Eleanor Fitzsimons's Blog, page 14

The Kindness of Oscar and Thomas

I was delighted to be named a finalist in the Biostories Essay Contest. The theme was kindness and I wrote The Kindness of Oscar and Thomas, which deals with Oscar Wilde’s time in Reading Jail. I think the winning entry, The Old Spiral Highway by Liz Olds, is lovely. The other finalist, Julie Goodale has written Escape, a very powerful and evocative piece. Both are well worth reading.

The Undertaking: Eleanor Fitzsimons Talks to Audrey Magee

This interview appeared first on writing.ie, a wonderful resource for readers and writers.

It is hardly surprising that 2014, the year during which we will observe the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, is shaping up to be the  year of the war novel. What is striking however, is that some of the most searing and poigniant novels to emerge during the early weeks of this year have been written by women: examples include The Lie by Helen Dunmore and Anna Hope’s The Wake, both of which examine so effectively the human tragedy of war. This month a new treasure was added to the canon of war literature by Wicklow-based former journalist turned first time novelist, Audrey Magee. What is surprising perhaps is that her novel, The Undertaking explores the terrible human cost of the Second World War rather than the first. Also striking is the fact that she writes from the German perspective.

Published last week by Atlantic Books, The Undertaking tells the story of Peter Faber, a German soldier fighting on the Eastern front, who marries Katharina Spinell, a woman he has never met, in order to escape the horrors of the battlefield for a few days. During their brief honeymoon in Katharina’s home city of Berlin, both are taken aback by the attraction that develops between them. Peter returns to the horror of Stalingrad, with vague hopes of a future with Katharina to sustain him, while back in Berlin, she becomes enmeshed in the higher echelons of the Nazi party. Both behave quite monstrously at times, but events ensure that their hopes of future happiness can never be realised.

It must be hugely gratifying for Magee that The Undertaking has met with a universal outpouring of acclaim, and that she is now recognised as a fiction writer of considerable talent. Yet it’s clear that such eulogising has not gone to her head; the first minutes of our time together in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel are spent discussing the importance of hot, buttered toast on a cold winter’s day. Tea in hand, I ask her what prompted her to write about the human cost of war, and more particularly to do so from the perspective of a very ordinary German family. Magee agrees that this is in many ways an unlikely development as her family has no German connections whatsoever, but explains that her interest is rooted in a deep desire to understand how events unfolded, perhaps the best motivator of all.

We explore the origins of this curiosity. Arriving in Germany, aged eighteen and with little more than a rudimentary knowledge of the country’s history, Magee was struck by a weird dichotomy: ‘Everyone was so normal but there was this shroud of silence, and it’s a very thick shroud, and do not go there’, she explains. She found German people to be friendly and welcoming, but tells me: ‘I became fascinated by this silence, and I became fascinated by their normality, because it wasn’t normal’. The question that preoccupied her was, ‘how did these incredibly normal people end up engaging in this?’

Three years later, having studied German in university despite not taking it as a subject for the leaving cert – ‘don’t even go there’, she laughs – Magee was living in Germany, and thoroughly enjoying the experience. Yet her need to understand the wartime experiences of seemingly ordinary German people remained. She recalls one particularly poignant incident when she visited Dachau with an American-Jewish man whose relatives had died there: ‘It was a Monday and the gates were closed’, she explains. The man was keen to fulfil a promise made to surviving family members that he would visit the camp, so they decided to walk around the perimeter instead. Along the way they met an elderly German woman who was tending her garden, and all three struck up a conversation with Magee interpreting.

The tone of this seemingly innocuous encounter changed utterly when the German woman mentioned casually that she had lived all her life in this house, which backed onto Dachau. Hearing this, the man became incensed, asking her why she had not intervened. In return, the older woman became extremely defensive, insisting that she hadn’t realised what was happening, and even if she had, she could have done nothing about it. What had been a pleasant chat descended into a heated shouting match, with Magee caught in the middle. ‘It stripped me of everything and it stripped them of everything’, she says, adding, ‘I just needed to understand and explore and to question’.

The final impetus for what became The Undertaking emerged years later when Magee was enjoying dinner with her husband in a restaurant in West Cork. Towards the end of the evening they struck up a conversation with the German owner, who told them that he had operated as a transport pilot on the Russian front during WWII. As this man described how he had married a complete stranger in order to qualify for a few days leave, the incentive for his wife being that she would be entitled to a pension should he be killed in battle, Magee realised that this was exactly the hook she needed. ‘I didn’t know what to do with it, but I knew this was it’, she says.

