EC/ASECS conference on liberty in the long 18th century at Penn State: enslaved families; professional women, Priestley, the Paterno library

The family broken up in a slave auction

Dear friends and readers,

I continue my report of the fine conference (East Central Region meeting of ASECS at Penn State) centering on the concept of liberty in the long 18th century. Over the course of three days, there emerged a developing definition for different groups of people, much pursuit, much thwarting. Gambling emerged as a mode of liberty rather than enslavement; controlling your image in public (a form of self-restriction) so as not to tell of your real private life provides a modicum of liberty; I heard defended cases of people turning away from friends so as to protect themselves (a paradoxical use of liberty). We all at the business lunch heard of the courage of the scientist and radical thinker, Priestley.

As in my first, my summaries of the papers are just part of the gist of what I heard: what I was able to take notes about and interested me. I enjoyed all the papers I heard very much and (as at Bethlehem), you’d think someone had my interests in mind. Then it was Burney; this time (for me) women seeking liberty as professionals, especially actresses as presented in their memoirs.

See the first report and the third.

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So, in the later afternoon on Friday, we had our first plenary lecture: Jennifer L. Morgan in “‘Their Children shall be bound:’ Freedom and Family Life in New World Slavery.” Prof Morgan began by quoting Toni Morrison’s Beloved that marriages in slavery occurred in the darkness: it could not exist during the day. The slave trade turns enslaved people into commodities and black women disappear from the record. Women were treated brutally over and above their sexualized labor (for sex and to produce babies), enmeshed in systems of violence. The rhetoric justifying slavery claimed that African women were different from European: they had no pain in childbirth, could put their distended breasts behind their backs to feed a child while they were laboring in the fields; the purpose of their existence was to work and work hard, and mercilessly whipped to force this. She quoted someone who had written a description of family forcibly parted; showed us an Abolitionist image of the hold of a slave ship in the middle passage where one can see a slave women in a tiny space giving birth while she is shackled. There was a tradition in Africa of women doing hard agricultural work. She told of why African people sold others as slaves (you make more than when you farm); of the diseases African were and were not subject to; the difference in a life of rice versus cotton or tobacco cultivation

Despite all this black people were able to experience aspects of family life however checkered and anguished. Much of the lecture was taken up with showing whatever remnants are left of whatever kind of family life: slave owners wrote that one way to stop a man from revolting is to provide him with a wife, and there is much evidence enslaved parents cared intensely about their enslaved children; there are records of terrible punishments for women (working harder in fields, given worse jobs) when they try to cling to their children longer than allowed. This was a grim sobering talk about how slavery shaped and deformed slave families. I thought of speaking in the discussion afterwards of how George Calvert freed his slave family at Riverdale house and tried to provide for them, but I know these ameliorating sort of anecdotes because whites wrote them down.

An hour after the lecture, we had our reception of drinking and snacks at the Nittany Inn and then a banquet to which many people came. Suffice to say I enjoyed the talk with friends and acquaintances very much, especially some more women friends, Erliss, Sylvia and mingling with all sorts of people and the talk with yet others over dinner.

And then it was back to our room, some Riesling wine, books and bed.

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Hester Thrale Piozzi (1741-1821) by Charles Dance (1793)

The next morning (Saturday) I went to two more sessions on professional women: these went beyond actresses to include novelists and letter-writers. Marilyn Francis’s paper on Hester Thrale Piozzi began the sequence. She began with the real problem that the definition of professional is not fixed in this era. Professionalism in the 16th century was defined as someone with a vocation; it has a religious sense as of one professing a faith. By 1784 it means someone engaged in a profession, someone with training and a skill; and by the end of the 18th century professionals were to be distinguished from amateurs in something of the 20th century way, but either word can be found used derogatorily. What do you do with a scientist like Caroline Herschel? Her paper was about women achieving professional status or recognition and respect for their kind of work (from writing to saloniere) even if we cannot see an outward recognizable shape in the sense of consecutive steps (and salary). Thus Sarah Fielding is a professional woman of letters if you study her life and work.

