Anne Murray Halkett). Lucy is distinguished from her fellows by her overt active political behavior, opinions and fierce dislike of Cromwell, which she says her husband shared — apparently because Cromwell set up a dictatorship, with himself and his son-in-law Ireton, in charge. The Hutchinsons’ vision was of a godly republic ruled by a Parliament which would be made up by godly men of property. John Hutchinson retired from public life for a while; he and his wife eschewed ambition overtly. She is deeply anti-feminist (Elizabeth I did so well because she listened to her male advisors), herself never for a moment drops her sense of a class hierarchy and where she and her husband deserve to be (She says that initially she and John were much in favour of the original Levellers who were merely standing up for justice and against vice, but that later the name became associated with a ‘people who endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities which these sober Levellers were never guilty of desiring’); she is biblical and acidulous. So their far left of the revolution is much qualified. The central section offers a fascinating exposure of the internecine personal politics of Nottingham as well as its seiges, the battles military and social that went on. Nick Hay wrote of this:

the massive bulk of these 230 pages is taken up with the events of the war as far as they concerned Nottingham and Hutchinson’s Governorship of both Castle and Town. Such is the account of internal dissension, treachery and indeed incompetence that it becomes something of a miracle to the reader that the Parliamentary victory seems astonishing. We must remember however that the key military encounters of the war (Marston Moor and above all Naseby which gets about 2 lines) take place very much off-page.

Early 18th Century print of Nottingham castle and park, showing “priest holes,” as it was rebuilt by the Duke of Newcastle

It’s also brave and original of Lucy to discuss the king’s trial at all, much less from the Parliamentarian point of view.

Lucy is writing this history after the Restoration to vindicate her husband and their war effort. Hutchinson himself seems to have been a fanatic. About pulling down images. He would not yield and that kept them winning at times. He also was inflexible and knew it. He didn’t want a place in the high government. It was dangerous and not what the war was about to him. He was not seeking high place, and Lucy (his wife) wants him to be admired for this. She knows how unusual it is. She herself didn’t feel this way. There are numerous references to Cromwell’s ability, his personal courage in hindsight. From the viewpoint of the post-Restoration republican Cromwell, even if seen as a malevolent force, appeared as a giant saviour. Prof Norbrook concentrated on one episode presented indirectly in the memoir: in order to save her husband’s life (he was one of the regicides who signed the death warrant for Charles I) she forged a letter in her husband’s handwriting where he recants his beliefs and expresses deep remorse over the king’s death. She went to court with this, and angered her husband very much. She had to persuade him to want to live for the sake of his family.

From our group read of the memoir in 2008 I find we agree that John Hutchinson suffered from what we now call “survivor guilt and this becomes more oppressive as the repression deepens and more and more of his old comrades are executed, exiled, imprisoned. Lucy wishes that he would save himself and wants to do whatever she can personally to do so, which leads her to take momentous steps (for her) of going against his wishes. Fascinating political and psychological material here – what a marvellous drama. Lucy understands her husband’s psychological processes as in this passage where she describes his reaction to persecution of his friends and associates:

‘notwithstanding that he himself, by a wonderfully overruling providence of God, in that day was preserved, yet he looked upon himself as judged in their judgment, and executed in their execution; and although he was most thankful to God, yet he was not very well satisfied in himself for accepting this deliverance.’

Here is where she stands:

‘And his wife, who thought she had never deserved so well of him, as in the endeavours and labours she exercised to bring him off, never displeased him more in his life and had much ado to persuade him to be content with his deliverance.’

Notwithstanding all her efforts her husband is eventually imprisoned, somewhat to his own satisfaction; he “told his wife this captivity was the happiest release in the world to him’. We are told “His wife bore her own toils [which must have been massive but of which we are allowed to hear little] joyfully enough for the love of him, but could not but be very sad at the sight of his undeserved sufferings; and he would smile sweetly and kindly chide her for it.” Neither of the Hutchinsons in any sense repent; their views do not change. On the subject of religious liberty they become more radical still. John Hutchinson only questions the abuse of power by the Revolutionaries and advises his son that if there should be a second Revolution he stand back and wait and watch what those in power do before committing himself to them. Remember all this is left in manuscript. He was arrested in 1663 after a pathetic uprising, treated harshly, sent to Sandown Castle in Kent, a run-down ruined place, cold, damp, wind-blasted, and there he sickened and died. Lucy suspects he was poisoned.

Professor Norbrook’s interest in print culture (for this paper especially) led him to tell us of the elegant speeches printed and attributed to those who were executed: Algernon Sidney, for example. Edmund Ludlow “entered print culture” to express “fierce hostility to the regime” in his Voyce from the Watch Tower. Those executed her hung, drawn and quartered.Lucy did not want this kind of thing to be published about her husband at all and in her Memoir reveals a continued pesistent misunderstanding between them (which I find poignant). On the other hand, Lucy meant to in her book show her husband’s continued loyalty to the puritan regime.