Before she turned her hand to writing fiction, Magee was a highly respected journalist, and covered the gut-wrenching war in Bosnia for the Irish Times. As Ireland correspondent for The Times, she also witnessed the turbulent state of affairs in Northern Ireland first hand, and the effect on a civilian population of having soldiers on the streets. I ask if her experiences in Bosnia gave her a more nuanced understanding of the chaotic reality of war. Although she agrees that the opportunity to observe soldiers engaged in a combat situation, and to see the effect this had on the civilian population, was invaluable, Magee is keen to point out that she was never a war correspondent.

‘I think that’s very important because, had I been a war correspondent, I would have become inured and I never reached that stage’, she says, adding, ‘I always found it shocking and traumatising.’ There were times when she was in personal danger. On one occasion, while travelling in a van the company of two Bosnian Serb journalists, she encountered an unexpected checkpoint, and describes the ‘pure terror’ that they all felt for the thirty seconds or so before they realised that they were safe. ‘Those boundaries shift within moments. There’s nowhere to go. I really thought that was it.  That stayed with me in terms of the chaos’, she says.

Magee believes that our conventional approach to writing history, which often requires the inclusion of a lot of detail pertaining to weaponry and strategy, is one that runs the risk of neglecting the reality that what is often at the core of conflict is chaos and indiscriminate terror. She elucidates: ‘As soon as you talk about the weaponry you’re removed and there is no hiding place in this book at all’. Yet, in order achieve authenticity and fully inhabit the minds of her characters, she meticulously researched the experience of being a German soldier fighting on the Russian front; this included not only knowing the name of the weapon he would have used, but understanding what it looked like and what it weighed, and seeing and touching the uniform he wore. She believes that this immersion was essential if she was to describe faithfully the wartime experiences of Peter and his fellow combatants. Once this was done, she then devoted considerable attention to striping all of this detail out again: ‘One of the things I really sought to do in the book was to pare it back’, she tells me.

I ask her if she believes that there is a distinction between the genders when it comes to writing about this war. Might women take a different stance, given that we were not called upon to fight? As a woman, does she believe that she approached WWII from a different perspective? Magee agrees that there is some truth in this, but attributes her approach to her experience as a journalist: ‘The boundaries have changed but traditionally the men covered the hard news and the women talked to the victims and covered the human interest angle.’ This was hugely important in shaping her experience of conflict: ‘All I could see was damage – of the men and of the women – there’s just so much damage’, she says.

One thing that concerned Magee is what degree of legitimacy she could claim in telling this story. She worried about the reaction that her involvement might provoke, and tells me: ‘every day I was paralysed by the thought, “what right have you to write this’’.  I’m not German, I’m not Jewish, I’m not Ukrainian – I’m not any of the people involved in the story’. However, she acknowledges that the themes in The Undertaking are universal, and impact on all of humanity, and in the end she clung to the fact that Heinrich Böll, the great German post-war writer and Nobel laureate, had no such qualms about writing about Ireland in his Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal); ‘If he can write about my country, then I can write about his’, she laughs.

Magee is greatly influenced by the writings of Böll, and others from the same great European tradition; she mentions Sartre and Beckett in this context. Her intention is to marry this rich tradition, with its huge themes, to the distinctively Irish tradition of working with a smaller canvas, as exemplified by writers such as John McGahern and William Trevor. The end result is a deceptively simple narrative that tackles huge themes, and it is fitting that her finely-crafted approach has been so well received by critics and readers alike. What pleases Magee particularly is the way in which The Undertaking has become the starting point for a wider discussion – she mentions specifically a glowing review inThe Independent on Sunday that refers to current events in Syria in the context of her book.

It saddens her that we have some way to go in order to resolve the tensions that cause us to behave in such a destructive way towards each other, she says: ‘We progress with fancy televisions and the latest phones, but we don’t seem to actually progress. We are in a better place than we were… but we haven’t got there yet’. As to the central question of how seemingly ‘normal’ people can behave monstrously at times, Magee speaks of the ‘gradual inurnment’ that she believes can happen under a political system. ‘It’s usually people responding to circumstance and there are very few of us who are truly noble’, she says, adding, ‘What’s really important is that we try to understand the impact of what we are doing to each other’. Certainly, Peter and Katharina are extremely nuanced characters, and although their actions are often monstrous, there are times when we as readers must acknowledge that they have been brutalised too. It’s a tricky balancing act, and one which Magee manages beautifully.