Marilyn felt, however, that Hester Thrale Piozzi represented someone unusual because she really commanded respect the way men who set standards do: say, Johnson with his dictionary, Reynolds with his Discourses of Art, Burney’s history of music. This, even if what she wrote was not conventionally recognizable as say a biography (her writing about Johnson is titled Anecdotes). Reviewers were unable to discuss her work according to their preconceived categories about genre, style, purpose, yet her content is liked. She was consistently writing, consistently inventing new genres and new criteria for genres. She existed in a liminal space between amateur and professional which allowed her to “take liberties” which were creative.

Gambling scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 Barry Lyndon

Loring Pfeiffer discussed gambling in women and men’s plays, with Susannah Centlivre’s Basset Table and Gamester, Mary Pix’s Beau Defeated, and Colley Cibber’s Lady’s Last Stake providing her example texts. Gambling was wildly popular in the 18th century, and when written about the concern was over “depravity,” loss of money; Collier said it leveled class distinctions. It displayed wealth and seemed immoral. Many characters in the era’s plays gamble, especially women, e.g., Lady Townley in Vanbrugh and Cibber’s Provoked Husband. Gambling compromised women’s chastity, shows that women are not easy to control. In Cibber’s Lady’s Last Stake, Lady Gentle is challenged when payment is sex; that frightens her into reform. In Centlivre’s Basset Table, Lady Reveler does not repent, marries and does not stop gambling, carries on with life of pleasure. Mrs Sago steals from her merchant husband to fund her habit of gambling and Mr Sago is blamed for not controlling his wife. Similarly in Mary Pix’s Beau Defeated, the middle class female character, Mrs Rich, learns to eschew gambling. Ms Pfeiffer felt that those heroines who at the end of their plays still have access to money parallel Centlivre’s own financial success and independence.

In her paper on Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829), Nora Nachumi asked what enabled Elizabeth Farren to escape the calumny and sexualizing of actresses in the period so that Farren’s presentation of herself as chaste and not having sex with Lord Derby was believed. On 14 March 1799 Derby’s first wife died; April 8 Farren played her last role on the stage (Lady Teazle); May 2nd she married Derby and was fully accepted by his people and all others too. Very little survives in her letters; her story was told by others, including Memoirs of the present Countess of Derby, told by Petronius Arbiter, by Scriptor Veritatis; the work is snobbish and presents Farren as lady-like, innocent, not ambitious, but had integrity, good breeding — though when she was dying she did not support her family. In her theatrical career, she was willing to take lessons; she followed Mrs Abington with her own Lady Teazle; she separated herself from a woman architect who wanted to be her lover, Anne Seymour Damer. Farren worked very hard on her roles, and managed her career so that her identity was thought to be glimpsed in well-bred and lady-like characters. Nora thought Farren created for herself an artificial identity; she is a strong contrast to what we know and surmise about Georgiana Spencer, Countess of Devonshire. Derby got her the respectable friendship with Emily Fitzgerald, duchess of Leinster. She became friends with respectable actresses like Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Inchbald. The “amateur” theatricals she mounted also added to her respectability.

Anne Seymour Damer (1748-1828) by Giuseppe Ceracchi

In the discussion afterward, Jessican Rickman’s Romance of Gambling was recommended. I rose to say that the definition of women as professional women of letters by virtue of making money, or a visible promoted career, or high postion would exclude many women today. On my Wompo listserv women poets and others have agreed with me and Paula Backscheider in her book on women’s poetry in the 18th century that one has to define a woman poet by asking if this is truly her vocation, the way she spends her time, not if she makes money by it, how much publication she has or if she is on some ladder of promotion in an institution. The label “professional” is still a sore one since most women today are not able to encompass all of these categories. So-called poet models include Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti. Someone suggested maybe we had to look at women in different genres differently. Perhaps.

