Debt: again Trollope, other Victorian novelists — and us

Phineas (Donal McCann) famously humiliated and harassed by Mr Clarkson (Sidney Bromley) who urges him “Do Be Punctual” (Pallisers 4:7)

Dear friends and readers,

Another in the same spirit as my last. Again on Victoria someone asked for citations of debt in Victorian novels, so I wrote as follows:

As he often mirrors common reality, Trollope has so many instances and characters driven, worried and occasionally (rarely but it happens) exploiting debt in different ways it’s impossible to catalogue briefly. The most common and well-remembered plot device is of the man who counter-signs a bill for someone else and then the other person doesn’t pay it. Phineas Finn lured and pressure by Lawrence Fitzgibbon in Phineas Finn, but also Mark Robarts in Framley Parsonage who co-signs for Lord Lufton who can much better afford living on more than he has.

Larger versions of this include male characters who owe a lot of money and hide this or that their business is failing or non-existant: this leads to suicide — Melmotte and Lopez and Dobbs Brougton. Debt collectors can sometimes hound women and they seek to sell jewels or use them as insurance (Lizzie Eustace). The “blaggard” type male who we are to have contempt for is the man driven to take money from a woman (though we may be led to understand why he does): George Vavasour dragging money out of Alice Vavasour because he has to pay huge election bribes, and then breaking his sister’s arm when the grandfather dies and it’s discovered he had left just about everyone to George’s sister, but in trust so he cannot get at it.

Kate Vavasour holding her broken arm after George has fled (from the original illustrations of Trollope’s novels, this one by Miss Taylor, a scene in Can You Forgive Her?)

The most interesting instances though are those which enabled us to see the working of finance in the Victorian period: say, the short story, “Why Frau Frohman Raised her Prices” shows an Austrian woman innkeeper’s struggle not to raise her prices:

The Frau had always held her head high,– had never been ashamed of looking her neighbour in the face, but when she was advised to rush at once up to seven swansigers and a half (or five shillings a day), she felt that, should she do so, she would be overwhelmed with shame. Would not her customers then have cause of complaint? Would not they have such cause that they would in truth desert her? Did she not know that Herr Weiss, the magistrate from Brixen, with his wife, and his wife’s sister, and the children, who came yearly to the Peacock, could not afford to bring his family at this increased rate of expenses? And the Fraulein Tendel with her sister would never come from Innsbruck if such an announcement was made to her.

She learns a very hard way that to keep up with inflation (as we would put it, she must must raise her prices. Trollope analyses the workings of a business: how the Frau has to buy things before she makes money by selling them, and how when the price of these go up, she must put her prices up; if she does not, how she must buy inferior goods and then loses customers but when she does, she helps other people do better (who work for her). He does not (unfortunately) go further than that, but it is still an insightful analysis which explicates the workings of capitalism. In Doctor Thorne Roger Scatcherd now an alcoholic and ostracized from people of his own intelligence because he is not of their class grew rich by saving the large amounts he made as a construction worker who opened his own business; he then lent money to others to begin enterprises. In the Victorian period it was very difficult (well nigh impossible) for an ordinary man to borrow large sums to open a business. Charles Darwin’s father grew rich by lending money and charging interest (like Roger) of course.

Novels by Trollope about gambling or fearful of it will be about debt include s a minor gambler in Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, man who is an aristocratic drone type (familiar) and lives off his mistress; Burgo Fitzgerald does very badly at the gambling tables when last seen in Can You Forgive Her and is given an allowance by Plantagenet Palliser who also becomes wrathful when his wife, Lady Glen, congenial with Burgo and still in love with him, wants to gamble too and blamed Alice Vavasour (poor Alice). Quiet prostitution within boarding houses to pay the rent is shown in Trollope’s Miss Mackenzie. How single women really got on.

Other novelists:

Oliphant’s Hester is about the workings of a business and family and thus how well the successful yet lonely, envied and somehwat isolated heroine by the end has handled debt (It reflects Oliphant’s successful career). Gwendolen marries Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda to avoid her mother going into debt; the novel opens with her learning how gambling will not do. In Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, the secondary heroine, Cynthia is hounded by Preston, a ruthless aggressive steward who sexually wants her (and now wants to be allied to her as her mother has married up by marrying Mr Gibson), Preston, I say, tortures her emotionally over a 20 pound debt and blackmailing letters to prove it; he wants to force her to marry him.

From opening shots of Daniel Deronda (director Tom Hooper, scripted by Andrew Davies): next to Gwendoleth an aging women’s bejewelled hands at the gambling table

And so much in Dickens, just to start: Little Dorrit. The Marshalsea prison. Mr and Mrs Merdle destroyed. Arthur Clenham thrown in jail near the end.

And who can forget:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure
nineteen pounds, nineteen six, result happiness. Annual
income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds,
ought and six, result misery. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Debt does never seem to make anyone happy in Victorian novels. It does not make individual people happy in our own day, and that’s why the Republicans can manipulate the populace by arguing the state deficit must be brought down. Corporations are not people; nor are states. Deficits when the money brought in is used by gov’t to expand social services, building roads and schools, providing for lower interest rates really does provide more jobs and a better life for all. Ask Frau Frohmann how capitalism can work well.

Ellen

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Midsummer: Capital Fringe, Pinky Swear, the Brontes, Hamlet

Karen Lange reading entries aloud (Pinky Swear)

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve seen four more productions, and, as might be expected, since we are going to twice as many this year as we went to last (Izzy is going with us but 3 times and last time she went to nearly all), we did at last find ourselves at a real dud. But we’ve also had two memorable, so alive, stirring, and very contemporary experiences.

Pinky Swear is an all girls’ band, raunchy, angry, sexy; they are “in your face” in the way they apparently break all sexual taboos. They don’t quite break all, but they break several: dildos abound; they get into quarrels, they insult one another, are sarky, their songs range from a desire to fuck or be fucked, to grating irritation with the nature of life, to (sometimes) romantic longing and muted heartbreak. Masturbation is the way to go as you can do it anytime. If you can’t have the one you love, love the one you’re with was this year’s theme.

All four: Karen in the back, next to her Allyson Harkey the guitarist Christina Frank, and with the black tambourine Toni Rae Brotons

Last night (Thursday), there were three young men with them as support band, and sometimes they played music from the 60s and 70s; while I enjoyed these (they were written before the performers were born), I thought the electrifying moments came from the contemporary music, the stances the girls took.

The witty and wry Karen Lange who read aloud slips of paper on which members of the audience were asked to write the “weirdest place they had sex.” The weird experiences were not that transgressive, or odd or wild. One read loud: “We had sex under a bush in Central Park. The gravel underneath was a problem.” That prompted jokes about what positions the gravel would make most uncomfortable. Then there was a second on having sex in Central Park, and Karen remarked Central Park must be a busy place at night. The singers said they were going to put some of these on face-book, but I could not find any. An informative pdf. They were in the large (but un-air-conditioned) Baldacchino Gypsy Tent next to one of the central bars and meeting places of the Fringe.

Since the tent is across the street from the (famed) restaurant, poets-reading and performing theater space, Busboys and Poets, Jim and I went there for our dinner afterward. I had a pizza, scotch and ginger ale, and Jim had beer and burger and fries. The night was hot, but there was a breeze, and we sat outside under an awning near a working fan and were happy.

*********************

Tonight (Friday) we saw a spectacularly well-acted Hamlet. Powerful, fast-moving sizzling performances, especially by 1) Christ Genebach who was Hamlet and his father’s ghost, and the player king: he was just magnificent; his face and gestures reminded me again and again of Ralph Fiennes; and 2) Sandy Gainum as Gertrude and the Gravedigger, she probably was directed to be this sentimental and shocked Gertrude when Hamlet comes to her in her bed to tell her not to go to bed with Claudius, but otherwise she was sharp, gesturing and face just right, ever on the move. Raven Bonniwell did another unlikely doubling of Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Osric and was particularly good in the first two. As Laertes Billy Finn was violent emotionally as well as physically. The final duel is not with swords, but fists and the two men murder one another with blunt knives.

Directed by Hannah Todd, it was said to be much shorter than the original, abridged. And it ran only 1 hour and 40 minutes, but that is not just one hour (as most of the events are) and a lot was included. Horatio was the only major character cut; they chose to sweat lines rather than cut whole soliloquies. The director’s notes said she saw the play as a violent one, an outcropping of Hamlet’s feverish imagination, trapped by his own fantasies. The play began with Hamlet half-dreaming on the floor and ended with him dead in the same posture. He and all the players were driven people. I felt we really experienced the play. There was no intermission and that helped sustain the move.

Chris Genebach as Hamlet

Everyone clapped hard, and people stood for the performers whose lines had come so swiftly and naturally (it seemed) off their tongues. The company calls themselves the Flashpoint theater and their specialty is similarly abridged classics. Lauren Katz also thought it one of the strongest productions of Hamlet she’d seen in a while.

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You can’t win ‘em all. Wednesday night we went to a musical based on the life of Helena Rubinstein in America, Madame it was called. The performers had worked very hard, the costumes were lovely, the choreography was well-worked out; the problem was the content of the lyrics and “book” and story line. Excruciatingly lame, sentimental where they should have been prosaic, including even a love duet which belonged to Carousel, and a major male role going to an actor who was wooden and couldn’t sing.

Apparently the management of the whole festival is aware of which shows are not likely to please or lure an audience, as this one was held in small basement room of a church, there were few chairs, and even these were not filled up. To be fair, here’s a reviewer who saw some good things in the show and tries to like it

Two of the actor-singers rehearsing

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Not as tedious (we stayed at Madame because we felt we’d hurt the actors-singers’ feelings), but their musical rock show nowhere as good as last year (Finn McCool) and last year not as good as the spectacular brilliance of the year before (Oreisteia), Dizzy Miss Lizzy Doing the Brontes was something of a disappointment. The idea of each rock show has been the same: interweave some story or intense anguish or misery with the upbeat of hard rock. This time it was the Brontes and I’ll give it to them, they didn’t pollyanna the story of these four finally unlucky geniuses. The frustrated outcast Branwell became an alcoholic; Anne died so young; Emily unable to integrate at all into any social life and dying fairly young; and Charlotte left alone, also unable to build a life of fulfillment with people gifted like herself, also dying, of a miscarriage; their isolated lives as children on the moors.

Narrator, Branwell and accompaniment

Izzy came with us and I can’t better her commentary.

It’s true that Jim and I probably didn’t get all the jokes because we didn’t recognize some of the pop references. It’s hard for me to believe I was the only person in that tent besides the performers who had heard of Anne Bronte — does no one watch PBS movies? there was a splendid Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with real stars in the leading roles, and on most of the listservs I’ve been on, admittedly literary ones, people have read this and/or Agnes Grey (a governess story). I was the only person to clap and call Yay! when “Anne Bronte” came forward and told us the titles of her novels. A woman sitting next to me told me she had never heard of Branwell Bronte, so I recommended Daphne DuMaurier’s powerfully passionate The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte, which reprints what is left of his poetry. Considering the lamentable state of ignorance then about the Brontes, I suppose it’s picky of me to complain Dizzy Miss Lizzy did not seem to know that Emily was a great poet, but still I wish they had known it. Some of her verses set to rock might have stirred the audience.

Untitled:

Redbreast, early in the morning
Dank and cold and cloudy grey,
Wildly tender is thy music
Chasing angry thoughts away.

My heart is not enraptured now,
My eyes are full of tears,
And constant sorrow on my brow
Has done the work of years.

It was not hope that wrecked at once
The spirit’s calm in storm
But a long life of solitude,
Hopes quenched and rising thoughts subdued,
A bleak November’s calm.

What woke it then? A little child
Strayed from its father’s cottage door,
And in the hour of moonlight wild
Laid lonely on the desert moor.

I heart it then, you heard it too,
And seraph sweet it sang to you;
But like a shriek of misery
That wild, wild music wailed to me.