As an Irish writer, she is conscious that she comes at this story from a more neutral standpoint than an English writer, or indeed reader, might, and for that reason, she is extremely pleased that The Undertaking has been received so positively in England. There is huge excitement in the US too, and her book will be published there this autumn. It is being translated into several languages, although not German as yet. As this positive reception is so richly well deserved, it’s surprising to learn that the book was turned down by several publishers, at least one of whom told Magee that they were ‘not in love’ with it. Eventually, talent prevailed and she found herself at the centre of a bidding war.

We both agree, from bitter experience, that it can be very difficult for a writer to maintain self-belief in the weeks and months before a publishing deal is secured. When I suggest that, given the great success of her first novel, it must surely be easier to write number two, Magee smiles enigmatically and admits that she has indeed started a new book which is, ‘very different’; she refuses to elaborate. Now that her children are older, she has the luxury of more writing time, but progress can still be slow. Perhaps time away from the keyboard is valuable when you’re tackling huge themes that require a good deal of contemplation, I suggest. Having said that, I hope we won’t have to wait too long for the next instalment from this extraordinarily talented and reflective new Irish author

Review of The Lie by Helen Dunmore

It’s incredible to think that July 28, 2014, will mark the centenary of the commencement of World War One. Although no longer part of the living memory of anyone save a tiny handful of people, who were children at the time, the wastefulness and horror of the trench warfare that characterised that vicious four year campaign will live long in our collective memory.

By Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, more than nine million combatants had been killed, with a further twenty million or so badly wounded. The conflict changed the direction of world history, and led to significant political upheaval, prompting revolutionary uprisings in many of the nations that took part. Understandably, it had a profound and lasting effect on the young men directly involved in combat.

The physical and psychological destruction wrought by the Great War has been commemorated by many authors, including Pat Barker, with her brilliant Regeneration Trilogy; Sebastian Faulks with his poignant novel, Birdsong; and Michael Morpurgo with his hugely successful children’s novel, War Horse. Now, Helen Dunmore has added to the canon of WWI literature by writing movingly about the worst aspects of trench warfare and its aftermath in her new novel, The Lie.

Dunmore has tackled this period before: Zennor in Darkness, her finely researched, McKitterick Prize winning novel, published in 1993, describes the events surrounding a time when the writer D. H. Lawrence and his German-born wife Frieda lived in Zennor in Cornwall during the war, and came under suspicion as German spies. A hugely respected and highly entertaining writer, her acclaimed catalogue of finely crafted prose and poetry has been praised universally and rewarded many times; her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and in 2010 her poem The Malarkey won the National Poetry Competition.

In The Lie, an enthralling and ultimately heart-wrenching novel, Dunmore again uses Cornwall as her backdrop and tells us the story of Daniel, a young local man who has survived the horrors of the trenches in body if not in spirit. Life has been one constant struggle for Danny, an exceptionally bright boy who was deprived of the chance of a decent future by relentless poverty. Returning from the front, he wrestles with his demons and works hard to grasp the first chance of independence and fulfillment he has ever known, but fate is conspiring against him and his future happiness hinges on the concealment of a lie told blithely in a moment of madness.

The Lie, will be published by Hutchinson on 16 January 2014

I’ve won the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize 2013

I’m absolutely thrilled. I’ve won the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize for 2013. This means a lot as I am working on a biography of Harriet Shelley and I’m hoping that this takes me a step closer to publication. Fingers crossed! Here are some details:

Keats-Shelley Prizes 2013 won by Irish Writers:

On Thursday evening, 7 November, in front of a distinguished audience that filled St. Martin’s Hall in St. Martin’s Crypt to capacity, the prestigious Keats-Shelley Essay prize for 2013 was awarded to Eleanor Fitzsimons for her essay ‘The Shelleys in Ireland: Passion masquerading as insight?’ and the prestigious Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry was awarded to Patrick Cotter for his poem ‘Madra’. This is the first time in the sixteen year history of both the poetry prize and the essay prize that an Irish person has won, so it’s remarkable to have achieved the double.

