Gillian Polack's Blog, page 72
March 31, 2014
Women's History Month - guest post by Kari Sperring
Kari Sperring grew up dreaming of joining the musketeers and saving France, only to find they’d been disbanded in 1776. Disappointed, she became a historian and as Kari Maund published six books and many articles on Celtic and Viking history, plus one on the background to favourite novel, The Three Musketeers (with Phil Nanson). She started writing fantasy in her teens, inspired by Tolkien, Dumas and Mallory. She is the author of two novels, Living with Ghosts (DAW 2009), which won the 2010 Sydney J Bounds Award, was shortlisted for the William L Crawford Award and made the Tiptree Award Honours’ List; and The Grass King’s Concubine (DAW 2012).
We ask a lot of history. It must tell us not simply of our varied pasts, but justify them to us, explain the present, excuse or support our weaknesses and desires, reflect for us those things about ourselves – our believed selves – that we admire or cling to or wish to make acceptable. We accuse it of lying or of incompleteness when – as it must do – it contradicts our deepest held understandings. We snatch at it, claw at it, paw over it to find the stories that make us feel safe and whole and good. It’s a lot to ask of anything, let alone a thing – a set of things – as fragile and oblique and compromised as this profession we call history. We make it our magic mirror, to show us who we want to think we are.
As a woman and a writer and a historian, I’m asked to justify myself a lot. What point is there to history: it manufactures nothing tangible, critics say. It adds nothing to the GDP. What point is thereto fiction? What point to any woman speaking out, anywhere, at any time? I have answers of a sort to all of these, differing according to my company. But they all come down to the same thing in the end: human beings seem to have a need to understand themselves as they are now, and they look back for help in this. Woman’s history month seeks to highlight the hidden and forgotten histories of women, who, as a class, have been largely side-lined by the gatekeepers of the official past. Women’s history in general seeks to rediscover and document the lives and achievements of our female forebears of all times and identities. It’s a project I have a lot of sympathy with. And yet, and yet….
We ask such a lot of the past. As women – as female historians – it sometimes seems to me that we ask even more of those women who preceded us than we ask of the past itself. Their lives become our voyages of discovery, their acts and desires are re-patterned and repurposed to fit modern needs and frameworks. As with the common complaint of women in a patriarchal culture – we have to be more than good enough, more than very good: we have to be better, best of all, to gain even the first step, the first rung, the first chance. Our female forebears must needs almost be superwomen, to justify their space in our narratives of history. It is not enough to have lived and worked. They must have been special, unusual, rare, even to get their names noted down in the sources on which historians depend. I have on my shelves a books on the histories of women, entitled Silences of the Middle Ages, a name which reflects the difficulty of finding much material at all about women for large periods of time. And yet, for all the slow increase of raw sources as we come closer to the present day, I sometimes think that all women’s history is the history of silence and of silencing. We are so easy to silence: many of us are taught to stay silent from our earliest days and can be reduced back to that state with a handful of sharp words. We are so easy not to hear or see or record, because of our social silence. A woman who speaks is mad or bad and, almost always, dangerous to know. There is a whole joyful industry of scholars and writers who rediscover and document such women now; those women who accidents of birth (usually) or marriage or situation or talent brought into the purview of the compilers of chronicles. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Wu Zetian, Hildegarde of Bingen, Lady Yohl Ik’nal, Hatshepsut, Börte, Makeda, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffman, Indira Gandhi. We celebrate and interrogate their lives in our search for ourselves, our meanings.