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I go out to plays, to operas, see movies, look at pictures, listen to music, even walk in landscapes for the same causes I read. These experiences are meaningful to me, speak to me at some level that counts, help me endure. Funnily of these four, the one I came away with repeating an idea the artists had voiced was Pinky Swear. Karen had a song whose refrain was you end where you start out, find yourself what you were. That’s my case. Soon I shall be driven to retire (they are beginning to harass me at GMU because they want me to turn my English humanities into a business computer-based course and I cannot) and I find I end where I began.

Just being me, living alongside Jim, and the real irony is what I love after the few human beings who I am attached to and whom I hope are attached to me are books precisely those I started out with (Austen among them) and a set of 18th century historical romances, whose hero and heroine were norms for me in my conscious teenagehood: the Poldark series.

It’s not that Hamlet does not have much to say. But I’ve read and seen the play so many times it’s hard to have a fresh reaction. Maybe I did tonight. When Hamlet took Yorick’s skull, and said to his imaginary lady, to this you will come, I identified. I’ve few teeth, bad feet, my lower back hurts, my hair grey, my handwriting is terrible (when I go to make a letter it’s hard to make it come out clearly and often I will write another letter or number than the one I consciously intend), I’ve forgotten multiplication tables (and never could do percentages, fractions, long division), I can’t read late into the night or watch movies without napping, when I get on the Metro people actually immediately get up to give me a seat. Yes to that I am coming.

Do people know Sylvia Plath also drew? yes, lovely touching drawings of everyday things, houses, street scenes. Here’s a pair of shoes I can no longer wear except for a few minutes at a time unless the miracle of really soft leather is achieved.

Sylvia Plath, Large Size Shoes (maybe she thought she had “big feet”)

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Matilde Blind (1841-96)

Mathilde Blind (1872) by Lucy Madox Brown (1843-94), chalks on grey paper

Dear friends and readers,

Frances Wilson’s summary of Mathilde Blind’s life in her review of Angela Thirkell’s book which tells the story of the four women-as-partners in Ford Madox Brown’s life, the last of which was Mathilde Blind, is unbeatable for vivacity and concision:

Mathilde was raised in Germany by an overbearing revolutionary stepfather who knew Karl Marx; her brother shot himself after failing to assassinate Bismark. In her own first attempt at revolt, Mathilde was expelled from school for atheism. A feminist, journalist, critic, poet, translator, novelist and biographer, she was a fabulously beautiful wild card (and most likely a lesbian) who shared with Madox Brown an interest in radical politics. She lived as a friend with the artist and his wife on and off for 20 years, until Emma’s death in 1890. Because none of their letters survives we cannot know the true nature of the relationship between Mathilde and Madox Brown; Thirlwell concludes that it “was probably not physical in the full sense”, but contained “a special erotic charge”. But had Mathilde felt any physical passion for Madox Brown, she seems the type to have expressed it. Mathilde is not only the most interesting of Madox Brown’s loves, she was also probably the most interesting woman in London at that time.

I’ve chosen her also because I found her poems in a book which choses unusual poets, provides a strong biography, and gives a lengthier selection than usual, Virginia Blain’s Victorian Women Poets: An Annotated Anthology. Blind’s are strong, passionate, electrifyingly descriptive and intelligently feminist, socialist. To begin with,

Manchester by Night

O’ER this huge town, rife with intestine wars,
Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines
Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines
Black brows majestical with glimmering stars.
Her dewy silence soothes life’s angry jars:
And like a mother’s wan white face, who pines
Above her children’s turbulent ways, so shines
The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars.
Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush
Each other in the fateful strife for breath,
And, hounded on by diverse hungers, rush
Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath,
Are swathed within the universal hush,
As life exchanges semblances with death.
[1881]

A Winter Landscape

ALL night, all day, in dizzy, downward flight,
     Fell the wild-whirling, vague, chaotic snow,
     Till every landmark of the earth below,
Trees, moorlands, roads, and each familiar sight
Were blotted out by the bewildering white.
     And winds, now shrieking loud, now whimpering low,
     Seemed lamentations for the world-old woe
That death must swallow life, and darkness light.
But all at once the rack was blown away,
     The snowstorm hushing ended in a sigh;
     Then like a flame the crescent moon on high
Leaped forth among the planets; pure as they,
Earth vied in whiteness with the Milky Way:
     Herself a star beneath the starry sky.
[1889]

She felt herself an internal exile; someone exiled from the rest of her society by virtue of her inner self. Towards the end of her life she wrote in her Commonplace book “I have been an exile in this world. Without a God, without a country, without a family.” Her series of love lyrics, published in The Ascent of Man (a Darwinian perspective made optimistic) is called Love in Exile. It begins:

1

THou walkest with me as the spirit-light
     Of the hushed moon, high o’er a snowy hill,
Walks with the houseless traveller all the night,
     When trees are tongueless and when mute the rill.
Moon of my soul, 0 phantasm of delight,
     Thou walkest with me still.

The vestal flame of quenchless memory burns
     In my soul’s sanctuary. Yea, still for thee
My bitter heart hath yearned, as moonward yearns
     Each separate wave-pulse of the clamorous sea:
My Moon of love, to whom for ever turns
     The life that aches through me.

She was deeply active on behalf of impoverished women and prostitutes, and her purview included non-western women. Blind’s poem “Mourning Women” describes, then addresses, the Muslim women of Egypt (from the volume Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient
and Occident [1895],

Mourning Women.

ALL veiled in black, with faces hid from sight,
     Crouching together in the jolting cart,
     What forms are these that pass alone, apart,
In abject apathy to life’s delight?
The motley crowd, fantastically bright,
     Shifts gorgeous through each dazzling street and mart;
     Only these sisters of the suffering heart
Strike discords in this symphony of light.

Most wretched women! whom your prophet dooms
     To take love’s penalties without its prize!
Yes; you shall bear the unborn in your wombs,
     And water dusty death with streaming eyes,
And, wailing, beat your breasts among the tombs;
     &But souls ye have none fit for Paradise.

Samuel Fildes (1843-1927), Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874)

Many many more poems at Matilde Blind (1841-96)

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As to a more extended view of her life, I don’t mean to suggest she lived a solitary or at all reclusive existence. She’s much better known for her political and social activities. Her father had been a Jewish banker and she was born in Mannheim, Germany, but when he died and her mother remarried, the revolutionary leader, Karl Blind, the family moved to Paris, and from there to England where Matilde was educated at a London girls’ school. She tried to again admission to university lectures and her failure fired her first enthusiasm for women’s education. When she died, she bequeathed her estate to Newham College, Cambridge, to found a scholarship for women.

Her first poems were dedicated to Giuseppe Mazzini, and she supported the Italian revolutionaries; she was influenced by and admired Elizaabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot, about whom she wrote yet another life (1883). Shelley, Byron inspired her. Two poems show her time in Scotland, one set in the Hebrides deals with religious questions from an atheist angle (The Prophecy of St Oran, 1881). The Heather on Fire (1886) is about the shameful Highland clearances, razed villages, people driven cruelly into further absymal poverty and emigration. There is no false romance here: we see the “agonizing plight of a crippled old woman whom no-one removed from her home before” it was set on fire; we see the people herded onto beaches to set sail for Canada. The scope, sincerity, intensity and authentic concern made her poems admired. She was no favorite with critics; her poems were not designed for male readers. Her fallen woman poem of a prostitute dying in a hospital was seen as distasteful. The pains of childbirth were not their concern. But Arthur Symons did published a full Poetical Works in 1900.

John Everett Millais (1829-96), Blow blow though winter wind (a Scotland scene)

As to her prose writing, she admired Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote an article on her (1878) and herself spent her life as an independent woman. She traveled widely in Europe and Egypt and through Scotland, published translations from Goethe, and wrote a life of the French revolutionary, Madame Roland (1886), and (her most famous work today) translated the extraordinary Journal of Marie Bashkirseff (1890), herself a fine artist. Her one experimental novel, Tarantella: A Romance is online (18805). To sum up her social existence as seen by others, confident, generous, she had circles of friends in the arts (especially the Pre-Raphaelites), knew the radical novelists, Mona Caird, was friends with Eleanor Marx. Blain says that Blind loved to give “‘literary dinners’ in rooms in well-chosen hotels.”

Lucy Madox Brown, The Duet (1870), watercolor on paper

See wikipedia and recent articles:

S. Brown, “‘A Still and Mute-Born Vision’: Locating Mathilde Blind’s
Reproductive Poetics,” Essays and Studies 56( 2003): 123-144.

James Diedrick, “‘My Love is a Force That Will Force you to Care’:
Subversive Sexuality in Mathilde Blind’s Dramatic Monologues.”
Victorian Poetry 40.4 (2002) 359-386.

James Diedrick, “A Pioneering Female Aesthete: Mathilde Blind in the
Dark Blue.” The Victorian Periodicals Review 36.6 (2003): 210-241.

Christine Sutphin, “Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints:
Augusta Webster’s A Castaway and Victorian Discourses on Prostitution and
Women’s Sexuality.” Victorian Poetry 38.4 (2000) 511-532

As to Lucy, as will have been seen she succumbed to romantic pictures of actors playing Shakespeare. But then these sold. But she also wrote a book, on Mary Shelley and it’s online.

I thank my good friend, Fran, for helping me find some of the above material and filling me in on her knowledge of Blind from Fran’s childhood in Lancaster and now life in southern Germany.

I had begun to place my foremother poet blogs over on Austen Reveries where they have mounted up to 18, as under the sign of a central women writer (who also wrote verse); but this one I felt really was not a life which can be placed with Austen as a gravatar, example. For the other (25) foremother poets on this blog, see the archive here.

Ellen

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Charles Dickens and Sandy Welch’s Our Mutual Friend: A book of a river

Filmic rendition in Welch’s movie of the famous opening scenes of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: opening shot of movie; Lizzie (Keeley Hawes) at center; John Harmon (Steven Mackintosh) back from the dead and drowned the last

Dear friends and readers,

Over the past 10 weeks I’ve been listening to Mil Nicolson (Librivox) read aloud Dickens’s last complete great novel, Our Mutual Friend while in my car. Alas, I didn’t get very far: I was hardly in my car after the 1st week of December, and I was that awkward with the thumbnail drive and the ipod, I kept re-listening to what I had heard. I managed to get near Chapter 20. At the same time though I did read a number of essays on Dickens’s novel and found myself remembering my first reading of the novel while I was in my thirties, when I reached the point of the strained marriage
of Bella Wilfhur and John Rokesmith and Dickens’s presentation of Rokesmith’s way of educating Bella out of her materialism and prestige-oriented values. It seemed to me a reverse of Ibsen’s The Doll House: he was tyrant and she obdurate pupil. I was pulled along by the ferocious rivalry of Headstone (his deep injuried) and the nihilism, arrogance of that expert needle artist, Eugene Wrayburn. Finally the abject Lizzie despised at some level by both and all but Jenny Wren, her loving self-annhiliation.

So I sought quick entry into the novel by way of Sandy Welch’s masterpiece film, a transposition (faithful), Our Mutual Friend. And I found I got closer to the book than I might have done in the text had I been able to read at night. (I no longer can most of the time.) Welch is (as she often is) faithful to the plot-design, keeps all major characters (and invents no new ones), keeps all the hinge points (central plot turning points), famous lines (well what there is of fame). She respects Dickens — and her audience. I just loved this film and writ here about it to suggest it is a deeply humane way reading of the novel and present another case for the greatness of costume drama and mini-series.

Welch’s film is deeply melancholy, sad and opens where Dickens’s does: the river. I remember OMF as being highly unusual for Dickens for its central exploration of sexuality twisted and gone wrong and the conflict of Headstone and Wrayburn, but this far in the book (Chapter 8) the idea that what is driving the world into sickness is not that everyone is longing to love one another and be loved — which is Welch’s particular emphasis.