The Keats-Shelley Prizes were established in 1998 by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, which actively champions and celebrates new voices and emerging writers. In her introduction, acclaimed novelist and chair of the judging panel, Salley Vickers described the essays submitted this year as, ‘rich and various, scholarly and for the most part pleasingly original’.

On presenting the prize to Ms. Fitzsimons, Salley Vickers described her winning essay as, ‘a thoughtful, exciting account of political reform’, and spoke of how her own admiration for the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was tainted somewhat by his behaviour towards his first wife, Harriet. She chose Patrick Cotter’s poem for: ‘It’s mysterious power to conjure the non-verbal animal world via language – a non-verbal world that stayed in my mind and remained tangible in my imagination’.

Eleanor Fitzsimons is a researcher and freelance journalist. She is represented by literary agent Andrew Lownie and is working on a biography that examines Harriet Shelley’s fascinating, turbulent and tragic life. More information here: http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/eleanor-fitzsimons/books/a-want-of-honour-the-short-life-and-tragic-death-of-harriet-shelley

Patrick Cotter is the Artistic Director of the Munster Literature Centre in Cork and the organiser and jury chairman of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His published work includes a verse novella and two poetry collections Perplexed Skin (Arlen 2008) and Making Music (Three Spires 2009).

The winning essay and poem will be published in the next issue of the Keats-Shelley Review. For further information see http://www.keats-shelley.co.uk/keats-shelley-prize

 

My chat with author Alison Jameson

Recently I met with author Alison Jameson to chat about writing and about ‘Little Beauty’, her wonderful third novel. Our interview can be found here.

Last month I met with Irish author Alison Jameson in the lovely, bustling surroundings of Cinnamon cafe in Ranelagh, Dublin 6. We were there to discuss her third novel, Little Beauty, and her very successful writing life. Recently returned from Portland, Oregon, where she spent a year with her husband and young son, Alison is incredibly busy responding to the warm and well deserved reception that her new book has provoked. Little Beauty is set, for the most part, in 1970s rural Ireland and tells the story of Laura, the unconventional island-dwelling central character who, after a horrendous start in life, is left to deal with the consequences of going her own way in defiance of the stifling, judgemental community amongst which she lives.

As we settle down with a couple of coffees I admit that I’m absolutely intrigued by Laura, a fantastic character and a free spirit who suffers the consequences of being different. As the story progresses, Laura is orphaned early, betrayed by her neighbours and besotted with her child, the delightful product of an unsanctioned liaison of the type not tolerated in the Ireland of that time. I ask Alison if she deliberately set her novel in 1970s Ireland, a time when women were still judged harshly yet were on the cusp of making great progress. Surely a ‘Laura’ would fare better today? She agrees that this is largely the case, but expresses reservations that we may not have come as far as we think; she is convinced that even in these more tolerant times a woman who behaved as Laura did would, at very least, be considered slightly eccentric and perhaps be treated with suspicion.

Although Alison tells me that she was comfortable writing about the 1970s because, ‘I really like that era, and it’s a very interesting time in Ireland’, she admits that this is in some ways a fortuitous coincidence as she, ‘wanted to end the novel in a contemporary sense’, therefore for technical reasons, the bulk of her story needed to be set then. This thought process gives me some insight into how carefully Alison structures a story and the meticulous planning that goes into crafting each novel. She elaborates: ‘I slightly wrote the book back to front. People generally think of books as being made up of chapter one, two, three and so on but I tend to think and write in a circle, and then fit all the elements into that circle. With this book I wrote the last part first and that’s the part I really wanted to write about’. When I tell her that it works brilliantly, she smiles modestly in response.

Some of the themes in Little Beauty, like motherhood and death, are huge, emotional topics and Alison confirms that, in keeping with many accomplished authors, she taps into her own personal experiences in order to get the tone right. Life threw plenty of material her way. While she was writing Little Beauty Alison became a mother and lost her father. So profoundly did the experience of having a child affect her thinking that she abandoned the book as it was and began to rewrite it from scratch; not something to be undertaken lightly. I wonder if that level of authenticity is important to her. ‘Definitely’, she says emphatically, adding, ‘as a writer it’s important to write about things you have insight into’. As motherhood is a central theme in her story, she believed that it was particularly important to get this right and readily acknowledges that having a baby, ‘just brought out this whole other rainbow of emotions’.