I only briefly suggested this to the larger group, but I was struck in the two sessions thus far on how hard most of the women’s lives were and how rarely a happy older life (when the woman aged). Those who escaped to marriage or got some permanent funding or land through a man or family were able to be stable and seemingly contented. Some exceptions among those mentioned at the sessions include Elizabeth Inchbald who supported her family — though she did destroy her memoirs and it seems was under the thumb of priests. I did notice too there seemed to be a pattern among the successful women of dropping beloved or close women friends or family members or just associates who seemed to give the writer, actress a real or meaningful relationship of her life. There was overt pressure from others to drop these women (like Derby pressured Farren to drop Damer). It puts me in mind of Charlotte Lucas who has to distance herself from Elizabeth quite tangibly to be safe.

On gambling, I thought of how Louise d’Epinay’s Montbrillant, Georgiana Spencer’s Sylph, and Edgeworth’s Leonora all contain stories of husbands bullying (menacing, threatening, physically forcing in the case of Montbrillant) their wives (the book’s heroine) to have sex with a man the husband owes money to. To be sure, Leonora (Austen’s Lady Susan was modelled on her perhaps or just such another type) doesn’t really mind. Also that George Sand’s Lelia is about a woman who recklessly and pleasurably engaged in gambling and sex. She was excoriated for it to the point that afterward she ceased writing openly heroine’s texts, and put males at the center of her stories. I told this to Loring Pfeiffer though she was not interested. perhaps because these are novels. What I liked about Sand’s was the heroine was having a deeply alive time.

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The second session of papers on professional women began with Jan Stahl’s paper on Mary Davys’ The Reform’d Coquet. Jan said that Davys’ problem was she wanted to present and critique male violence, and yet not lose her own reputation for chastity and virtue because she wanted to continue to write for money and for the respect her friends showed her when she produced her books. Davys also produces a novel where the heroine learns lessons from her guardian and her reward is marriage to the hero; here, though the apparently major story is blended into one that seems to count more than the central one: the heroine’s friend is raped and nearly murdered, and the two women characters have a homoerotic relationship important to them. Davys allows them to engage in role-playing in ways unusual for women characters. It’s a novel which presents itself as about the education of the central characters, but this is a sort of outward disguise.

Mary Robinson (1757-1800) by George Romney

Lisa Wilson presented a long talk on Robinson from a book history perspective: the thrust was that the way Robinson’s books were packaged (paratexts, illustrations, what was said about her life) were all calculated to make Robinson into a respectable poet and woman of letters (they resemble aspects of Accademia della Crusca poetry books). Prof Wilson divided Robinson’s life into 3 careers: 1) amateur writing of poetry, stage acting; 2) mistress of George IV (a short career); and 3) a return to poetry, novels, memoirs. Wilson said she used the recognizable identity of the woman poet of genius; she claimed sensibility, artlessness. (It seemed Prof Wilson didn’t care Robinson’s poignant senusual poetry much; she never discussed any of Robinson’s poetry as poetry.) John Bell had a long career of publishing well-made books of find literature, and his accepting, recognizing and helping Robinson when others rejected her makes him an appealing figure.

Elizabeth Hamilton (1756-1816) by Henry Raeburn

The last of these papers on professional women that I heard was Temma Berg’s “Becoming a Professional Woman: the Career of Elizabeth Hamilton.” The session was running out of time and Temma had to cut short her paper unfortunately. Temma set two of her novels, The Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796, where she pretends she’s a translator), and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) in the context of Hamilton’s life, her brother’s early death and other literary texts where political stances were debated. Temma said that Hamilton wanted to present herself as on the side of reform in these books, but that the reform is not a radical one; women need and want to be lovers, mothers, wives, mistresses, a helpful aide. She partly wrote Hindoo Rajah to solace herself after her brother died. I liked the relativity of the novels’ structures, their tone, their kindness (at least as described by Temma). They do have strongly anti-Jacobin elements and one anti-feminist caricature: Bridgetina, through whom she makes fun of herself. Temma felt these books are post-modern, register an experience of post-modern self-reflexive learning, of alienation.

The discussion afterward had to be short, and most of the questions were addressed to Lisa Wilson about book sales in the era.