Dickens’s book had stayed with me: I still remembered the opening on the river between Liz and her bird of prey father after all these years. The 2nd chapter of the Veneerings is generalized out to depict the dysfunctional — unreal, utterly insincere lying — basis of social life and the goals of those who practice dinners. The 3rd chapter gives us some understanding of what we saw in Chapter 1, and we meet Eugene (a do nothing, this type embitters Dickens so, only here we are allowed to see how hard it is to do something and how it’s all wrapped up in money and performance) and then 4th, Lizzie who can’t read because it would offend her father and she can only hope “to influence” if she gives up her inner life.

Dark and bitter and lost. I miss the use of the narrators in Bleak House (Esther Summerson versus the saturnine voice) and the use of 3rd person free indirect discourse in Little Dorrit. We are at such a distance from these figures we listen to and see thus far.

Welch’s film worked for me as all was presented as deep grief from Lizzie’s horrified bewildered point of view. The settings were most of them of narrow spaces, no room to turn, dark too, scary as allowing people to come up behind you and destroy you. Or abject public spaces.

It’s a world based on the river. Everyone gets their living off the river and around it. Even dredging up corpses. People throw themselves into the river or are thrown there.

It’s a world of garbage dumps. Of people making their living scavenging. The Boffins for years have run a huge garbage dump.

Mr Boffin (Peter Vaughn) showing Mr Rokesmith (Steven Mackintosh’s second disguise, now hired as Boffin’s secretary) his house and environs

In the film after the river scene and the party salon choral scene:

Lady Tippins (Margaret Tyzack) in the center

we cut to the scene in the public tavern which comes out of the river: In both book and film we encounter the hard indifference of behavior Miss Abbey Potterson (Linda Bassett in the film) could enact before Lizzie Hexam when Lizzie refuses to separate herself form her father, disliked by Miss Potterson as much for his low status and what people therefore think of his possible horrible crimes as these crimes themselves: he seems to kill poor people, throw them in the river and then retrieves them for money.

Dickens’s descripion of The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, like the use of caricature and abstraction, brings us right back to early Dickens. apparently there was such a pub; here is a later illustration by Sol Eytinge (From Victorian Web)

The house is alive, it’s a person or character in itself, a world built of meanings reflecting its significance in its surrounding by its physical characteristics. Stone had not illustrated it.

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Part Two of the film veered off to Welch’s emphasis. She presented the characters are intensely eager to reach one another, to love, to be interdependent. Three love affairs in Dickens which I remember as fiercely devouring, finally selfish, are here presented under the aegis of intense need and hurt. Eugene Wrayburn intensely needs Lizzie to give his life a meaning and him meaningful action (to teach her and Jenny to read). David Morrissey delivers a brilliant performance as a half-mad anguished Bradley Headstone, intensely sexually repressed and hating anyone who is not (especially women): he wants to take over Lizzie to prove his self-worth and loathes Wrayburn for dismissing him, laughing at him.

Headstone (David Morrissey) in his school

Wrayburn stands for the world. It’s hard to see if he has any concern for Lizzie (Wrayburn seems to) but the performance is sympathetic. At least I think so.

Paul McGann as the louche drone who is finally reclaimed

The third affair shows us Rokesmith falling in love with Bella whose kindness to her father is made much of. He takes the father out to dinner, and shows him respect. They have a beautiful day doing things like going to a museum, dressing up, courtesy interchanges; she has bought the father a new outfit all at once (Dickens makes the point that this man never before had a new hat and trousers at the same time). He loves her and she is beginning to see the man who is hovering over her with the same intensities as Headstone and Wrayburn has a heart.

Father-daughter, Mr Wilfur (Peter Wight) and Bella (Anna Friel)

John and Bella

The movie is filled with shots of people hugging one another. Jenny Wren imagines herself being beaten and beating others, but she is all loving kindness to Lizzie whom she has taken in as a seamstress and she needs Lizzie as much as Lizzie needs her.

Lizzie and Jenny Wren (Katy Murphy) hugging together

Thus far the Boffins are loving; even Wegg is respectful, enjoying his cake while reading The Decline.

Regret, anger, grief, alienation from one another: the Lammles (Anthony Calf and Doon Madkichan shortly after marriage

Against this the Lammles are obviously a sick couple, full of hatred because they have married perversely; Lizzie’s brother does stand out as inexplicable in character compared to the others. He throws Lizzie off for not accepting Headstone: he seeks status as well as money, We do wonder why? There seems no reason to — the day out of Bella and her father is not at all connected to having status and money; it seems one can pull this off as long as one has a heart. The Lammles have one only for themselves.

Marcus Stone’s illustration

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Lizzie’s brother, Charles (Paul Bailey), sent to school

A crucial moment in the book. Chapter 6, the scene where Lizzie comes home and tells her brother he must leave them to go to school full-time and stay away, and then the profoundly affecting/affective scene of Lizzie telling her father, his sudden (to me) unexpected murderous rage, taking his knife and stabbing the table, saying that if his son rejected him, he rejected the son totally and would smash (or some other word) that son, and Lizzie’s abject cringing horror.

The pictorialism of the scene remains in the mind: the outline of the girl cringing in horror more than terror for herself, the old man again a bird of prey at that table.

I took it that Lizzie is not afraid of her father, but we are to understand that though she insists to herself her father does not murder people, throw them in the river and then retrieve them to sell as corpses, at some level (not very deep) she believes it. And it could be he does.

At any rate she wants to separate her brother from him more to keep the brother from the moral contamination than even the shunning of the father that has begun as Rumor becomes explicit. She refuses to protect herself either from social isolation and pariah-dom and refuses to learn to read well and to teach herself because this would arouse the father’s jealousy and hatred and she no longer be able to influence him.

The complete self-sacrifice of this position is intolerable and the contradictions not improbable. If a girl were so electrified with moral horror, she’d not stay; if she had this kind of intelligence, how could she (like a Radcliffe heroine) refuse to acknowledge wrong-doing even to herself; if she refused to believe it, she’d probably be narrow, obtuse, filled with the usual family loyalty that is a species of hypocrisy (so I see it) and clan protection. By doing this Dickens does make such a scene. I would not call her an angel since her behavior is as morally imbecilic as the Radcliffe heroine of Udolpho faced with terror and refusing to run away because forsooth she has to be obedient to her aunt, some piety.

The brother is such a weasel and now I’m remembering this way he and we meet Bradley Headstone (whose second name refers to death, the graveyard, he’s a headstone, and also his great bodily strength — made of stone, his obtuseness). And that is the way Welch has the boy actor do the part in the film.

We see the breakup of families and how it happens and real internecine feeling.

The shunning by Gaffer by crowd or group mentality against his “pollution” as well as self-protection.

This is a novel and film for this decade — not thus far as to analysis of institutions but the way people are just turned into hideous poverty. I was watching DemocracyNow.Org last night and film of the Syrian people, desperately poor, being shot in the streets by their gov’t's military forces, their home hovels. They have no access to the great wealth of their own country, it’s kept to the few, in this case including not only the elite of their country running it (1% indeed) but the US which gives millions to support that elite (ditto in Yemen, ditto Bahrain). And we need not go so far: the Tories are busy doing this all over England (impoverishing people, destroying jobs, social services, social institutions for public meeting) and the US gov’t here (billions for drones for surveillance, no money for people foreclosed or the least job).

The real trouble with the book is the picture is not attached to anything the way I have just attached it. Welch I think achieves this with her larger landscape pictures and use of choral commentaries (ironic, bitter) in the rich people salon and party scenes.

Did Dickens expect his readers to understand? or simply have an urge to rouse them against the conditions of their time? the problem is the readership is not Gaffer and Lizzie — they are not real people at any rate. I remember how Madame de Stael said the problem with writing novels is you have to appeal to readerships which don’t understand, will get offended, and get past conscious censorship too.

It appeals through inarticulated pictures and a dependence on the reader having the moral reaction which is comprehensive but the readers often do not For example, readers online complain of Stone’s illustrations as ugly or weird or not pleasing. They are spot on — and a product of collaboration between Dickens and Stone. I’ve put a few of them into our albums.

Mr Wegg wants some of his body parts back; Mr Venus (Timothy Spall) charges

Mr Venus’s shop in the pictures scarcely captures the morbidity of the bodies. They are done in both the caricature and idyllic style. Headstone writhing on the floor is the latter:

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Peter Vaughn as Mr Boffin asking Wregg to become his reader

Crazed madness of Wregg (Kenneth Cranham) before Boffin’s new mansion

The dwarf is a disabled figure who turns up as an evil grotesque in Dickens — and again it’s bodily and again dwarves are often shown to be twisted people where they are blamed for having poison in them, not that their emotional state is a reaction to how they’ve been treated, which is much more the reality. A powerful black singer (Eric Owen) turned the anti-semitic portrait of a dwarf in Wagner’s Ring into a figure that resonated with justified resentment in a recent Met HD production, and the stance seems to have resonated in many heart and ear. I have never read The Old Curiosity Shop. I can’t think of any dwarves this morning. We have to try to remember disfigured characters perhaps to find an equivalent in realistic fiction.

I remember feeling for Jenny Wren who takes Lizzie in. I understood how she could come to love-hate her clinging devouring father.

Dickens’s Mr Boffin seems to me a male type that has disappeared. Literary types do disappear when whatever social reality that gave rise to them goes. He’s the male simpleton, usually or almost always working class. Such men were used in the Shirley Temple movies. I suggest they come from the strong culture of deference which at once deprived most males of higher education and taught them they would be punished hard if they did not appear happy and complacent and even ignorant of the terms of their lot. The type may be seen (paradoxically perhaps but neutralizing the archetype) in Walt Disney’s Snow White’s 7 dwarves. Dickens does improve this by suggesting Mr Boffin is socially insecure, sensitive, avoiding class hurts. Why else go to Silas Wegg? Mr Boffin feels he’s least likely to be despised, and his tiny sums of money appreciated. So there’s a little insight …

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Lizzie as Madonna saving the beaten Wrayburn

In Sandy Welch’s film, we have the uncommon case of a male novel turned into a woman’s film — for all the characteristics of women’s films are here, plus distinguishing elements of Welch’s art. Among these both are this peculiar emphasis on the large landscape as a scene of intimacy. We have one here: in the story Eugene Wrayburn as been in effect stalking Lizzie, trying to get her to come live with him outside marriage. He does it tenderly as if he cannot resist and needs her, but he will not marry her as beneath him. She our ideal woman of course knows it’s unthinkable for him to marry her so flees him, but does stubbornly hold out when he finds her out through bribing Jenny Wren’s father — Lizzie has been working as a seamstress for Jenny who took her in when her father died.

But his stalking her is just one stalking; he is stalked in turn, by Bradley Headstone who tells himself his intentions are all honorable. He wants to marry her. That means in reality crush her spirit utterly. He despises her as he daughter of the lowest of the low, a grave snatcher, perhaps a murderer, who drew bodies from the filth of the Thames. He would control and bend her to his will, with an iron mind. This is honor? This is marriage Victorian style yes. Bradley stalks Lizzie too but he also stalks Eugene who drives him mad by his mockery. Wrayburn won’t acknowledge Headstone is there and gets a thrill out of this stalking.

Wrayburn is a sick man, as sick as so many of the people in this novel are.

Unfortunately Welch softens Wrayburn as many do. What she does do — is make the film about people reaching out to one another, prevented from succeeding by the norms of the private property system, prestige, social performance. The madness of dysfunctional behavior if we were to consider what might make good people happy is pictured for us repeatedly in the landscapes. There are astonishing moments of a crippled man named Wegg dancing in the screen against garbage dumps, against rich houses. Most of the scenes are of garbage dumps, broken down places. Others are of the river, wet, stodgy, dangerous, glittering. Some are the corridors of the city, pictured as narrow labyrinth prisons (like a Renaissance painting). Only nature has beauty. Only there are people together intimately because away from the social group.