Fortunately Alison’s agent, Faith O’Grady was completely supportive and agreed that what mattered was that this book simply had to be the best book she could write at that time and no less than that; if that involved a rewrite then so be it. Alison is very appreciative of this support as it allowed her to change her book dramatically and turn it into something extraordinary. It was a brave move but one that she regards as unavoidable as well as ultimately very rewarding.

Along with motherhood and death, superstition is a strong theme running throughout the novel. The book’s island setting, a place where people are confined by the elements and have a great respect for the sea, facilitates this and Alison succeeds in exploiting the theme very effectively. The claustrophobia of Irish society and the suspicion directed towards deviant people, particularly women, is perfectly encapsulated. We discuss this and both agree that the pressure to conform and to join in with the condemnation of any individual who refuses to fit in is strong.

This really is an essential element in her plot and once again her life experience fed into this aspect of the story. Growing up in rural Ireland during the 1970s, Alison believes that, although she was very young, she was, ‘obviously absorbing things I saw’. This understanding, she feels, explains why she found it relatively easy to imagine the life of an unmarried mother living on an isolated island; the complex character of Laura came to her first. The intricate relationships Laura forms with her neighbours took a lot of work to construct and I tell Alison that she captures the multifaceted interdependence of an island community brilliantly. It certainly helps that she, ‘finds great richness’ in communities such as those she discovered when she visited the West coast of Ireland at a time when she was immersed in the writing process. Little Beauty’s ‘Inis Miol Mor’ is fictitious but familiar at the same time.

‘Settings are so important for me as a writer’, she says, ‘where you locate your book really matters, the weather, the scenery, the atmosphere, the type of people and what they do are all really, really important’. She places great emphasis on the unique ‘Irishness’ of her books and believes that our national psyche is a rich and rewarding thing for Irish writers to tap into.

Little Beauty is a nuanced book and readers are allowed to decide on the appropriateness of the dramatic and often potentially damaging acts perpetrated by its characters. Alison is very clear on her decision not to set it all out in black and white, ‘I try not to tie up every little loose end’, she says, ‘real life is about questions and you don’t have the answer to everything’. There’s great wisdom and skill involved in not seizing control and spelling everything out and I tell her that I admire her ability to allow the uncertainties to remain.

At times the story that Alison tells is deeply troubling and desperately sad, yet it is punctuated with flashes of truly uplifting humour. ‘I’m very pleased to hear that’, she laughs, adding, ‘I believe in life that even when things are really diabolical there is invariably something that somebody will say that is actually, genuinely funny’. Her characters are so authentic that, as I sit back to listen to her discuss them and explain their motivation so lucidly and with great passion, I find it almost impossible to remember that they are her creations rather than real, living, breathing people. My neglected coffee turns cold. This is a master class in characterisation.

I tell Alison that she writes brilliantly about old age and the vulnerability that it can bring. ‘Thank you’ she says before explaining that she believes we as a society engage in a lot of denial about the realities of aging. In fact one of the reasons she juxtaposes descriptions of young, vibrant characters with their older selves is to remind us that life is a continuum and that, as her late father once remarked, every old person, ‘was the apple of someone’s eye once’ – in their own mind they often are still.

I had heard Alison admit to an earlier interviewer that she would feel, ‘almost ashamed’ if she hadn’t pursued her drive to write. I find that very interesting and ask her to explain how she became a successful writer in such a difficult industry where talent alone, no matter how great, is no guarantee of success. ‘It’s getting harder by the day’, she laughs, adding, ‘the difference between when my first book (This Man and Me) was published in 2005 and now is vast. The whole industry has changed so much. Everything is taking so much longer people are so much more reluctant. It used to be an editor going, “Oh, I love that, great”. Now it’s, “I’ll have to check with 25 other people”.

‘Editors used to be much more willing to follow their gut, to fall in love with something’, she says wearily, adding, ‘everybody worries about their jobs now and there’s a much higher fear factor’. Yet she is adamant that she wouldn’t criticise anyone in the publishing industry and that it’s ‘a very brave decision to take on a novel’.