But we ask a lot of them. Not long ago, on a day devoted to celebrating women in science, I had a conversation about Annabella Milbanke, who even now, in our era of rediscovering women, is mostly remembered as a wife (to Byron) and a mother (to Ada, countess of Lovelace). Annabella was a highly talented mathematician, who as a teenager corresponded with adult men who were members of the Royal Academy, and was respected by them for her ability. Yet, if you glance at her biography on Wikipedia, say, what dominates our narrative of her is her piety and her strictness with her daughter. Biographers, over and over, accuse her of ‘not understanding’ her husband (her rapist and abuser) and of being cruel to her daughter. She was, certainly, not an easy woman. But why should she have been? She was a gifted women in an age when women were not permitted full access to a scientific life, nor considered possessed of full intelligence; she was a survivor of rape and violence. Byron was not a nice person, either. Yet his genius remains worthy of study, we are told, and hers does not. Annabella, across nearly 200 years, is not nice enough, sweet enough, silent enough, to deserve study and rediscovery by historians, male or female. Our female forebears, our re-found heroes, must be worthy by the standards imposed on us both by patriarchal culture and by ourselves. In seeking heroes, we still, it seems, seek to please the social standards that constrain us, and silence, ignore, or avoid those female forebears who make past and present mores uncomfortable. Some women, like Annabella, are too mean: they are the angry mad women in our collective attics. Others, (in)curiously, are too meek, too goody-goody to be worth noting (they don’t fit the check-list of modern ideas of agency). Blanche of Castille, Jane Seymour, Queen Tiye, Anne of Brittany: good wives and sisters and daughters, women who suffered and served. They make us uncomfortable, by fitting the social roles laid out for us too well. As male-dominated history judges us – not significant, not valuable, not important – so we judge other women from our collective pasts and consign them to continued silence. Women of the past must make us proud, and to do so, they must live up to our present-day needs. To justify ourselves, we need a history full of successes: we must answer the questions well – see our female Shakespeares (Lady Murasaki, Aphra Behn), our female politicians (Emma of Normandy, Matilda of Flanders, Wu Zetian), our musicians (Hildegarde, Fanny Mendlesohn) and artists (Frida Kahlo, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun) and astronomers (Caroline Herschel). We don’t have space for the silent or those who failed for whatever reason to shine. We can’t afford them, though histories worldwide are full of undistinguished men. For women, even now, only the best will do.
Far more time and ink is expended in my field (Celtic and Gaelic cultures of the British isles c. 400 – c.1300) on the legal fiction of the banchomarbha (a land-holding woman with full social legal status, noted as a possibility in the highly schematising books of Irish laws, but who probably almost never happened in reality – no, not even in that highly imagined land ‘pre-Christian Ireland’, a place full of late 20th century wish-fulfilment fantasies and no reliable historical evidence for female agency at all)(1) than on the handful of real women whose names we know and about whose lives we possess fragmentary information. There’s part of me that understands that and sympathises. It’s hugely frustrating trying to reconstruct lives that are noted down so sparsely, and in terms of motherhood, marriage and renunciation. But these quiet women were real; they lived in those past worlds under those past rules for female conduct. And they deserve our attention as much as the women who broke or transcended those rules by being royal or rich or very, very lucky.
But they are very hard to find. Mostly, they have left us little or no trace at all. We can wonder, in museums or at archaeological sites, who owned and used that comb, that quern stone, those loom-weights? What did they talk about, the millions of everyday women whose names we don’t know? What were they like? There are, of course, also many millions of silent, forgotten, ordinary men. History – official histories – are classist as well as sexist and racist. The poor are not, in general recorded, and, when recorded, are noted mostly for crimes and accidents. But when we concentrate on Eleanor of Aquitaine and Wu Zetian, over Blanche of Castille and Xu Yihua, when we chase after fictional mediaeval Irish female lords over Gormflaith and Derforghaill, we are complicit in the silencing. We play the game by the rules imposed on us by social and cultural norms, that, where women are concerned, only the very best, the shiniest, the specialist snowflakes are worthy of attention and record and time.
We ask history to make us worthwhile, worthy of space and air and attention in our own lives. It’s a lot to ask. And perhaps we should be asking for something rather different. Not for a right to agency, or a justification for the claims we might make for agency, but rather, for something simpler. For recognition. We are here. We are real. We exist now and we existed then, and we are all of us worthy of attention and notice and record.