The colors are so rich. The film much reminds me of her Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, North and South in this use of landscape. Here, for example, is Lizzie reversing what her father did. Her father drew dead bodies from the river which he perhaps killed, and he sold them to doctors or anyone who would take them Ah ha another parallel for today: the animal torture business, people kidnap and enslave animals for experiments and if you protest for real, you can be imprisoned as an eco-terrorist. It also shows the ruthlessness of the medical industry then too.

She is going to save Eugene Wrayburn. She has found him smashed up on the wet grasslands (!?) just outside London, done in by Headstone who he Wrayburn did egg on to this.

It’s deeply felt and the book provides the depth behind the vignettes, each story fully played out with details and thought. I loved the music too, slow, rhythmic like a swaying boat in a river.

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In the feature Pam Ferris likened Mrs Boffin to a working class woman today who wins the lottery; she is better than that for she has a very good heart, and unlike Mr Boffin is never corrupted into even seeming mean
Some contemporary analogues and characters in other novels by Dickens:

Some of the description of Mr Podsnap (hardly there at all in the film) put me in mind of Newt Gringich, lines about his solid sliminess (words to this effect). He is not the lout the American politician is. Otherwise his narrow hypocrisy and obnoxiousness is probably an accurate rendition of a Victorian type still partly with us.

Miss Podsnap (not in the film) reminded me of Flora in Little Dorrit: made nervous and unsure of herself by never having been allowed to live or have any independence. I wonder if this type is found elsewhere in Dickens. If she reflects Dickens’s wife’s character, then considering he understood that, his leaving her feels worse. OTOH, I was not sure in either Flora or this Georgiana’s case I’m not reading sympathy into the character rather than derision.

IN the book, Riderhood comes to snitch on Hexam in order to get the award and both Lightwood and Wrayburn return to the Hexam residence. The picture of Lizzie weeping by the fire, her loneliness, her desperate circumstances is moving. She is this still picture of abjection and loss. We are not allowed to see inside her hardly at all in this book.

Rokesmith and the Wilburs are brought in very late: almost an afterthought, something that came to Dickens later. Yet a central group. By contrast, in the film adaptation the supposed murder of Harman comes first, and the character of Harmon to Rokesmith brought in very early. I’ve put a still of Steven Mackintosh talking to Bella after they are married on our website page. He’s a brilliant actor and really best at fierceness, anger and I think has just the right amount of intense sternness towards Bella for the part Dickens meant. I just wish his bitterness had been directed elsewhere or Bella had not been made into this shallow type; Welch changes that a lot, and makes Bella have a warm good heart which very quickly learns to be better once she leaves the Wilbur mother (a misogynist bully figure to my mind).

The surroundings are so oozy and ugly and eerie in the book, but then London was not nice place for most people and Wrayburn’s words about the desperate street life he saw Paris (people picking up garbage to make ends meet) probably I assume reflects what Dickens saw and wants us to realize are the real cities too.

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As I watched the first hour or so of the fourth and last part (thus half of it) of Sandy Welch’s OMF, it set me thinking more about Dickens’s OMF. The last part of Welch’s OMF moves very slowly: we have a longish sequence of each of our sets of characters waking: everyone getting up to face the day and what they see: Mortimer Lightwood gets up and Eugene not there; we see the desperate houses by the water, Jenny out anxious and deeply resentful but worried about her father; Wegg vowing vengeance — and we see the misery of the workers at the garbage dump (especially symbolic this); Bella looking at John in bed; Mrs Noddy sad in her splendid loneliness; the Lammles smoking nearby as they prepared to enter to offer themselves as replacements for the real friends the Noddys had (the crippled disabled boy is gone as well as Bella): Mr Riderhood finding Headstone bloodied in the grass near his house. Again when a series of climactic events where Mortimer discovers Wrayburn near death with Lizzie; Jenny’s father dredged up from river where he drowned; John outted as John Harmon finally, the Lammles refused, Headstone back in the school where LIzzie’s vicious brother now says he will have nothing to do with Headstone we get another such sequence.

One does not have time for this in the recent (by Andrew Davies) Bleak House and Little Dorrit films, or most Dickens films I’ve seen. Welch is registering a peculiarity about OMF, one which Christine Edzards tried to pull out of Little Dorrit by removing the idiosyncratic grotesques and concentrating just on two central figures as if the story were seen from their consciousness (Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clenham). It’s set up as a mystery with complicated plot, but that’s not what the text really lends itself to. It’s more a series of dramatic picturse linked through allegory. I noticed for the first time that the Podsnaps are totally omitted from Welch’s film, and how sidelined Mr Twemlow is. That’s in line with Edzards’s film. Mr Twemlow is a comic repeat of decency, only comically puzzled and the Podsnaps another set of grotesques, more hateful in their effect than the Lammles who are at some level (especially in Part 4 of Welch’s film) pathetic, as contemptible in our eyes as they ought to be in their own and the world’s were the world’s values humane. (At the end of the Part 4 the Lammles hook on to another innocent couple to live off them.)

I’ve been very moved by Welch’s film; I love how the characters finally come together — the sudden wild violence of Steven Mackintosh as “our mutual friend” — for he has provided the wherewithal to support Bella, by extension Bella’s father, the Boffins. On Welch’s account it’s John Harmon who is the Dickens figure in this novel, the alter ego, not the more dramatically riveting Wrayburn or Headstone.

All three are Dickens in a sense (Wrayburn what he rejected but impulses in him), but Harmon stands for what is good — as does Arthur Clenham, what is right. Seeing the book this way turns it on a pivot for me and makes it if not easier to get into and engage with at least growing out of a central vision underlying the later books. This time he’s simply made a quieter book.

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The green and lovely gardens surrounding the house John Harmon can provide the Boffins and Bella and his child with; we see Jenny and Sloppy join them in a picnic scene

Lammles forever playacting, forever to be humiliated hangers-on

When I came to the end of the film I was very moved. This is one of the great — of many great film adaptations done by the BBC or British TV — and occasionally by commercial groups for movie-houses. The idyllic ending for some had been prepared for in Part 3 when they reached out to one another (Bella and John’s beautifully unadorned marriage with just the father behind them walking in the park); the lousy ending for others by their egoism (the Lammles with their opulent wedding and now cold mean life). Welch had filled out Dickens’s characters with her projection of human need. I can only hope the new spirit abroad of making travesties which assume the audience has not read and would not even like the book fall down on the reality the audience they seek really is not keen on this genre for real – not done with depth of emotion and seriously conceived interaction between era, text, film.

The film also ends with yet another stalking sequence: now the fierce hateful Riderhood stalks Bradley Headstone. We do feel very much for Headstone: this man is a rat, a snake; David Bradley the actor who did the part looks like the actor who did Wegg: Kenneth Cranham. Both are older thin man with heads that can be made up to look skull-like.

Headstone says he never had a friend and when it’s clear that Riderhood (David Bradley — have I done justice to his performance) is going to suck him dry, he’ll starve. He walks away and Riderhood follows and of course what happens is the lonely desperate hurt man (whom no one would know any more than the people at the end of the film will know Lizzie) turns on Riderhood and takes him down to drowning with him.

So the antepenultimate scene of the film is the filthy scary greasy polluted waterways with bodies seen floating in it. Where we began. (The pipeline so touted that Obama did reject would take filthy oil down the center of the US to be exported; not to get any jobs for anyone in the US, and it would pollute). Have people heard of fracking? OMF is about 19th century fracking.

The penultimate scene is a montage partly scene from Mortimer Lightwood’s point of view — he is the only unpaired presence:

Mortimer Lightwood (Dominic Mafham looking down at Eugene in bed)

where we see Sloppy taken in by Jenny and they become a couple interspersed with Rokesmith and Bella and baby and the Boffins on a blanket. Mr Wifur seems forgotten here. (So too Lizzie’s brother but then he wanted to be.) We hear Eugene talk of how he might go abroad with Lizzie but Lightwood would miss him. The perspective on this scene is Lightwood as outsider but needing these people too. Wrayburn wants to go abroad for the wrong reasons: he’s ashamed. He should not be he’s told. Rokesmith rowing and his face seen.

I loved the last scene. After all Podsnap might have been in the social scenes: if the fat nasty man so gussied up is him. Well he and Lady Tippins and everyone are sneering at a party at Wrayburn for marrying this waterman’s daughter. They are disgusted. Why Lightwood stays with these people is beyond me — but it’s what makes us see them. Lightwood appeals to Twemlow and Twenlow has his great moment: they are shits, and what’s most their point of view is stupid and ugly. It’s articulated very generally: anyone who lives in accordance with what he or she thinks is the imagined respect of society is a fool for in a way there is no such thing. “Society’ is a shallow mirror we make up with our own minds, and anyway (to be particular) Wrayburn never cared for these people any way.

A curious contradiction: we are to grieve for Headstone for not having any friends but at the same time see that false friends and the world’s admiration is not worth the loss of your soul. The camera ends on Twemlow and Lightwood.

I liked that ending very much though I’m not sure it was Dickens’s emphasis. It seems to me to speak to 21st century people and come out of a particular perpsective often seen in the finest costume dramas made by women and a few men too.

Eugene and Lizzie’s hands holding tight to one another

In Welch’s film, the pair are never shown in close conversation — except one scene half suggestive itself where he is trying to get her to come and live with him. Even then it’s seen from
afar. It’s all vignettes. When Wrayburn talks, it’s to Mortimore
Lightwood; when Lizzie talks it’s to her brother, father, Abby, Jenny Wren, and except to her brother, it’s all reactive. We see Bella visit her but hear no conversation. In the book is it that we are made aware of how different in class and education they are?

Welch’s is quite different from Davies’s presentation of Amy Dorrit and Clenham: Davies fills in the relationhips, and in Dickens’s book while the scenes between Amy and Arthur are not dramatized, they are told in the third person indirect mode. (Too much is made of showing and not telling, until the 20th century the scene described was as common as the one dramatized.)

This film and book certainly made my spirits soar and validated what I know to be the correct view but one it needs strength to hold to because there are too many Lady Tippins and Podsnaps and Lammles about, to say nothing of their instruments and the hateful complicit angry people serving them too.

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At work in the garbage dumps of the film’s world — out of which money is to be made; the actor here when he pulls off his mask turns out to be Sloppy (Martin Hancock), the disabled young man Mrs Higden took in

Finally, we come back to the river. It is the case that in the 19th century the Thames River was (relatively speaking, say compared to today) stuffed with corpses. The vision that Our Mutual Friend projects is not a fantasy nightmare. Many ways to look at this, but I’ll content myself with being literary and say it’s another instance of how the gothic genre is as real, and can actually tell us more about what’s important in life than books which adhere to what’s called “realism” (Trollope is called realistic).

Unfortunately, we have no photos of people dredging the Thames for corpses or dropping them in, but I did see a reproduction which has something of the same meaning as Our Mutual Friend‘s real life symbols: at the Museum of Modern Art there’s a show on of murals by Diego Rivera (see just below for the LRB column by Hal Foster on this) and one includes “Frozen Assets:”

Our modern more decorous version of corpses at least here in the US (outside the US until very recently it was rare for the armies of capitalism to attack citizens outright — now drones are okay too inside the US) does not include soaked human bodies floating in or underneath our waterways as a usual thing. For dead bodies we must go to the streets where they are dragged off to the side, or better yet, hospitals (yes hospitals) where if the person is brought back, it’s with a huge bill. In a way what a black joke is there: the body brought back is priced (chattel slavery priced people too)

Anyway Hal Foster describes the Rivera mural impeccably:

“Frozen Assets is an inspired montage: Rivera based the vault on those he had toured in Wall Street and the hangar on the interior of the Municipal Pier on East 25th Street, while his skyline combines a few downtown banks with several new buildings in midtown, including the Chrysler, Empire State, McGraw-Hill, Daily News and Rockefeller Center (the last three of which were designed by Rockefeller favourite Raymond Hood). The allegory of this literal exposé is explicit: the building boom that gave us the great skyscraper city depended on the cheap labour represented by the subway drones and the sleeping bodies as much as on the stashed assets. In this not-so-divine comedy, the pier is a grey purgatory and the vault a brown hell, as much prison as bank (in this faecal cavern, Rivera almost suggests the anal sadism that Freud associated with money). Only the skyscrapers have any vitality, but their animation is fetishistic; indeed, Frozen Assets depicts a fetishisation of capital on a metropolitan scale, in which urban liveliness counts far more than the actual livelihood of working men and women; unlike the labouring bodies in the other murals, they are the real ‘frozen assets’ here.