Alison Jameson wasn’t always a full-time writer. When she started writing in earnest, she was a director at advertising agency BBDO and struggled to fit her writing around this demanding role, but she always believed that it was where her true passion lay. Initially it was her short stories that attracted the attention of her highly respected agent, Faith O’Grady. After that there was really no stopping her. She admits that early, positive feedback was hugely important and became a key factor in deciding to write full-time, a decision she has never regretted as she plans to write for the foreseeable future. I assure her that I, for one am delighted to hear this.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our chat and I’ve gained some wonderful insights into the writing process. Alison’s third novel, Little Beauty is a thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable read, and, all going well, we can look forward to reading many more gems from the pen of Alison Jameson. In fact she confirms that she has, ‘the idea, the setting and a fair bit of the work’ done for the next one already. Alison’s humility does her credit and she finishes by telling me that what excites her most is to see her style developing and changing as she learns her craft.

(c) Eleanor Fitzsimmons

Eleanor Fitzsimons is a researcher, writer, journalist and occasional broadcaster. Her work has been published in the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Irish Times and a number of other publications, and she is a contributor to the http://www.theantiroom.com podcast and blog. More recently she worked as the researcher on a number of prime time television programmes for RTE, including ‘What Have The Brits Ever Done For Us’ and the IFTA-winning ‘Bullyproof’. In 2012 she returned to UCD, graduating with an MA (first class honours) in Women Gender and Society. She realised that uncovering women’s hidden history is her true passion and at present is writing a biography of Harriet Shelley, first wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her agent is Andrew Lownie and further details can be found at http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/eleanor-fitzsimons/books/a-want-of-honour-the-short-life-and-tragic-death-of-harriet-shelley

She lives in Dublin with her husband and two children.

Deadly Sensationalism: Female Suicide by Drowning in the Victorian Era

I feel very proud to have an article in the September/October issue of History Ireland. It’s a wonderful and fascinating magazine, and well worth spending €7 on. Here’s a version of my article on female suicide in the nineteenth century – admittedly not the most uplifting topic.

The words of medical doctor and coroner, William Wynn Westcott, articulated in 1885, still hold true today:

‘In every age of the world, and in the history of every country, we find instances more or less numerous of men and women who, preferring the dim uncertainty of the future to the painful realities of the present, have sought relief from all their troubles by suddenly terminating their own existence.’

Although we fall far short of adequately tackling that scourge of despair which persuades vulnerable people to doubt their worth to the extent that they chose to end their lives, we can take consolation from the fact that in our time we have developed a more sympathetic approach to mental illness than was demonstrated by our predecessors. Our contemporary attitude to the tragedy of suicide is characterised by compassion and it seems barely credible that such an anguished flight from torment was decriminalised in Ireland as recently as 1993.

For many centuries we in Ireland were subject to English common law and our legal system retains to this day strong echoes of a code that once deemed ‘self-murder’ a grave felony. In England the act of suicide was declared illegal as early as the thirteenth century and although the ‘perpetrator’ had moved beyond the reach of the law, any property destined for their family could be seized by the state right up until the passing of the Forfeiture Act of 1870.

A ‘felo de se’, translated as ‘felon of himself’, was considered to have committed a shameful crime, an affront to God and the crown. As a result both they and the family they left behind were denied the posthumous consolation of a decent Christian burial. Until 1823 it was customary to bury suicides at the crossroads closest to the site of their ‘crime’ and as an extra precaution, the body might be interred in quicklime with a stake driven through the heart to prevent the restless spirit from rising.

The only recognised defence against ‘felo de se’ was acceptable proof of insanity, a state of mind that was difficult to establish. This was not an attractive prospect for a respectable family unwilling to accept the taint of mental illness, a poorly-understood affliction that would damage the marriage prospects of generations to come. As censorious court officials took no account of the anguish that must have hijacked the thoughts of those driven to end their lives, a family’s best hope was to conceal the details of their loved one’s death; a sympathetic coroner might be prevailed upon to suppress evidence of suicide and opt for misadventure instead.

This was the case during the inquest into the death of Harriet Westbrook of Chapel Street in London when her family persuaded John Henry Gell Esq., coroner for the City of Westminster, to declare that she had been, ‘found dead in the Serpentine River’, with no explanation as to how or indeed why. As the details of Harriet’s tragic death were largely kept from the papers the public learned little more than what was published in a short but intriguing report carried on page two of The London Times on Thursday 12 December, 1816:

‘On Tuesday a respectable female, far advanced in pregnancy, was taken out of the Serpentine River and brought to her residence in Queen Street, Brompton, having been missed for nearly six weeks. She had a valuable ring on her finger. A want of honour in her own conduct is supposed to have led to this fatal catastrophe, her husband being abroad’.