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Two more events to record. During the business lunch, Lisa Rosner gave a splendid lecture on Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), radical thinker, scientist, land- and library owner. It was great fun to see her do some of these experiment sin front of us; she had an attractive power-point presentation of images of Priestley, his books, his home, his experiments. Lisa began with Priestley’s political and educational work and issues; later her discourse on his experiments (some shown to us), and, finally, briefly, her later sad years. After the lunch for Roy Wolpert, a small group went with Christine Clark-Evans, who teaches at this conference, and together with Linda Merians (the society’s central organizer), she made this conference happen and have all the lovely events we did. Well she took us to the Paterno Library where we saw spread out on tables, rare precious books from the 18th century. Christine performed the function of curator herself. I could see what a rich place Penn State is for a scholar, and enjoyed looking over the separate volumes on the tables, hearing their stories (as it were).

While we were there, the scandal over the exploitation and sexual abuse of boys by one of the lead coaches at Penn State was beginning to saturate the newspapers. Ironically, this is a story of thwarted and exploited liberty too: of how the trust others had in these men to give them free access to these boys (a kind of liberty) was abused. Other similarly trusted and powerful people allowed one man directly to hurt the boys seeking success and promotion (he raped them), of how other people, his colleagues and other boys allowed this to happen rather than risk their careers, the reputation of Penn State, and the income football generated, of how norms of masculinity and heterosexual sexuality twist, limit, and direct and enslave children and adults (see links in comment).

My last and third blog covers a session and lecture later in the afternoon (on Thomson’s The Seasons, and then on Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier de St George, known sometimes as “the black Mozart”), and two of Sunday’s presentations: Did Aphra Behn write the short fiction and Letters between a Noble-man and His sister? Edgeworth’s Leonora as an epistolary novel of Continental sensibilities?

Ellen

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Books in art and science: Sharp (3): community identities through books (Australia, South Africa, in libraries); book illustration (Phiz & Millais)

Children’s reading club, circa 1910, Children’s Museum, NY or NJ

Dear friends and readers,

A third instalment of my experience of the Sharp conference last weekend. What unites these sessions is the belief that people form social identities through reading books and magazines and create social networks and capital (Bourdieu’s term) by setting up and controlling what happens in institutions needed for the study of books. All the paraphernalia and social experience surrounding books are exploited to make favored books sell and norms spread; this includes illustrations. National identities and what language a group speaks, which languages die and which carry on partly depend on and are shaped by what texts are published and distributed.

Perhaps individual minds and hearts were not so much left out, as people were seen sheerly in their social roles interacting with one another with books. Of course individual experience with books occurs when someone is alone in a room or with his or her book and matters as intensely and maybe more than all this identity formation, marketplace behavior and accounts of social external interaction of a less intimate nature. However, it’s not something that’s studied generally nor quantifiable and not the focus of book history.

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Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney

Saturday mid-morning I went to a 2nd session on “Transnational Transactions,” this one on forming literatures and marketplaces. In “The Two-Sided Triangle: Australian Books and American Publishers” David Carter described the attempts of Australian publishers and authors to go beyond a paradigm set up early for selling books: in publishing London was a center which dominated Australia; it’s a story of Australian books published in the US without reference to UK editions. Famous books like Henry Kingsley’s Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life appeared in both the UK and US, but there were numerous lesser books published in just American editions, e.g., Rolfe Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms, mysteries and thrillers (Fergus Hume’s The Steel Crown. Jessie Couvrer (Tasmania)’s Piper of Piper Hall. Copyright made a great difference in the profits that could be made so we see the twentieth century’s book clubs distribute Henry Handel [Ethel Florence] Richardson; the Nobel Prize made Patrick White’s books more popular in the US than UK. It’s a story of changes from decade to decade: in the 1930s Australians began to write books for an American audience; after 1945 the paperback revolution spread sexy and detective fiction; in the 1980s there was a boom in sales, which was not sustained. Australian science fiction and fantasy sold, but stories rooted in Australian landscape, history, culture did not draw much readership. Nonetheless, in the 21st century Sydney talk directly to London and New York publishers. Nowaday there is much intermixing so it’s not clear if J. M. Coetzee is an Australian or South African published in the US.