Diego Rivera, Frozen Assets (1930)

It may be not be realized but today again aging people in the US fear nursing homes the way the poor in Dickenss’s time feared the poor- and work-house

Another death scene: Lizzie caring for Mrs Betty Higden (Edna Dore), Welch’s interpretation emphasizes the loving care, but the words are the terror Dickens gives the old woman

I understand there is a film adaptation of Edwin Drood “in the works”. I hope so for I’d like to see a good film adaptation in the tradition of the older ones like this of that last book. There is enough there to figure out an ending Dickens probably meant.

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Amy Clampitt (1920-94) amid the thrushes

Amy Clampitt

A Thrush singing in Dorsetshire

Dear friends and readers,

This foremother poet blog on Amy Clampitt, is done differently from most. I was so taken by her “The Hermit Thrush” after reading a review in Women’s Review of Books of a newly published book of her poems, that I wrote a brief foremother poet posting and then put this poem on Wompo — at whch there was an outpouring of Thrush poems in reponse. So this is Amy Clampitt amid the thrushes. I found 2 UTube videos where one can hear the thrush’s song and watch a couple: the one above and one at the end of the blog.

Jim and I don’t share that many favorite poems but one is Basil Bunting (Yorkshire poet)’s (part of which forms the epigraph to my Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two):

A thrush in the syringa sings.

‘Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things.

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk’s beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.

Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things,
fear, hunger, lust.’

O gay thrush.

(1964)

Syringa is sweet-smelling lilacs and Austen planted one in her first garden in Southampton for the sake of a line by Cowper that includes the syringa.

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The latest issue of Women’s Review of Books (Jan/Feb 2012) is particularly rich and fine, and among its essays are no less than three on women’s poetry. One of these Amy Clampitt whose name I’ve heard before was written about in such a way I longed to read her poetry. In no time I found this masterpiece:

The Hermit Thrush

Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day,
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,

to where, a decade since well-being staked
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us
back, year after year, lugging the
makings of another picnic—

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there’s no knowing what the slamming
seas, the gales of yet another winter
may have done. Still there,

the gust-beleaguered single spruce tree,
the ant-thronged, root-snelled moss, grass
and clover tuffet underneath it,
edges frazzled raw

but, like our own prolonged attachment, holding.
Whatever moral lesson might commend itself,
there’s no use drawing one,
there’s nothing here

to seize on as exemplifying any so-called virtue
(holding on despite adversity, perhaps) or
any no-more-than-human tendency—
stubborn adherence, say,

to a wholly wrongheaded tenet. Though to
hold on in any case means taking less and less
for granted, some few things seem nearly
certain, as that the longest day

will come again, will seem to hold its breath,
the months-long exhalation of diminishment
again begin. Last night you woke me
for a look at Jupiter,

that vast cinder wheeled unblinking
in a bath of galaxies. Watching, we traveled
toward an apprehension all but impossible
to be held onto—

that no point is fixed, that there’s no foothold
but roams untethered save by such snells,
such sailor’s knots, such stays
and guy wires as are

mainly of our own devising. From such an
empyrean, aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as

in the end untenable. Base as it is, from
year to year the earth’s sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with

thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry’s cool poultice—

and what can’t finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

Little is certain, other than the tide that
circumscribes us that still sets its term
to every picnic—today we stayed too long
again, and got our feet wet—

and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,
a broken, a much-mended thing. Watching
the longest day take cover under
a monk’s-cowl overcast,

with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,
we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end

unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive—
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human—there’s

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing

Amy Clampitt

Said to be a hermit thrush

A biography with reviews and poetry linked in.

I can contribute this brief life too:

Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor.

Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher.

In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), and Westward (1990). Her last book, A Silence Opens, appeared in 1994. The recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy Fellowship, she was made a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1992. She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and taught at the College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College. She died of cancer in September 1994.

I have read that she is accused of being bookish! if so, all the better (see poems in comments). If this woman be not a foremother, where are foremothers to be found?

And here is the outpouring of thrush poetry from the women poets and lovers of poetry from Wompo (Women’s Poetry list) whence we had an outpouring of thrush, with photos and another UTube performance of a bird. These were placed on Wompo over three days. Friends, were Congress to enact this draconian censorship bill on behalf of the movie and music industry and other powerful corporations who the Internet takes business from (narrow public media owned by a few) and other powerful institutions threatened by the Net this is the sort of thing they’d silence, black out.

By Margo Berdeshevsky (which she shared with us):

Of the Song Bird

Legend tells of the community of birds who had wings but no song as yet : of a contest offered them by the god : of the prize of song—offered to that bird who could fly the highest : of the tiny dun white-spotted-thrush who knew it had no powers to fly high enough to win and wanted to—

Who crept, instead, who hid her small self in a white eagle’s feathered crown to fly far higher than all others : who dozed there, dreamed there, concealed in her carrier’s flight, and longing—and when her eagle tired, she who knew, and bounded out and upward farther still—

Legend tells of the coveted prize of song she heard and learned there, in the heights : of the thrush who returned with the song of spheres in her thirsty small throat, who knew she had won by cheating : who saw the gathering of birds below—a community, receiving, each, their entitled songs—

Legend of the thrush who went away then, hid in the deepest of forests out of shame—but who could not help her song from rising, even in those stands of webbing vine and shadow—of a quest for beauty, of goodness as we barely know it but beg to receive it—that it brings us to longing, only—

Frailty, that rarely, like the thrush, the gorgeous song in us climbs, a bird ashamed of its arriving at a possession of beauty by unsanctioned means, a slouching off to such a dim-lit place where the song erupts in spite, its open-winged remembering, seining from the quiet—

We decided that these thrush poems project world views and tell us much about their poets:

The Laughing Thrush

O nameless joy of the morning

tumbling upward note by note out of the night
and the hush of the dark valley
and out of whatever has not been there

song unquestioning and unbounded
yes this is the place and the one time
in the whole of before and after
with all of memory waking into it

and the lost visages that hover
around the edge of sleep
constant and clear
and the words that lately have fallen silent
to surface among the phrases of some future
if there is a future

here is where they all sing the first daylight
whether or not there is anyone listening

White-crested laughing thrush

— W. W. Merwin

Thrushes

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living – a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce,
a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
And a ravening second.

Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.

With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,
Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,
Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
For years: his act worships itself – while for him,
Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and
above what
Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils
Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness
Of black silent waters weep.

Ted Hughes

A cruel poem, embodying the cruelty of the natural and human worlds.

A darkling thrush

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy

*******************
Turning back to women’s poetry and thrushes, it’s been suggested that in women’s poetry one finds women poets who identify physically and intimately with small animals. (See Women’s faery poetry). For a near contemporary we have Mary Oliver

Am alert watchful thrush

And to go back in time, two from my favorite era, the 18th century. This is in the spirit of Robert Burns’s To a Mousie, or a similar vein. It really belongs to an early part of the animal rights movement; other poems (often by women) against experiment and really empathizing with (for example) cats are part of this earlier context.

Elegy: On finding a young THRUSH in the Street, who escaped from the Writer’s Hand, as she was bringing him home, and, falling down the Area of a House, could not be found

Mistaken Bird, ah, whither hast thou stray’d?
My friendly grasp, why eager to elude?
This hand was on thy pinion lightly laid,
And fear’d to hurt thee by a touch too rude.

Is there no foresight in a Thrush’s breast,
That thou down yonder gulph from me would’st go?
That gloomy area lurking cats infest,
And there the dog may rove, alike thy foe.

I would with lavish crumbs my Bird have fed,
And bought a crystal cup to wet thy bill;
I would have made of down and moss thy bed,
Soft, though not fashion’d with a Thrush’s skill.

Soon as thy strengthen’d wing could mount the sky,
My willing hand had set my captive free:
Ah, not for her, who loves the muse, to buy
A selfish pleasure, bought with pain to thee!

The vital air, and liberty, and light,
Had all been thine: and love, and rapt’rous song,
And sweet parental joys, in rapid flight,
Had led the circle of thy life along.

Securely to my window hadst thou flown,
And ever thy accustom’d morsel found;
Nor should thy trusting breast the wants have known,
Which other Thrushes knew, when winter frown’d.

Fram’d with the wisdom Nature lent to thee,
Thy house of straw had brav’d the tempest’s rage;
And thou, thro’ many a spring, hadst liv’d to see
The utmost limit of a Thrush’s age.

Ill-fated Bird! and does the Thrush’s race,
Like Man’s, mistake the path that leads to bliss;
Or, when his eye that tranquil path can trace,
The good he well discerns, thro’ folly miss?”

——Helen Maria Williams

(1790)

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Ode to the Missed Thrush

Charlotte Smith

The Winter Soistice scarce is past,
Loud is the wind, and hoarsely sound
The mill-streams in the swelling blast,
And cold and humid is the ground[;]
When, to the ivy, that embowers
Some pollard tree, or sheltering rock,
The troop of timid warblers flock,
And shuddering wait for milder hours.

While thou! the leader of their band,
Fearless salut’st the opening year;
Nor stay’st, till blow the breeze bland
That bid the tender leaves appear:
But, on some towering elm or pine,
Waving elate thy dauntless wing,
Thou joy’st thy love notes wild to sing,
Impatient of St. Valentine!

Oh, herald of the Spring! while yet
No harebe1l scents the woodland lane,
Nor starwort fair, nor violet,
Braves the bleak gust and driving rain,
‘Tis thine, as thro’ the copses rude
Some pensive wanderer sighs along,
To soothe him with thy cheerful song,
And tell of Hope and Fortitude!

For thee then, may the hawthorn bush,
The elder, and the spindle tree,
With all their various berries blush,
And the blue sloe abound for thee!
For thee, the coral holly glow
Its arm’d and glossy leaves among,
And many a branched oak be hung
With thy pellucid missletoe.
Still may thy nest, with lichen lin’d,
Be hidden from the invading jay,
Nor truant boy its covert find,
To bear thy callow young away;
So thou, precursor still of good,
0, herald of approaching Spring,
Shalt to the pensive wanderer sing
Thy song of Hope and Fortitude.

The above too has a larger specific context from the time: poems about nature in a time of war (Napoleonic). It fits in with some eighteenth century poetry by poets like Thomson and Cowper, discussed by Favret (her last name) in a recent brilliant moving article in PMLA (“Still Winter Comes”, PMLA 124:5 (2009):1548-61

Just listen to that gay song and watch at the Metro Toronto Zoo with people commenting.

Ellen

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A serene day to all

Camille Pissaro, Louvenciennes in Snow (1770s)

Dear year-long friends and readers,

From the 19th century: Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

Again at Christmas did we weave
          The holly round the Christmas hearth;
          The silent snow possessed the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,
          No wing of wind the region swept,
          But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.

As in the winters left behind,
          Again our ancient games had place,
          The mimic picture’s breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

Who showed a token of distress?
          No single tear, no mark of pain:
          O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
Of grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!
          No—mixed with all this mystic frame,
          Her deep relations are the same,
But with long years the tears are dry.

Stonehenge, a drawing by John Constable

**************************************
Last night:

Izzy, at her computer, 2011

R. Joyce Heon’s The Dream Again

The dream again. Near Christmas. It is time
To lower and unfold the attic stair
That will not hold a grown-up’s weight, to climb
Into the chill and naptha-scented air.
Here moth will not corrupt, and time must spare
The box of lights and mismatched ornaments
Packed in a carton filled with Angel Hair
And met, as if by sheer coincidence,
With lawn chairs, summer clothes, and two old Army tents.