(1) I can supply a reading list on this. Please do not tell me about women from myths, legends, sagas or Roman period sources. They are not the same as real women in early Ireland. I’ve done years of detailed academic research in this field. This sounds brusque, I realise, but I’ve been having the ‘liberated Celtic women’ conversation with people for 25+ years, and it gets wearing.
We ask a lot of history. It must tell us not simply of our varied pasts, but justify them to us, explain the present, excuse or support our weaknesses and desires, reflect for us those things about ourselves – our believed selves – that we admire or cling to or wish to make acceptable. We accuse it of lying or of incompleteness when – as it must do – it contradicts our deepest held understandings. We snatch at it, claw at it, paw over it to find the stories that make us feel safe and whole and good. It’s a lot to ask of anything, let alone a thing – a set of things – as fragile and oblique and compromised as this profession we call history. We make it our magic mirror, to show us who we want to think we are.
As a woman and a writer and a historian, I’m asked to justify myself a lot. What point is there to history: it manufactures nothing tangible, critics say. It adds nothing to the GDP. What point is thereto fiction? What point to any woman speaking out, anywhere, at any time? I have answers of a sort to all of these, differing according to my company. But they all come down to the same thing in the end: human beings seem to have a need to understand themselves as they are now, and they look back for help in this. Woman’s history month seeks to highlight the hidden and forgotten histories of women, who, as a class, have been largely side-lined by the gatekeepers of the official past. Women’s history in general seeks to rediscover and document the lives and achievements of our female forebears of all times and identities. It’s a project I have a lot of sympathy with. And yet, and yet….
We ask such a lot of the past. As women – as female historians – it sometimes seems to me that we ask even more of those women who preceded us than we ask of the past itself. Their lives become our voyages of discovery, their acts and desires are re-patterned and repurposed to fit modern needs and frameworks. As with the common complaint of women in a patriarchal culture – we have to be more than good enough, more than very good: we have to be better, best of all, to gain even the first step, the first rung, the first chance. Our female forebears must needs almost be superwomen, to justify their space in our narratives of history. It is not enough to have lived and worked. They must have been special, unusual, rare, even to get their names noted down in the sources on which historians depend. I have on my shelves a books on the histories of women, entitled Silences of the Middle Ages, a name which reflects the difficulty of finding much material at all about women for large periods of time. And yet, for all the slow increase of raw sources as we come closer to the present day, I sometimes think that all women’s history is the history of silence and of silencing. We are so easy to silence: many of us are taught to stay silent from our earliest days and can be reduced back to that state with a handful of sharp words. We are so easy not to hear or see or record, because of our social silence. A woman who speaks is mad or bad and, almost always, dangerous to know. There is a whole joyful industry of scholars and writers who rediscover and document such women now; those women who accidents of birth (usually) or marriage or situation or talent brought into the purview of the compilers of chronicles. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Wu Zetian, Hildegarde of Bingen, Lady Yohl Ik’nal, Hatshepsut, Börte, Makeda, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffman, Indira Gandhi. We celebrate and interrogate their lives in our search for ourselves, our meanings.