Gerald Groenewald’s “‘Through literature a nation becomes great:’ Afrikaner Nationalism and the reception of Afrikaner books in South Africa, circa 1910-40″ was the story of how Die Huisgenout or The Family and House Magazine played a central role in the formation of a separate Afkricaner white identity. Sucessive editors differently attempted to define and model a national Afrikaner life by telling (inventing?) a history of traditions and ideals. Four to five out of 28 pages were reviews of books. There were 3 distinct periods under 3 distinct editorships: 1916-23, the magazine was high brow, serious throughout; then 1923-31, it turned more popular, had fewer shorter book reviews, many photos, covered sports. 1931-45 a trade journalist headed the magazine and added strong nationalism (“the great trek” was celebrated); historical artists presented as heroic, with Africaner texts 2/3s, Dutch texts 10 to 23% and English 10 to 15%. You might say the magazine provided a school for all in the early 20th century. (Afrikans seems to be a dialect of Dutch.)

Frank de Glas told the story of the Prix Formentor (1961-65), named after the hotel its initiator and his favorite writers met at and the Prix International des Editeurs (1961-67) He was showing how small groups of individuals could create respected reputations for specific books, larger national constortiums (something worth thousands of dollars) with translations functioning as consecrations. There had been an upsurge inteh sale of books in the international market in the 1950s, and this advertising move made for author brandnames. Carlos Barral made his own and the careers of his protegees (5 writers’s careers were described) and overcame cultural repressions. Rules that were said to be followed were sometimes broken; all but communists could get their books sold. Dacia Matraini was one of the 5, the only woman and she was “annexed” by feminists.

This was the lunchtime where I bought myself bad coffee and a stale croissant for too much money; drank and ate little, and went back to the Dillon center to look at the beautiful art works by staff in the gallery, browse the books on display, talked to an editor about my book project (“A Place of Refuge,” a study of the Austen films) and then read quietly until the afternoon sessions started.

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The Boston Athenaeum Library

In the afternoon I went to a session about how books can also be the center of individual identity and small community formation. Katherine Wisser told who were the individuals who belonged to and created social worlds through the development of the Boston Atheneaum Library: 1806 reading room was established; in 1807 named Atheneaum; 1826 established in Pearl Street House; 1829 women officially let in; 1848 established in its present location on Beacon Street. The conscious motives were those of the Enlightenment, civic pride (Boston would vye with Philadelphia and Benjamin Franklin), and to build social capital for themselves. In 1856 the Boston Public Library was opened; 1876 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Proprietors were members, 70 in 1882, 65 men & 5 women; 3/4s of these people had gone to a Harvard college; their occupations were various, but over 1/4 were scholars, and most were involved with intellectual matters (lawyers.

Ross Harvey showed that while white New Zealanders through they were indoctrinating Maoris with industrial & capitalist (how to save, how to invest) ideas by the publication of a bilingual magazine, the Maori Messenger, Maoris had their own developed forms of industry and capitalism (tribe style), were interested in maritime, export, and agricultural activities. Their products included flax, potatoes, timber. George Grey helped Maoris hold onto their language; David Burns was used as an example of someone came to live in New Zealand and left a diary of his arduous life among the Maori, which was published.

Melanie Kimball’s “‘They wanted to read books by lady authors’”: early 20th century children’s reading clubs at the Cleveland Public library” (from archives from 1908-32) meant to demonstrate that children’s experiences were shaped by the librarians Kimball used American developmental psychology to categorize the different age groups. Children all want a club to be able to belong to a group and are vulnerable to peer pressure; between ages 10 and 20 they are trying out roles, looking at alternative solutions for lifelong goals, exploring their talents and others. It’s true the children’s statements she read showed more piety and conscious aspiration than seems probable in a child and the lists of books read were improving, some snobbish, and class and gender based: Dodge’s Hans Brinker; Alcott’s Under Lilacs; Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. Archives show children naming their groups, electing officers. In the depression fees and car fares were waved; alas, by the 1950s there were few reading groups there to read, many more had become simply ways to meet and do something else.