Mother, an item here belongs to me.
It is a piece of plastic tubing, red
And cane-shaped, which I’ll hang upon our tree
In memory of an old man who is dead,
A neighbor on the block I visited
Daily when I was only three or four.
For months I took that thing with me to bed,
Then stopped and did not take it anymore
After he died. I’ve never known what it was for.

The dream again. We trim the slender tree
With strings of lights so antiquated they’ve
No colors left, hang icicles and see
These acts reflected, wave on frozen wave.
More rituals: the ribbon that we save
To bind leftover boughs to make a spray
Of cedar. Every year, on Christmas day,
These were the fragrant, handmade gifts you gave
Your mother and your father — one upon each grave.

To make room for the presents we arrange
The furniture and, for amusement, play
Old records that, in retrospect, seem strange:
Gene Autry, Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye.
I watch you setting out a metal tray –
Santa Drinks Coke — and sing along like one
Who knows what words each character will say,
A sort of deja vu, a knowledge won
From having played the part before, the role of son.

The dream again, the one that always ends
In a light which, while neither cruel nor hard,
Indifferent to my waking thoughts, ascends
In moments made to empty and discard
Like leaves the wind now scatters in the yard.
Yet it is such that I would not confine
It to the space inside a Christmas card
Or the stamped parcels bound with tape and twine,
Sent with regrets for invitations I decline.
So let the light grow dim, allow this dream
Its one still moment, where none may intrude
To hang the stockings which can only seem
Empty reminders of the magnitude
Of love we neither compass nor conclude.
Let the deep twilight gather to the chime
Of three brass angels circling in the nude,
Tinkling above their candles as they climb
The wall in shadows, marking nothing more than time.

Poor yet alert puzzled pussycat: Clary

Ellen

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Translated into Estonian!

Caterina von Hemessen (1527/8 – ?1566), Portrait of a Lady, 1551

Dear friends and readers,

Six years ago now I finished making this large bibliography page for women’s literature (it’s not limited to women poets), and rejoice to say that Anna Galovich has translated it into Estonian and placed it on her website.

I am planning to take all my foremother poet postings, website additions and (revised) partially poet blogs over the years and place them in a single region on my website this summer; one place where people can come to. This will help encourage me to do it.

The origin of all this was my translations of Renaissance women poets, whence my choice of Caterina for the page and this blog.

Ellen

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Books in art and science (Sharp 4): Fairy books; Medical books, outsiders, & handbooks as territorial struggles; Keepsakes, Alice in Wonderland and Pitman sten

The Blue Fairy Book, compiled (and written by) Andrew Lang

Alice in Wonderland — in translation

Dear friends and readers,

I am come to the fourth and last blog on this conference. Today topics included the fantastical and imaginative (fairy books and math and Alice in Wonderland), just its seeming opposite, medical memoirs, and large handbooks whose entries and publication are fought over tirelessly because such huge amounts of money can be made by a few if the organizations can keep preventing universal non-profit medicine from going into effect. In effect the social targets for fantastical and fairy books brought before the listener how it was supposed children and their middle class parents were interacting with books, while medical books and the institutions which ignored, published or supported them showed us how an interested profession used books to fight over their territory and promote themselves, their science agenda, their careers.

A Sunday story. There was hardly any traffic on the way in, at noon the park outside the Dillon center was filled with people doing all sorts of things and the carousel nearby crowded with children.

*******************************

“The Bronze Ring” from The Blue Fairy Book

Sunday morning I might be said to have fitted in two sessions each period since in both cases, I left 2/3s the way through one session and arrived at the second session where there was still 2/3s to go. In both cases the questions were good enough to elicit re-explanations of the papers. So I heard twice as much.

At 9:00 I went to “Utopia, Fantasy and Prophecy,” and heard a paper by Jennifer Gundry on how print culture (books, thoughtful high-minded doings) were regarded with suspicion and distrust in a selection of Utopias. The critics and reviewers (rightly) assault advertising, find slipping literary standards at each new technology or innovation; they indict the low quality of the new productions. Print has failed 19th and 20th century society. It would seem the only printed object valued is money. Sara Hines described the unexpected huge success of Andrew Lang’s series of “colored” fairy books; here there is a stronger nostalgic pull. With the success of the Blue Fairy book, Lang went on to compile (and write) the nostalgic notes. Critical writing and studies of folklore and fairy tales enables us today to understand him. (Probably translation studies ought to be brought in). Green came next, then a rainbow, then violet. Lang were first intended for the Christmas market; eventually they functioned as a poet manque for family rituals, gathering and creating time together.

I hurried out to a session on scientific and medical publishing. Sounds boring? Think again: Darwin is a central tract; so too Humboldt. I spend 1/3 of my course reading serious books on how medicine is practiced today. Jim Conor’s paper on “The Editing and Publishing History of Rural and Medical Care (1948) was of direct relevance to the essays I read with my students. This was not a how to book: name a condition and then offer treatments. Rather it is a book which describe and defines disease and has essays on aspects of the profession and its author was strongly for socialized medicine. Mr Conor told a story of a man who had continually to fight to get his book published, then respected, then distributed. Eventually it became enormously influential in Canada, in US minus the politics which (if I understood him correctly) were cut out. Jennifer Conor’s paper on a specific medical memoir by Gordon Murray enabled me to see how the medical establishment viewed the kind of scientific medical memoirs I’ve been assigning students for years. With respect. The specific one she discussed had problems that were never resolved, especially balancing autobiography and telling an appealing story with explaining technical cases in difficult language.

The interest of the Health Guide is how it became a lightning rod for political issues. The AMA and other powerful physician organizations were vigilant against anything smacking of socialism, and defining illness in ways that insurance companies want to control was seen as strongly socialist behavior. The AMA fought to suppress the book. Now its definitions are used by our local day coffee bar place. As to memoirs, they can teach ethical norms, and do well when they are beautifully written, like Atul Gawande’s Complications), and can reach a large layman audience. Jennifer Conor said a president of a respected college had had to resign recently because it was discovered he plagiarised his goodbye speech from Gawande’s Complications. The students had read Gawande and recognized the passage by checking the texts on their computers.

I got myself a coffee and then went to the mid-morning sessions. Marie-Claude Felton’s paper was “‘Je ne suis pas fou’: The Self-publishing journey of poorly-estimated scholars in the 19th century was a general history of statistics; she showed far more scientists managed to spread their work by self-publishing than is realized. Johanna Lilja told of an “indefatigible botanist” who persisted in the face of neglect, ridicule and misery; institutional norms destroyed him personally though much later in life he was done justice to. The paper was very sympathetic towards the institution and its problems and showed how it learned from this experience to cope with non-conformity. Susan Pickford began her paper by telling of what she called with any specific definition or defense “insane” scientists; she was going to talk about “outsider literature,” but I felt the use of such a blanket derogatory term (“insane”) unacceptable (like the use of “idiot” in Victorian literature for mentally disabled people) in scientific, medical (or humane) senses so quickly left.

I found I had just time to listen to two papers and heard a third discussed afterward from another session, “Play and Politics.” Manuela Mouraco and Margaret Stetz argued the children’s books he described were made with parents’ ideas and desires in mind; they taught children to fit in; encouraged certain kinds of socialization and interest in subjects that are career-worthy. Mouraco and Adam Trammell agreed the Keepsake and other annuals were intended to build an identity for the people buying them; they are books with a strong middle class bias and show nostalgia for the past.

In this session and an earlier one on librarians helping children to form reading groups in libraries, the idea was endorsed in the discussion time afterward that in a classroom socialization is as or more important than the topic taught. So that if math is being taught, the children should be made to do it in group settings. This reminded me of how the whole conference seems to value how books function socially for people, what intellectual stance they enable people to feel they belong to (or do). But what about the child who learns best alone and would learn far more about the topic if left to do so alone. He or she will be straitjacketed into first enacting a set of general social skills or be made to feel bad if he or she can’t (and perhaps graded on social capability rather thabn math). This set of values makes learning very hard for the disabled (e.g., autistic children). And it’s not just the autistic that such tactics in a classroom would stmy but many non-outward people. We do have inward growth as we learn academic subjects sheerly for themselves.

For lunch I sat with Elizabeth Starr on a bench in a lovely shaded area and we shared a sandwich, memories and goals. We hope to keep contact up. She has a student working on a biography of Jane Austen for younger readers and perhaps I could help.

******************************

The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, illustration by John Tenniel

The last session I attended was unexpected fun for me. It was on translating Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Clare and August Imholtz, a married couple of independent scholars and book collectors gave papers on different translations of Alice. Clare went over many kinds across the globe, and August concentrated on those just in Russian. Statistics of how many translations and where are impressive. Of course translation is bad at puns, and some of the word play and games that provide the experience we have of the text. They named particularly good ones (a Spanish one); August took us into the realms and suppositions of a Russian child.

Catherine Parisian then got up to tell us the history of Alice in Wonderland translated into Gregg and Pitman. How many Pitman’s, how many Gregg’s. It seems this was a way of teaching girls to read and to use phonetics. She knew I was in the audience and could read Pitman stenography and I did come up to the front to declare this text was Pitman and did not use vowels or the three line approach and the other was written precisely following the conventions. Stenography by hand is associated with women working in offices and we find it spread as soon as jobs were created: 1872 in the UK it’s said 6 women knew Pitman, in 1893 6000. Gregg grew exponentially from 1901 -1915. Alice was published in 4 systems: Callenders (1899, the 7th, Mad Tea Party chapter), Pitman (1908 and 1909), Gregg (1915) and Pitman again (1979, Chapter 7).

We discussed stenography as well as why the Alice books appeal so. We also discussed the real gender faultline in the uses of hand stenography in the first 3/4s of the 20th century. I offered my memory that in my high school class in 1963 there were not boys learning shorthand, though you could find boys learning to type. Only girls learnt sten so there was a strong taboo of shame involved. But when machine stenography spread and began to be used by court reporters, men went in for the training in great numbers in post-secondary school.

I was charmed with the notion that stenography had been taught this way. In Richmond Hill High School where I was first taught Pitman stenography I was never encouraged to respect it as a system. I did that later when I studied languages in college. I should say here that all the blogs I’ve written since I started going to conferences and blogging are the result of my use of stenography. While recently I can no longer cover pages of my sten pages in pure Pitman, and must use English spelling and abbreviated words, when I am really trying to get down specific wording there’s nothing comes near using Pitman sten.

A table of short forms within Pitman

It’s a 19th century invention.

There was again much more to the conference in the later afternoon. A Plenary panel, a general meeting, and finally an African American Literary Walking Tour, with Toast. I could not do any of it. This was the last night of the Capital Fringe Festival: we had tickets for La Belle Parricide, a play by a community of women on Beatrice Cenci so my conference ended on Alice in Pitman. Many people appeared to be leaving around the same time.

As I came out of the building, the sun seemed so bright and the air very hot. I threaded into the quiet justle of people going down the escalator. The trains to and from into Alexandria were running on just one track (not two) so there seemed to be a mass of people waiting to get on as they were thus running slowly (taking turns). I got home in plenty of time.

*****************************
This is the first conference I’ve written about in this extensive way in quite a while. I had heard a diverse number of excellent papers which took positions which did teach about how books can be or are made to function socially. Countless individuals have largely idiosyncratic or personal responses to books that these large social perspectives ignore or sweep by and these are important for the individuals and for their communities too — making for finer disinterested ideals from the sympathetic imagination which can cross all borders. Yet people do choose a book because they are part of a particular sophisticated or political world, and read as part of that (often class-based) world. About this group of people at the conference, I came away feeling the generality might have at one time really loved books for themselves (as on some level I still do a fine, beautiful or wise and good and great book), for their texts (ditto), and that’s why they cared about books materially and how they function as social instruments, commodities and social capital.

See Sharp 1, Sharp 2, and Sharp 3.