Few realised that the young woman, who was buried as ‘Harriet Smith’, was in fact Harriet Shelley, twenty-one year old wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and mother to their two children. She had been estranged from her husband for more than two years at the time of her death, but not by her choice, and the child she carried was not his.

Harriet Shelley was not the only literary wife to succumb to deathly despair. For much of her married life, poor, troubled Isabella Thackeray remained hidden from curious eyes, a situation that caused great embarrassment to Charlotte Brontë who was unaware of this when she dedicated Jane Eyre to William Makepeace Thackeray. In letters to his mother, Thackeray describes the repeated attempts that Isabella made to end her life. On one occasion, while travelling to Ireland by steamship:

‘The poor thing flung herself into the water (from the water-closet) & was twenty minutes floating in the sea, before the ship’s boat even saw her. O my God what a dream it is! I hardly believe it now I write. She was found floating on her back, paddling with her hands, and had never sunk at all.’

To thwart further attempts Thackeray tied, ‘a riband round her waist, and to my waist, and this always woke me if she moved’.

Had the lurid details of Isabella’s distress or Harriet’s lonely death been widely known, there were many who would have revelled in their tragedy. Although then as now many more men than woman took their lives, female suicide by drowning was a phenomenon that preoccupied the chattering classes throughout the nineteenth century.

Such tragedies were sensationally reported on by the popular press and read vicariously by thousands. In fact so pervasive was this unhealthy obsession that English physician George Man Burrows, a man who dedicated much of his career to the understanding and treatment of insanity, grew increasingly exasperated and accused the ‘Cheap Press’ of directly contributing to an increase in suicides. In a lengthy treatise entitled Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity, published in 1828, Borrows observed that:

‘Nothing is found so attractive as tales of wonder and horror, and every coroner’s inquest on an unhappy being who has destroyed himself is read with extraordinary avidity’.

Specifically linking the reporting of suicide with the act itself, he wrote:

‘No sooner is the mind disturbed by any moral causes, than the thoughts are at once directed, through these channels [newspaper reports], to mediate an act, which otherwise neither predisposition, despair, nor the nature of their insanity, would have suggested’.

Certainly by the mid-nineteenth century there was an appetite to develop an understanding of the effect that becoming obsessed with the details of a suicide might have on vulnerable people. An article entitled ‘Suicide: Its Motives and Mysteries’, published in the Irish Quarterly Review of 1857, outlined how the ‘excited curiosity’ that resulted from exposure to the details of a well publicised suicide might prompt people to visit the sites of these deaths. Once there the danger was that ‘empathetic imagination’ would lead these voyeurs to attempt to understand the ‘motives and sensations’ of the victim, and in extreme cases, ‘visionary power’ might cause someone preoccupied with a case to emulate the actions of the earlier victim.

Popular artists and writers of the day responded to this public appetite for the maudlin and graphic depictions of fallen women plunging out of windows or off bridges into the murky depths below were regularly featured in popular one-shilling novels, paintings and prints. William Shakespeare may have started the trend more than two centuries earlier with his description of sad Ophelia drowning amidst garlands of flowers; certainly performances of Hamlet were hugely popular at the time and John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia (above) was publicly exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. Others, amongst them Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and the illustrator, George Cruickshank, enthusiastically took up the theme.

In Hardy’s Jude the Obscure the infant Jude is abandoned by his mother when she forsakes her violent, unhappy marriage and later drowns herself. Dickens, the most popular author of the day, revisited this theme several times. In The Chimes, published in 1844 as one of a series of instructive Christmas stories, he recounts the tale of Meg, an impoverished young widow driven to contemplate drowning both herself and her child but saved by the timely chiming of church bells. Dickens based Meg’s story on the real life case of Mary Furley who, in a desperate bid to avoid the workhouse, jumped off a bridge holding her infant child. Mary was rescued but her baby died and she was convicted of infanticide in April 1844.

The lure of a watery death seemed irresistible to fictionalised ‘fallen women’. In Oliver Twist Dickens has Nancy point to the Thames as it flows under London Bridge and say:

‘Look at that dark water. How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the tide, and leave no living thing to care for or bewail them? It may be years hence or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at last’.