Professor Norbrook asked what genre the book belongs to because it is written as a family history told to her children to remember their father and learn from his life. The family did experience a steep decline, with children and grandchildren leaving England, descending to bankrupt poverty. Keeble suggests we see the Memoirs as part of the literature of defeat, and places it alongside Milton and Richard Baxter. The issue for defeated revolutionaries was how God could have left them to be defeated. This is the theme of Samson Agonistes. John Hutchinson is Samson – ‘a prisoner chained’. It’s one of these works which supposedly justifies the ways of God to men. The detailed portrayal of John Hutchinson’s perfections are intended to show him as a complete ‘gentleman’ – and patriot ‘in the tradition of Roman republicanism’ (this is suggested by Lucy’s use of the word senator, and links Catonian republicanism and whiggish England as its heir found in Addison’s Cato). Prison (as with Bunyan) is a place of spiritual education and liberty.

I have tried to read some of Lucy’s translation of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura and (much better as a read) her Order and Disorder. The first appears to be an exercise where she is teaching herself about atheism and learning to reject it after careful consideration. Order and Disorder is a retelling of the Genesis story where (once again) she is justifying the ways of God, or finding justification. What are moving, however stilted are her elegies for her husband (written while she is alone, grieving for him). How to convey the agon of this woman? In her elegies she inveighs against court life (an old pastoral trope):

A troop of restless passions wander there,
And private lives are only free from care …
[The moon’s] image only comes to close the eye,
But gives the troubled mind no ease of care …
… he alone possesseth true delight
Whose spotless soul no guilty fears affright.
[she did once stop an execution] …
Those who survive will raise no mutiny;
His table is with home-got dainties crowned,
With friends, not flatterers, encompassed round;
No spies nor traitors on his trencher wait,
Nor is his mirth confined to rules of state;
An armed guard he neither hath nor needs,
Nor fears a poisoned morsel when he feeds.
[For the person retired from court and public life]
Sweet peace and joy his blest companions are:
Fear, sorrow, envy, lust, revenge, and care,
And all that troop which breeds the world’s offence,
With pomp and majesty, are banished thence.

Much more her “Final Meditation:” dense, fragmentary and complex prose on the subject of death. It is personal and self-searching as Lucy struggles to reconcile what she knows should be her own theological joy at John’s translation to heaven with her own sense of personal loss … She’s a wonderful prose stylist, a poet in prose superior to her poetry in verse.

She remains a strong supporter of patriarchy and even apologizes for writing! Keeble writes:

This tension between, on the one hand, dutiful wife and, on the other, creatively bold writer, is negotiated by the narrative device of splitting the identity of Lucy Hutchinson into two. There is, on the one hand, the Mrs Hutchinson who is a subject of the Memoirs, her husband’s shadow with no voice; on the other hand, there is the narrator, independent, defiant and assertive. She is obliged to be dutiful, deferential, quiet; I, however, enjoy licence to speak my mind.

I wish I knew far more about her last 18 years of life, her relationship to her children, but we have nothing written down by her. There appears to be a historical novel about Lucy by Elizabeth St John The Lady of the Tower): I’m not sure what the focus of the book is, so am obtaining a copy. Sometimes this genre when well done can add to our knowledge through imaginative use of history.

The author has done extensive research in archives and gone round to battlefields too.

And for my Austen reader, Austen could easily have read this memoir; it’s the sort of thing she was known to like to read (memoirs, history, letters by women — think of Fanny Price, Anne Elliot’s reading, of Austen and Anne Grant). She might not mention Lucy and John Hutchinson, radical revolutionaries, any more than she mentioned reading Wollstonecraft. Or references to this material were cut.

Il y a toujours d’hommes superposés en un homme, et le plus visible est le moins vrai — Régis Debray, Éloges

Ellen

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Scottish suffragettes, artists and writers

Stories of 25 Dundee women

Friends,

Since part of the “mission” of my blog is to call attention to women artists and writers, feminists, and forgotten women’s real lives, I thought I’d alert my readers here to a new book on Scottish women written and arranged by the Lothian Women´s Forum of the WEA (Workers Educational Association). I was told about it by a German friend, Andrea Schwedler, who lived in Scotland for 16 years, now mourning the severance from the EU of the United Kingdom (itself possibly breaking up now that the Tories want to take Henry 8 powers and the Scottish and perhaps a majority of the Northern Irish voted to remain). While living there, Andrea was belonged to this forum. They asked themselves how do women want to be remembered when we are dead? — as opposed to how they are remembered (wives, mothers, sisters, nieces). What should be written on women’s graves? What are the differences in remembering women and men. They researched the different graveyards in Edinburgh — it all sounds very gloomy but it was an inspiring time for women working with other women, for meeting women from all walks of life.