Ellen

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Scottish women poets: Isabel Pagan (c. 1741-1821), Janet Hamilton (1795-1873), Mary MacKellar, Lochbar (1836-90)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve not made a foremother poet blog here for a month unless you count my review of Linda Peterson’s Traditions of Women’s Autobiography. I’ve been busy watching Andrew Davies’s movies, working during the day on my Jane Austen Movies book, it’s been hot and at night I’ve been tired and writing friends (a pleasure for me), or reading friends’ blogs.

Also I decided I would try to extend my knowledge of women’s poetry and include women whose work or era or type I didn’t know well at all, but were of real interest, power, beauty. This takes reading anthologies and thus time. On Reveries under the Sign of Austen, I did succeed in telling something of the lives and presenting the poetry of several American black women of the Harlem Renaissance, and I wanted to tell of a kind of poetry and poets I did know something about but not enough to make individual blogs: Scottish women poets. I’ve spoken of this before when I wrote about Kathleen Raine and Anne Grant. So I waited several weeks while I read through Catherine Kerrigan’s An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets, and I have three to share tonight. I’ve chosen women who show the ballad tradition of communal poetry women wrote together (as an imaginative and literal community), individual autobiographical and protest poems, describing their lives, and poetry from the Gaelic tradition.

These traditions and community groups as well as the types of poetry and occasional individual who emerged can be found in essays in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edd. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan: “The Gaelic Tradition up to 1750″ (Ann C. Frater), “Old Singing Women and the Canons of Scottish Balladry and Song (Mary Ellen Brown),” “Women and Song, 150-1820″ (especially good by Kirsteen McCue), and for more recent women, “What a Voice! Women, Repertoire and Loss in the Singing Tradition” (Elaine Petrie), “Women’s Wrting in Scottish Gaelic Since 1750″ (Meg Bateman). The book also contains good essays on individual writers and say two or three women poets grouped together.

****************************

Tents Muir, Scotland by George Whitton Johnstone (1849-1901)

I begin with Isabel Pagan since a friend sent me a UTube rendition of her one famous folksong, “Ca’ the yowes to the knowes.”

_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX_jZ4Wn01Q&feature=related_
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX_jZ4Wn01Q&feature=related)

I was first attracted to Isabel Pagan’s poetry when I read Paula R. Feldman’s “life” in her British Women Poets of the Romantic Era that she was “A spirited woman who lived alone” and someone “unapologetically promiscuous, habitually drunk, and irrevent towards religion.” She was an alehouse keeper abandoned by her family in early life, and had to earn her own living. What happened to her was she was born with a disability that made it hard for her to walk and was impregnated by one Campbell, deserted, and then had a child. She lived in Muir, Scotland all the rest of her life after 14 in a property that had been a warehouse for a tar works, within walking distance of a village. Admiral Keith Steward gave it her rent free for life and so she opened an alehouse. She never had a license to sell liquor either – so she was not much good at negotiating institutions, had nothing to offer them anyway, and Steward’s help only went so far. Her place became a favorite for sportsmen (people coming to murder birds) in August; once when a clergyman visited her, she told of a satire she wrote at age 12 where she is told by a clergyman she will go to hell, and she replies “‘was not that great nonsense.” A woman after my own heart.

She apparently was wholly self-taught, could not write herself, only read. Her A Collection of Songs and Poems on Several Occasions printed by Niven, Napier and Khull of Trongate was published 1803, when she was in her early sixties. Her amanuensis is said to have been William Gemmell, a tailor. 76 pages of love songs, bawdy ones, in jokes, some tender and passionate it’s said, all from the ambiance of the “cheerful” Scots alehouse. A persona (people will understand I hope). In one “Hunting Song” she mentions some of her regular customers by name.She speaks out against injustice, government policy (no less), but there is a balancing act between insubordination and acceptance that enabled her to get them in print (and also survive).

The one I hope you listened to, gentle reader, would have been considered “indelicate” (“lewd” is another word from the era that might have been uttered) at the time:

CA’ THE YOWES TO THE KNOWES

Ca’ the yowes to the knowes -
Ca’ them whare the heather grows
­Ca’ them whare the burnie rows,
My bonnie dearie! [Chorus]

As I gaed doun the water side,
There I met my shepherd lad;
He rowed me sweetly in his plaid,
And ca’d me his dearie.

‘Will ye gang doun the water side,
And see the waves sae sweetly glide
Beneath the hazels spreading wide?
The mune it shines fu’ clearly.’

‘I was bred up at nae sic schule,
My shepherd lad, to play the fule,
And a’ the day to sit in dule,
And naebody to see me.’

‘Ye shall get gowns and ribbons meet,
Cauf-Ieather shoon to thy white feet,
And in my arms ye’se lie and sleep,
And ye shall be my dearie.’

‘If ye’ll but stand to what ye’ve said,
I’se gang wi’ you, my shepherd lad;
And ye may row me in your plaid,
And 1 shall be your dearie.’

‘While waters wimple to the sea ­
While day blinks i’ the lift sae hie ­
Till clay-cauld death shall blin my e’ e
Ye aye shall be my dearie!’

And here is one of her autobiographical pieces:

Account of the Author’s lifetime

I was born near four miles from Nith-head,
Where fourteen years I got my bread;
My learning it can soon be told,
Ten weeks when I was seven years old
With a good old religious wife,
Who liv’d a quiet and sober life;
Indeed she took of me more pains
Than some does now of forty bairns.
With my attention, and her skill,
I read the Bible no that ill;
And when I grew a wee thought mair,
I read when I had time to spare.
But a’ the whole tract of my time,
I found myself inclin’d to rhyme;
When I see merry company,
I sing a song with mirth and glee,
And sometimes I the whisky pree,
But ‘deed its best to let it be.
I, my faults I will not tell,
I scarcely ken them a’ mysel;
I’ve come thro’ various scenes of life,
Yet never was a married wife.
(1803)

Isabel Pagan lived to be 80 years old. As she was regarded as “well-known eccentric,” her funeral is said to have been well-attended. I note the singer of the song above is also called Isobel (Baillie).

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A spinning wheel

Janet Hamilton is very much one of Donna Landry’s Muses of Resistance: working class, out-spoken, deprived in so many ways. She lived in Shotts, Lanarkshire. A spinster and weaver, she married in 1809 and had 10 children. When young she taught herself to read by propping books against her spinning wheel. She learned to write only at age 54. She must’ve seen much drunkenness, misery among the men of her class making life much worse for the women.

Kerrigan reprints three poems, but I include only the two in English, because the third (and apparently much of her poetry) is written in Scots and very hard to reprint and not easy to decipher.

LAY OF THE TAMBOUR FRAME

Bending with straining eyes
Over the tambour frame,
Never a change in her weary routine ­
Slave in all but the name.
Tambour, ever tambour,
Tambour the wreathing lines
Of ‘broidered silk, till beauty’s robe
In rainbow lustre shines.

There, with colour less cheek;
There, with her tangling hair;
Still bending low o’ er the rickety frame,
Seek, ye will find her there.
Tambour, ever tambour,
With fingers cramped and chill; -
The panes are shattered, and cold the wind
Blows over the eastern hill.

Why quail, my sisters, why,
As ye were abjects vile,
When begging some haughty brother of earth
‘to give you leave to toil’?
It is tambour you must,
Naught else you have to do;
Though paupers’ dole be of higher amount
Than pay oft earned by you.

No union strikes for you; ­
Unshielded and alone
In the battle of life – a battle it is,
Where virtue is oft o’erthrown.
O working men! Oh, why
Pass ye thus careless by,
or give to the working woman’s complaint
One word of kind reply?

Selfish, unfeeling men!
Have ye not had your will?
High pay, short hours; yet your cry, like the leech, Is,
Give us, give us still.
She who tambours – tambours
For fifteen hours a day -
Would have shoes on her feet, and dress for church,
Had she a third of your pay.

Sisters, cousins, and aunts
Are they; yet, if not so,
Say,I are they not sisters by human ties,
And sympathy’s kindly flow?
To them how dear the boon
From brother’s hand that came!
It would warm the heart and brighten the eyes,
While bending 0′ er the frame.

Raise ye a fund to aid
In times of deep distress;
While man helps man, to their sisters in need
Brothers can do no less.
Still the tambourer bends
Wearily o’er the frame.
Pattern oft vary, for fashions will change ­
She is ever the same.

A tambour frame

The Plague of our Isle

It is said, it is sung, it is written, and read,
It sounds in the ear, and it swims in the head,
It booms in the air, it is borne 0′ er the sea -
There’s a good time coming’, but when shall it be?

Shall it be when Intemperance, enthroned on the waves
Of a dark sea of ruin, is scooping the graves
Of thousands, while redly the dark current rolls
With the blood of her, victims – the slaughter of souls?

A canker is found in the bud, flower, and fruit
Of human progression – a worm at the root
Of social improvement – a fiery simoom
That sweeps o’er the masses to burn and consume.

‘Tis found on the heaven-hallow’d day of repose­
Blest haven of rest from our toils and our woes!
That voice of the drunkard, the oath, curse, and brawl,
Are sounds of such frequence, they cease to appal.

We see the grey father, the youth in his prime,
Throw soul, sense, and feeling, health, substance, and time.
In the cup of the drunkard – the mother and wife
Hugs the snake in her bosom that ‘venoms her life.

We see the gaunt infant, so feeble and pale,
Crave nature’s sweet fluid from fountains that fail;
Or run with hot poison, distill’d from the breast
Of the mother – 0 monstrous! – a drunkard, a pest!

We’ve seen, with her bright hair all clotted with blood,
Lie cold on the hearth – where at morning she stood
The wife of a summer – a babe on her breast -
The husband a drunkard -let death tell the rest.

And darker and deeper the horrors that shroud
The brain of the drunkard; what dark phantoms crowd
‘The cells of his fancy’, his couch of despair
Is empty – the suicide slumbers not there.

O why do we seek, do we hope to bestow
‘The colours of heaven on the dwellings of woe’?
‘Tis temperance must level the strongholds of crime ­
‘Tis temperance must herald the ‘coming good time’.

Then turn ye! oh, turn ye! for why will ye die?
Ye shrink from the plague when its advent is nigh­
The Indian pestilence, the plague of old Nile -
Less deadly by far than the Plague of our Isle.

Janet Hamilton was was published in Cassell’s Working Man’s Friend. Poems and Prose Works of Janet Hamilton (1885).

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This modern translation by Meg Bateman from the Gaelic of Mary MacKellar of Lochaber is very much in the mood of these sorts of poems: melancholy, quietude desired. So too the women wrote formal, regular poetry, stanzaic, wth lots of rhyme. These are techiques which make them easier to remember and pass on. There is very little known about any individual woman.

The Vain Search

Where is there peace and where is there quiet,
where is there peace and where is there quiet,
There is a cure for the heart that’s oppressed,
and where is there ease from horror and dread?

Like the waves of the ocean that break on the shore,
and murmur and moan at the foot of the rocks,
is the tossing and turning all over the world,
with everything as restless as the breast of the surge.

I planted a flower in a bower where it grew,
and when it smelled sweet with the sun and the dew
death came and destroyed it with a frost-laden wind,
and its tender young leaves turned yellow to the tips.

I brought a bird from the wood to sing sweetly to me,
I would listen to the small bird’s glee
It was dull and dejected, sitting on the mould,
its eyes without lustre, its reed without note.

I searched the glen for peace and for quiet
one bright summer’s day with the sun in the sky,
and before it moved west, the heavens turned black, .
and lightening and thunder shattered the crags.

I wanted to find rest and I wanted to find quiet,
I wanted to flee from war and from strife,
and when I’d thought I’d reached the port of the brave,
I found I’d gone wrong travelling the waves.

I wanted rest though none exists on this earth,
and I lay my head down on my love’s white breast,
and that pillow was full of the petals of the rose,
but, alas, in their midst there was also the thorn.