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Phiz (Hablot Browne), Meekness of Mr Pecksniff and his charming daughters, one of the illustrations for Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit

John Everett Millais, “Tom, I am come back,” one of the illustrations for Trollope’s Orley Farm

The 2nd session of the afternoon was the most exciting of the conference for me. I wrote a long chapter in my book on Trollope where I studied the original illustrations to his novels; my work was based on real study in rare book rooms, and my conclusions praised by Mark Turner in the one scholarly review I’ve had. The session was on book illustration in 19th century England and the second talk by Robert Patten, a well-known scholar of book illustration and Dickens (Charles Dickens and His Publishers [1978], George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art [1991, 1992], editor of Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices [1995]), compared an illustration by Phiz for Martin Chuzzlewit to one by Millais for Orley Farm (a set of illustrations and book I know very well). I’ll describe his paper first even though it came second.

Prof Patten argued that the two illustrations showed radically different modes of illustration, with Phiz presenting a theatrical or presentational performance, where each gesture or item is an external symbol of an attitude or idea while Millais draw an inward, subtly complex picture in which the characters turn away from us, and their physical selves are not performing for us. Phiz uses personification, his art is emblematic; we are looking at a boxed stage set. External signs tell about interiority. The message is the hypocrisy of the Pecksniff’s and sincerity of Pinch. Millais’s drawing were engraved on wood by Dalziel, and Prof Patten suggested they capture a deep moment of psychological interaction not readily allegorized at all. In my book I spent a lot of time on the psychologized idyllic style and all he said seemed to me spot on, but for his final interpretation of this specific picture. Prof Patten argued we had gender balance here, for Mr Furnival, the lawyer husband missed his wife when she had left him because she assumed he was having an affair with his client, Lady Mason, so badly, that her power was triumphing the way her skirt fills the space, with her hand at the center. He gave his talk with confidence and panache and it seemed to go over very well

The talk afterward included demurrals. One man seemed to suggest that Phiz was more inward than Prof Patten allowed and Millais more emblematic. Two women suggested that the situation was of a women suppliant before her husband. I agreed with with this and retold the story of how Mrs Furnival had left Mr Furnival after many years of emotional and social neglect, that he had the right to eject her once again, and that although Trollope let us know the husband longed for her, she did not know that. Her hand is uncertain, she is pleading with him to take her back. I then said she also would have to accept marriage on his terms, and accept that since she was literally wrong, Lady Mason would again be the center of Mr Furnival’s hours. Prof Patten then commended my comments, especially when I said both Pinch and Lady Mason are suppliants, but then said but no, this takes place after the trial. So it is gender balance.

Well after I went home, I checked and discovered that this picture occurs well before the trial. The trial is yet to come. Mrs Furnival also had been hurt by far more than Lady Mason’s presence; for years Mr Furnival had traveled alone, left her with a servant and no company, no social life. It may be she was literally wrong to think Lady Mason was her husband’s mistress, but all else she had felt was just and now she had to give up her demands and real personal needs. We may hope he’ll behave better now, but there’s no promise, and in the course of things he may well revert.

George Brettingham Sowerby, illustration to Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus, or The Wonders of the Shore

The first talk was Elizabeth Starr’s carefully thoroughly studied explanation and reading of a complicated publication of science illustrations for Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus. Kingsley presented himself as a well-read amateur who was conducting a tour of the shoreline to which we as readers are invited. There were 5 editions of this text, and what we find are a series of complex interactions between the text and illustrations, the writer and his illustrators. In particular George Brettingham Sowerby’s images function to fill the gaps in content and imagination in Kingsley’s book, and turns it into a Ruskinian experience. This book was one of the influential popular science books of the era.

Prof Starr took the audience through several comparisons of text and picture, reading aloud the scientific text with its information and then showing how the plate illustrated and went beyond the text. Competition between the men may have formed part of what happened for Sowerby’s notes to his illustrations are in an appendix. Kingsley also used Philip Henry Gosse’s nature and marine biology texts, but if we look we see that Sowerby’s illustrations are influencing Kingsley’s descriptions.