Here is the day they launched their project:

Click to learn their names

Here are fourteen women whose lives and work the Lothian Association discovered and wrote about. Click on each of the gravestones and you’ll discover much information and insight into the individual woman’s life, e.g., Isabella Lucy Bird (who made Caryl Churchill’s table in Top Girls). Much less well-known is Agnes White Miller by Andrea, the struggle of an unmarried woman to live a fulfilled professional and personal life in the 19th century. Andrea also covered Mary Syme Boyd, a sculptor.

A carved dog

I can’t resist showing how after a day-long session on Scottish women writers, Excuse My Dust (a Dorothy Parker epitaph), they included one of my favorite 19th century writers, Margaret Oliphant

Four of the women on this page are women whose books I’ve read and liked, some I’ve discussed here, and six 18th century: Susan Ferrier, Elizabeth Hamilton, Chistian Isobel Johnstone, Mary Brunton, Charlotte Lennox, Jane Porter (Austen we know read Hamilton, Brunton and Lennox).

Said by Merryn Williams to be a highly original novel about the pains of marriage Agnes experiences (and deteriorate her character), how she is done in by a jealous upper class sister-in-law Beatrice, a single woman:

[Life is] full of broken threads and illogical conclusions, and lacks altogether the unity of a regularly constructed fiction, which confines itself to the graceful task of conducting two virtuous persons through a labyrinth of difficulties to a happy marriage … Yet at the same time everybody knows that there are many lives which only begin after that first fair chapter of youthful existence is completed ….

Reading the Dundee and Scottish women website has re-energized me to write a third series of women artists blogs. This series will not try to cover early modern through the 21st century but be tilted towards the 19th and 20th century. I’ll begin with Anna Dorothea Therbush (1721-82),

1762, Self-portrait

of course include Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825, a Scottish woman letter-writer and diarist, known for her time in South Africa, and water-colors from India), about whom a new biography has come out,

and conclude a third year and round on Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945).

I close this blog on a pair of poems by a Scottish poet of the early 20th century, Olive Fraser (1909-77)

Lines Written after a Nervous Breakdown.1

I’ve forgotten how to be
A bird upon a dawn-lit tree,
A happy bird that has no care
Beyond the leaf, the golden air.
I have forgotten moon and sun,
And songs concluded and undone,
And hope and ruth and all things save
The broken wit, the waiting grave.

Where is that mountain I must climb
To gain again some common time,
Not this stayed clock-hand that must be
Some foretaste of eternity?
Where is that task or terror that
Will wake a slow magnificat
From this dead sense, from these dull eyes,
That see no more to Paradise?

There is no night so deep as this
Inevitable mind’s abyss,
Where I now dwell with foes alone.
Feather and wing and breathing bone
And blessed creatures come not here,
But the long dead, the aguish fear
Of never breaking from this hold,
Encapsuled, rapt, and eras old.

There is no second of escape.
As with some forest-wandering ape
Whose sad intelligence may go
So far and nevermore may grow,
I am enchained most subtly by
A thousand dendrons ’til I die,
Or find my mountain, storm and shock
This graven hour and start the clock.

September 1964

Lines Written After a Nervous Breakdown.2

Come, lamefoot brain, and dance and be
A merry carnival for me.
We are alive in spite of all
Hobgoblins who our wits did call.
With ghosts and gallowsbirds we went
Hundreds of leagues ’til, fiercely spent,
We laid ourselves to weep and cry
Beyond the house of memory.

We have been lepers, and now run
To sit again within the sun,
And smile upon some country fair
With Punch and poor dog Toby there.
We, who did only think to die,
Now laugh and mock the revelry.
Up, barefoot brain, and fill your hall
With flags as for a festival.

Yet you are poor and slow to do
The blessed things I ask of you .
Haunting with spectres still and still
Remembering your dungeon’s chill.
Where you did cower and aye did grow
A frenzied circus for your foe,
Who sought you in the blood’s dim arc,
And in the night-time, in the dark.

Peace, friend, and think how we are here
Through dangers, desolations, fear.
We two alone, now all is o’er,
Will never move from pleasure more.
We two will sit like birds i’ the sun
And preen and pipe while others run
And straddle in the world’s proud play.
We have been night, who now are day.
October 1964

Olive Fraser was born in Kincadineshire, lived in Redburn, Nairn, graduated from Aberdeen University in 1927, Honors English degree, an award for most distinguished graduate in the arts; attended Girton College, Cambridge, Chancellor’s Gold medal for poetry 1935. She served in WRNS in World War II, and after was librarian at Bodleian. In 1956 she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic, put in an asylum from which she did not emerge until 1961 when a woman physician correctly diagnosed her problem as hypothyroidism. Helen M Shire has edited a volume of her poetry: The Wrong Music: the Poems of Olive Fraser (1909-77). Here is a much fuller biography with more poems, some in Scots.

(from An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets, ed. Catherine Kerrigan

Early 20th century Scottish Impressionism (found on-line in gallery of Scottish artists)

Ellen

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