Oh, how could there be peace on the battlefield,
when the clashes must be hard before we’re set free,
there’ll be felling and wounding, iniquity and feuds,
and though sad, it’s vain to be looking for a truce.

But when we win victory as everyone should
on the silvery sand that lies over the flood,
we’ll find a tranquillity that cures every breach,
and be crowned with love in the joyous heart of peace.

Mary MacKellar of Lochbar and born in Fort William and is referred to as “Bardess of Clan Cameron” and was published in 1880, in Poems and Songs in Gaelic and English. I love the above poem until the last two stanzas, when the reference to victory on a battlefield, resigned acceptance of war, and looking to an afterlife for consolation undermines its meaning for me.

Next week I’ll have a group of 20th century poets and the last conclude with our first women poet to have the terrorizing ominous distinction to be the first of my women poets to have been beheaded, Mary Stuart (known as Queen of Scots, 1542-87).

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans Lewes) (1818-80)

In France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language . . . (George Eliot, “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé”)

George Eliot, 16 March 1877, Sketch by Princess Louise

Dear friends and readers,

I’m yet later this week for my foremother poet posting. Since I’m listening to a splendid reading of the unabridged text of Daniel Deronday by Donada Peters (aka Nadia May, Wanda McCaddon, Ann Miles, Leonarda Stafford) I thought I’d commemorate Mary Ann Evans (pen name: George Eliot) today. I realize from talking to people who love Eliot’s novels and have read all of them, that many people today are unaware she wrote much poetry and some magnificent narratives, not to discount the eloquence, intelligent perception and compassion, wonderful characters, dramatic scenes, description, in short the beauty and poetry of her prose.

Here though I concentrate on Eliot’s verse.

Her Spanish Gypsy, a long dramatic poem (story) was a bigger hit than a couple of her novels (especially Romola, written around the same time) and was reviewed lovingly by Henry James. It’s strongly effective psychological poetry, though the politics are dismayingly reactionary, and the heroine immolates herself (which gives insight into aspects of her novels). Eliot has a sonnet sequence called Brother and Sister (about herself and her brother). There are many poems of the Browning or Tennyson type (monologues, stories) and lots of Martial-like epigrammatic pieces, and lyrics too, the latter mostly (to me) overdone or solemn, arising from Wordsworth and Shelleyan conceptions. Most are too long for me to describe or begin to type out here.

One long dramatic poem titled Armgart was much read and discussed and still is analyzed by critics; it’s about a woman artist whose career is destroyed by a combination of illness and social pressure.

Here is a good passage people often quote from Armgart:

I would rebel and die in twenty worlds
Sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life,
Each keenest sense turned into keen distaste,
Hunger not satisfied but kept alive
Breathing in languor half a century.
All the world now is but a rack of threads
To twist and dwarf me into pettiness
And basely feigned content, the placid mask
of women’s misery.

Her poetry has been collected; I have a copy of a dissertation that is an edition of the poems. Here I found rows of fragments, little pieces of verse left over as it were, never worked up or placed into a large poem (or as epigraphs to her novels). The reader has to contextualize them him or herself. Here are two:

Suggested by Pindar:

Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life;
And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
They throb in after-throbs till Time himself
Be laid in stillness, and the universe
Quivers and breathes upon no mirror more.

Perhaps about her and Lewes, who was very ill for a long time before he died, and who was her life in effect: he made her writing of her novels possible, he negotiated the contracts which enriched them so they could travel, live well. He supported her very inch of the way lovingly, and she him.

Master in loving! till we met
I lacked the pattern thy sweet love hath set:
I hear Death’s footstep — must we then forget? –
Stay, stay — not yet.

George Henry Lewes, 1876 (see Trollope’s obituary)

This is from her sonnets, Brother and Sister. She had a tortured relationship with her brother (reflected in The Mill on the Floss; she just couldn’t get herself to dismiss his cold malice and rejection of her, and late in life tried to make up with him after she married Cross).

In the first as a generic sister she mourns the loss of her brother’s love and seems to say she placed the very meaning of her existence in her memories and past with him:

VI

Our brown canal was endless to my thought;
And on its banks I sat in dreamy peace,
Unknowing how the good I loved was wrought,
Untroubled by the fear that it would cease.

Slowly the barges floated into view
Rounding a grassy hill to me sublime
With some Unknown beyond it, whither flew
The parting cuckoo toward a fresh spring time.

The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder-flowers,
The wondrous watery rings that died too soon,
The echoes of the quarry, the still hours
With white robe sweeping-on the shadeless noon,

Were but my growing self, are part of me,
My present Past, my root of piety.

In the second you see a woman as a young girl led to worship the male; at the same time there’s a suicidal wish:

VII

THOSE long days measured by my little feet
Had chronicles which yield me many a text;
Where irony still finds an image meet
Of full-grown judgments in this world perplext.

One day my brother left me in high charge,
To mind the rod, while he went seeking bait,
And bade me, when I saw a nearing barge,
Snatch out the line, lest he should come too late.

Proud of the task, I watched with all my might
For one whole minute, till my eyes grew wide,
Till sky and earth took on a strange new light
And seemed a dream-world floating on some tide –

A fair pavilioned boat for me alone
Bearing me onward through the vat unknown.

There is just so much on George Eliot’s life one doesn’t know where to begin. I strongly urge though beginning with Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Maryann Evans, based as it is thoroughly on Eliot’s texts, especially her wonderful letters; Peggy Fitzhugh Johnston’s The Transformation of Rage is also very good. I find Ashton a normalizer and basically she just gives a redo of Gordon Haight. Also very good are the books by Jennifer Uglow, Gillian Beer and William Baker. The edition of poems I spoke of is a Cornell dissertation by Cynthia Ann Secor, and I wouldn’t miss Eliot’s brilliant essays, especially the one called “Wonen in France” (a review of a book of letters in the 17th century) where she for once talks about the birth of feminism in literature and situates in the later 17th century in France (from which I took my opening quotation). Her “Silly Lady Novelists’ shows her anti-feminism side and is unfortunately endlessly reprinted; there are countless silly male novelists who should be equally skewed.

I include here a passage from an essay I published partly on George Eliot in Studies in the Novel, “Taking Sides” (it includes a bibliography for Eliot):

A close reading of Eliot’s novels in the context of her autobiographical writing and non-fiction suggested to me that for the most part George Eliot’s politics is voiced in a language of painful personal experience. Her last book, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, includes rare instances of outright political language. There she dismisses an ideal of “common humanity” as hopelessly elitist “cosmopolitanism” or “universal alienism.” She argues that individuals cannot identify with one another as simply as people: nationalism is not a social construction; anyone who thinks differently is a blind idealist. Her assumption is that the only way to achieve toleration for any group of people is to give them power over themselves and other groups of people or equal power with other groups in a specific area (Theophrastus Such 146-49, 165). In Eliot’s stories her intelligent and sensitive heroes and heroines are thwarted and punished, and are made to submit to the desires of dense and passionate characters who far from earning any right to ask for submission, have maimed and will probably continue to maim these heroes and heroines because she despaired of finding any other way for them to achieve a peaceful integration into an ordered world. In her fiction, she articulates this idea in words which show she came to it through giving in to painful imperceptive pressure, and she urges the reader to see this kind of pressure as rooted in irremediable weakness which moral strength should yield to:

The stronger will always rule, say some, with an air of confidence which is like a lawyer’s flourish, forbidding exceptions or additions. But what is strength? Is it blind wilfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cords it tightens? Is it the narrowness of brain that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of to-day; that tugs with emphasis for every small purpose, and thinks it weakness to exercise the sublime power of resolved renunciation? There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness (Felix Holt 78).

Eliot’s stories are shaped to show that characters who subject themselves to others by overriding vitally-felt obligations to themselves or others also get something of pragmatic value in return. The rewards include gratification because the group professes admiration and respect for the individual, a highly compromised or grudging and grateful love, and safety (Middlemarch 586-87, 664-66; “The Antigone and Its Moral,” Byatt and Warren 365-66).

It is the great merit of Eliot’s imaginative work that she poses questions of serious and large import with which we are today only beginning to deal frankly. It may be its great defect that she repeatedly opts for dramatic resolutions which cruelly deprive her exemplary characters of some natural fulfillment or worthy goal on the grounds that it is right for them to violate their instincts. However, when she does this she provides an earnest agonized record of what was lost: Daniel Deronda’s mother unrepentantly puts before her son how her father egoistically used the patriarchical norms for a mother and daughter to pervert humane obligations between individuals and to repress her talents and nature as an individual (e.g., Daniel Deronda 535-48;Wilt).

It is true that Eliot’s stories occasionally end shockingly with an immolation of what is estimable, humane, and productive of genuinely beneficial decency, sometimes on behalf of an egoistic illusory tribal nationalism (The Spanish Gypsy). The Mill on the Floss ends on Maggie’s semi-suicidal act on behalf of a brother who has throughout the novel been as repugnant, narrow-minded, and vindictive as she has been pleasing, open-minded, and forgiving.8 More frequently, though, her endings are consolatory. At long last her characters find themselves in, or create a situation where one of them or the situation itself permits a dramatic resolution which defies the materialism, genetic tribalism, and the sheer cruelty and stupidity of unjust social arrangements rooted in human nature. The close of Silas Marner gives us a young girl who refuses to leave the old man who has brought her up and invested everything he valued in himself in her, not on the grounds that she would feel uncomfortable in upper class society (as the BBC/A&E/WGBH 1995 film adaptation of Silas Marner would have it), but on the grounds that her biological father has forfeited his rights over her.

In one of Eliot’s letters she writes:

I cannot tell you how much melancholy it causes me that people are, for the most part, so incapable of comprehending the state of mind which cares for that which is essentially human in all forms of belief, and desires to exhibit it under all forms of loving truthfulness … the only affect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but in the broad fact of being human (Haight, George Eliot Letters 3:111, 5 July 1859).

Eliot infuses her pictures of earlier eras with nostalgia; painstaking research mitigates the idealization. The goal seems to induce a belief in a time and place when individual acts had significance. Her choice of historical fiction seems rooted in her religious sensibility (Anger).

Eliot’s novels powerfully focus on characters who have lived apart, for whom isolation produces severe mental distress and destructive behavior. Her later novels are prophetic because she lived and wrote as a displaced alienated woman who lovingly narrated her experience and that of others with absolute earnest literal truthfulness “as if I were in a witness- box . . . on oath” (Adam Bede 177). Her complicity is expiatory propitiation. To close ourselves off from her torment is to close ourselves off from that of other women writers whose work hers resembles (and who have been castigated similarly). George Eliot’s past is not another country.

I close with a deliberately provocative passage from A.S. Byatt’s Whistling woman (now A. S. Byatt is much indebted to Eliot, herself a pastiche novelist of power in her Possession):

“”Eliot punished her beautiful characters, Julia said. No, said Frederica, she punished those who exploited it, who lived by it. Hetty, cold Rosamund, chilly, terrified, power-crazed Gwendolen. Her warm-blooded heroines were beautiful too. Dorothea, Maggie. But they wanted something else out of life beside sex and marriage, and sex and marriage defeated them. She punished them, said Julia. She punished Dorothea for high mindedness and Maggie for throbbing with emotion. She made Dorothea decline into marriage with a second-rate journalist, and punished Maggie for sex, with drowning. She couldn’t make a model of a woman who could be free, and creative, and sexy. She couldn’t give her readers any hope.

‘She was free and creative and sexy’, said Frederica. ‘She must have been the most public adulteress in England, and in the end Queen Victoria commissioned a series of paintings from her books and they tried to bury her in the Abbey’.

‘She had no children’, said Penny. ‘She knew about contraception, sponges and vinegar.

‘She looked after GH Lewes’s sons’, said Frederica. ‘She earned their school fees’.

‘Like a man,’ said Julia. ‘she earned money. Like a man.’

‘She couldn’t let Dorothea found a universiity, or Maggie write a book’, said Frederica. ‘She was telling it how it was. How clever women’s lives were’.”

Ellen

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