This made great sense to me. Of Millais’s illustrations to Orley Farm, especially one of Lady Mason during her agon before she hires a lawyer to fight the accusation of forgery and try to hold onto her son’s property, Trollope wrote:

In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what terrible things were coming on her. The idea however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it. Lady Mason was again sitting in the same room — that pleasant room, looking out through the verandah on to the sloping lawn, and in the same chair; one hand again rested open on the arm of the chair, while the other supported her face as she leaned uponher elbow; and the sorrow was still in her heart and the deep thought in her mind. But the lines of her face were altered, and the spirit expressed by it was changed. There was less of beauty, less of charm, less of softness; but in spite of all that she had gone through there was more of strength, — more of the power to resist all that this world could do to her.

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It was 4:30. I had had a full day. I now will try to give a paper on Trollope’s original illustrations at a coming Victorian conference (Spring 2012 in NYC, Columbia University) and Eleanor Shevlin’s Washington Area Print Group (meets one a month, on a Friday afternoon at the Library of Congress between September and May). We (Jim, I, and Izzy) had tickets to see a play about Picasso at the Capital Fringe Festival that evening. I had just enough time to get home, eat with my two beloved people, and then go out again to make the play’s first act.

So, gentle reader, I again did not attempt to go to the day’s late afternoon plenary lecture, this time at the Natural History Museum. It was hot and a walk away. I got on the train.

Well, in my clumsy and half-thwarted efforts to phone Jim to pick me up at the train station, King Street, I ended up having pleasant talk with a man on the train just my age who also has trouble using cell phones. I said I found the ubiquitous use of them analogous to chimpanzees grooming one another: phones are the most stressful way to contact someone; you have immediacy but no bodily contact to control behavior. He said he felt he lost his liberty carrying one around. Yes, Jim had said when he was working he did not want one for then he was a dog on a leash. I did manage to make the call though and when King Street arrived, I bid adieu to my companion and got off the train, walked down to the street where Jim was waiting for me in his Jaguar.

And now to bed,
Ellen

See Sharp 1, Sharp 2, and Sharp 4.

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How much our houses can mean: putting away one’s life, what was once close to hand, near to heart

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to
what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept
your soul alive. — R. L. Stevenson

Our house, 1984 (Jim’s mother, me, two daughters): it has not changed all that much

Our backyard: you see Izzy’s windows last summer

Dear Friends and Readers,

Over on facebook, someone told of a long day’s struggle to order, throw away, pack, and generally empty out his parents’ home (possible so as to sell it). What exhausting work emotionally and physically. Well his words reminded me of a moving diary entry in the LRB by August Kleinzhaler where he told of his experience of selling his childhood home. Rooting up your memories, and throwing them away.

How much our houses can mean to us. I will never comprehend the lack of feeling so many people display towards their environment, their house. They fix it in accordance with “market values!” Yes, when we did renovate the above, for we did, a little (new windows, installed new appliances in the kitchen, put in airconditioning, a new heater, painted), the man doing the kitchen wanted me to have certain kinds of woodwork along the kitchen cabinets because without that it won’t resell at a higher price. I’ve repeatedly come across people who make their houses into magazine-imitative places, with rooms set up for show (thus the need for a so-called family room). They are careful to make the show rooms impersonal: keep out signs of their real loves and occupations. Rooms are carefully distinguished as to purpose. We do all things in all rooms each of us likes; the rooms are partly distinguished by which of the three of us basically dwells there.

On his last visit to our house (1987 or so) my father remarked:

“It’s getting to look like Seaman Avenue” to which Jim replied, “These things take time, Willie.”

How important memories we have and how they are made concrete and perpetual for us by their local habitation. Do others not value their memories? To understand how a house can mean explicates why the gothic uses houses to signify terror, horror, deep perversion for in these spaces the memories are anguish, sorrow, corrosive. I actually don’t have such memories here, or they are minor, didn’t dominate even when we had a bad spirit here at times, and have now been contained and I can live in these spaces at peace.