Dickens showed genuine concern for London’s prostitutes and other ‘fallen women’. In 1847, along with his good friend, the philanthropist Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, he established Urania Cottage as a place of refuge and rehabilitation for these unfortunates. Here the regime was at variance with traditional houses of reform where harsh conditions were enforced in order to punish women. In Urania Cottage a woman was taught domestic skills, could learn to read and write and was offered a genuine opportunity to improve her lot.

Cruickshank, a reformed alcoholic and Dickens’ first illustrator, produced a cautionary series of prints entitled The Drunkard’s Children. The last of these depicts a distraught young woman leaping to her death from a bridge and is colourfully captioned ‘…The poor girl, homeless, friendless, deserted, destitute, and gin-mad, commits self-murder’.

Several Irish writers embraced the theme. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, Oscar Wilde allows Lord Henry to tease Dorian thus:

‘Besides, how do you know that Hetty [Merton] isn’t floating at the present moment in some starlit mill-pond, with lovely water-lilies round her, like Ophelia?’

In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, published in 1894, George Bernard Shaw writes:

‘Liz [Mrs. Warren’s sister] went out one night and never came back. I know the schoolmistress thought I’d soon follow her example; for the clergyman was always warning me that Lizzie’d end by jumping off Waterloo Bridge.’

Such literary drowning was not confined to the Victorian era; John B. Keane set Sive in nineteen-fifties Ireland and took as his theme the vulnerability of an illegitimate young woman who drowns herself rather than enter into a forced marriage with an elderly farmer.

Had Sive survived she would have received scant sympathy. Attempting suicide was a crime punishable by imprisonment and young Irish women were often fished out of rivers and lakes only to be incarcerated as a result. Many ended up in Grangegorman Female Penitentiary, established in 1836 as the first prison for female inmates anywhere in the British Isles. In August 1841 twenty-five-year-old Catherine Booth, who worked as a servant in Ship Street in Dublin, received a sentence of thirty days in Grangegorman for attempting to drown herself. One month later fellow Dubliner, twenty-seven-year-old Hannah Walsh from Britain Street was sentenced to fourteen days for the same ‘crime’. In October 1841 seventeen-year-old Mary Walsh from Angelsea Street received identical treatment. Both she and Hannah Walsh were unemployed and destitute at the time.

Among the most tragic cases was that of Mary O’Flaherty, a thirty-four-year-old married woman who had lost five children in infanthood; all died of natural causes. In 1892, when her sixth infant fell ill, the distraught woman attempted to drown herself and her baby. The baby died but O’Flaherty survived and was acquitted of manslaughter on the grounds of insanity. Diagnosed as ‘melancholic’, she was admitted to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum where she remained for the rest of her life.

Those most vulnerable to despair included the many thousands of Irish prostitutes who endured lives of unimaginable misery. A spate of suicide attempts among prostitutes in Galway followed the death of Mary Kate Costelloe, who drowned herself on September 20, 1888. Two days later Mary Reilly jumped into the same river shouting Costelloe’s name. She was rescued and jailed for thirty days. Later that same week Kate Dolan jumped in, declaring that she ‘would not put up with all the warrants and imprisonments’. As this was not her first attempt she received a sentence of six months. The matter did not end there. On 30 October Anne Owens declared she would, ‘follow her comrade Mary Costelloe and drown herself rather than go to jail’. She too was rescued and got thirty days.

In each case no attempt was made by the authorities to improve the lives of these desperate women. Instead they were simply rounded up, incarcerated in awful conditions and sent back onto the streets with even less chance of survival. For many this marked the start of a steady decline. Nowadays, although resources are stretched or sometimes simply not available, our approach is surely more enlightened and the notion of jailing someone in this way is unconscionable. We have some way to go yet but can take consolation in the fact that the Victorian romanticising of women driven by despair to drown or attempt to drown themselves coupled with the harsh, judgemental treatment meted out to them is no longer a feature of modern life.

Further Reading:

Broad, Richard, ‘Water and the Fallen Woman in Victorian Literature and Art’, 2010, University of London, Available from http://www.academia.edu

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1817-1840, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols., 1945, Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Hartley, Jenny. Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, 2009, York: Methuen

Luddy, Maria Prostitution and Irish Society: 1800-1940, 2008 Cambridge University Press

Guest Post for Women Writers, Women, Books

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