How women are taught to hate themselves: it is so common for little girls to have dollhouses. Like dolls, this kind of toy is sometimes despised, and even by mothers of daughters. I’ve known women to take away a daughter’s doll at 11. To me this is scorning one’s gender. It is partly circumstance, partly the construction of women’s lives, but also temperamentally female, to value the intangible, the inward, memory, why women are good at ghost stories. I built three dollhouses with my two daughters; we still have one large Edwardian one in Izzy’s room, shoved in a corner, gathering dust now.

I put pictures on the walls which have symbolic value for me. Scotch-tape them up. Here is my library table seen at an angle:

I’ve changed those pictures again. Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood still has pride of place though.

Much as I long to move to NYC, to sell where we live now would be erasing a 30 yr existence, and probably we’d have to sell our house as a tear-down. No one but us would value it. The thought of what I’m told I would have to do to “prepare” it for a buyer, make it attractive to a typical one is what I can’t bear to do. I hesitate to picture what would replace it even so (for this would just be the veneer) given the soulless McMansions and magaziny-looking houses that have gone up or are wrapped around other houses in my neighborhood. (One good effect of the depression is this kind of obscenity has stopped for a time.)

“Our books, dear Book Browser, are a comfort, a presence, a diary of our lives. What more can we say?” (Carol Shields, Swann).

A corner of the room I mostly live in, where I work and read and write.

On wompo someone asked where we literally read and write messages from and where we read them in cyberspace: I sit in my “workroom” or study in my house; it’s filled with my desk, two library tables, my husband’s desk (he sits in the living room), favorite pictures on the walls, lamps, bookcases, a closet with clothes and some of my stuff for writing or teaching. All the rooms in our house but the bathrooms and halls have two outer walls with a large window in each. So too here and I look out on a pretty old fashioned suburban scene (neighborhood built in 1949-51). The bookcases are my Austen and Trollope collections. I change the pictures on my wall as I feel like it. Pictures of friends and cats are on another wall. Poscards. On my computer Canaletto, [In front of] Northumberland House, London, a fresh fair morning, mid-century, peaceful, orderly.

Close to hand, near to heart.

THE ROOMS OF OTHER WOMEN POETS

By Eavan Boland (from Object Lessons in Outside History, pages 20-21, Norton, 1990)

I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions
of daylight, falling as dusk across your page,

make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think
I see that gesture in the way you use language.

And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers
dried and fired on the ironstone rim of

the saucer underneath your cup are a sign of
a savage, old calligraphy: you will not have it.

The chair you use, for instance, may be cane
soaked and curled in spirals, painted white

and eloquent, or iron mesh and the table
a horizon of its own on plain, deal trestles,

bearing up unmarked, steel-cut foolscap
a whole quire of it; when you leave I know

you look at them and you love their air of
unaggressive silence as you close the door.

The early summer, its covenant, its grace,
is everywhere: even shadows have leaves.

Somewhere you are writing or have written in
a room you came to as I come to this

room with honeyed corners, the interior sunless,
the windows shut but clear so I can see

the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel
the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early

I read messages mostly as emails using the gmail board, as emails on Yahoo sites, and nowadays on blogs, and facebook; once in a long while I check archives of lists online. I let the messages come in separately for four lists (my three at Yahoo ’cause I’m listowner, and Austen-l & wom-po since those listservs wreak havoc on messages). And because of all this my life is rich with friends. What matters in life is soul activity.

Hitherto, I have made it a policy to write autobiographically only on Reveries under the Sign of Austen; today I yield to temptation and begin to make my life apart from reading, movies, the arts part of this blog too, and link the two together. So last week at Reveries I wrote of The Return to Queens College: Autumn Entry and for two other examples, Christmas, 2009 into 2010 and Halloween 2009.

Our pussycat, Clarissa, aged 4 months (she is now over 2 years) sitting on Richardson’s Clarissa in our library house

Ellen

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