But we ask a lot of them. Not long ago, on a day devoted to celebrating women in science, I had a conversation about Annabella Milbanke, who even now, in our era of rediscovering women, is mostly remembered as a wife (to Byron) and a mother (to Ada, countess of Lovelace). Annabella was a highly talented mathematician, who as a teenager corresponded with adult men who were members of the Royal Academy, and was respected by them for her ability. Yet, if you glance at her biography on Wikipedia, say, what dominates our narrative of her is her piety and her strictness with her daughter. Biographers, over and over, accuse her of ‘not understanding’ her husband (her rapist and abuser) and of being cruel to her daughter. She was, certainly, not an easy woman. But why should she have been? She was a gifted women in an age when women were not permitted full access to a scientific life, nor considered possessed of full intelligence; she was a survivor of rape and violence. Byron was not a nice person, either. Yet his genius remains worthy of study, we are told, and hers does not. Annabella, across nearly 200 years, is not nice enough, sweet enough, silent enough, to deserve study and rediscovery by historians, male or female. Our female forebears, our re-found heroes, must be worthy by the standards imposed on us both by patriarchal culture and by ourselves. In seeking heroes, we still, it seems, seek to please the social standards that constrain us, and silence, ignore, or avoid those female forebears who make past and present mores uncomfortable. Some women, like Annabella, are too mean: they are the angry mad women in our collective attics. Others, (in)curiously, are too meek, too goody-goody to be worth noting (they don’t fit the check-list of modern ideas of agency). Blanche of Castille, Jane Seymour, Queen Tiye, Anne of Brittany: good wives and sisters and daughters, women who suffered and served. They make us uncomfortable, by fitting the social roles laid out for us too well. As male-dominated history judges us – not significant, not valuable, not important – so we judge other women from our collective pasts and consign them to continued silence. Women of the past must make us proud, and to do so, they must live up to our present-day needs. To justify ourselves, we need a history full of successes: we must answer the questions well – see our female Shakespeares (Lady Murasaki, Aphra Behn), our female politicians (Emma of Normandy, Matilda of Flanders, Wu Zetian), our musicians (Hildegarde, Fanny Mendlesohn) and artists (Frida Kahlo, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun) and astronomers (Caroline Herschel). We don’t have space for the silent or those who failed for whatever reason to shine. We can’t afford them, though histories worldwide are full of undistinguished men. For women, even now, only the best will do.
Far more time and ink is expended in my field (Celtic and Gaelic cultures of the British isles c. 400 – c.1300) on the legal fiction of the banchomarbha (a land-holding woman with full social legal status, noted as a possibility in the highly schematising books of Irish laws, but who probably almost never happened in reality – no, not even in that highly imagined land ‘pre-Christian Ireland’, a place full of late 20th century wish-fulfilment fantasies and no reliable historical evidence for female agency at all)(1) than on the handful of real women whose names we know and about whose lives we possess fragmentary information. There’s part of me that understands that and sympathises. It’s hugely frustrating trying to reconstruct lives that are noted down so sparsely, and in terms of motherhood, marriage and renunciation. But these quiet women were real; they lived in those past worlds under those past rules for female conduct. And they deserve our attention as much as the women who broke or transcended those rules by being royal or rich or very, very lucky.
But they are very hard to find. Mostly, they have left us little or no trace at all. We can wonder, in museums or at archaeological sites, who owned and used that comb, that quern stone, those loom-weights? What did they talk about, the millions of everyday women whose names we don’t know? What were they like? There are, of course, also many millions of silent, forgotten, ordinary men. History – official histories – are classist as well as sexist and racist. The poor are not, in general recorded, and, when recorded, are noted mostly for crimes and accidents. But when we concentrate on Eleanor of Aquitaine and Wu Zetian, over Blanche of Castille and Xu Yihua, when we chase after fictional mediaeval Irish female lords over Gormflaith and Derforghaill, we are complicit in the silencing. We play the game by the rules imposed on us by social and cultural norms, that, where women are concerned, only the very best, the shiniest, the specialist snowflakes are worthy of attention and record and time.
We ask history to make us worthwhile, worthy of space and air and attention in our own lives. It’s a lot to ask. And perhaps we should be asking for something rather different. Not for a right to agency, or a justification for the claims we might make for agency, but rather, for something simpler. For recognition. We are here. We are real. We exist now and we existed then, and we are all of us worthy of attention and notice and record.
(1) I can supply a reading list on this. Please do not tell me about women from myths, legends, sagas or Roman period sources. They are not the same as real women in early Ireland. I’ve done years of detailed academic research in this field. This sounds brusque, I realise, but I’ve been having the ‘liberated Celtic women’ conversation with people for 25+ years, and it gets wearing.
March 30, 2014
Women's History Month - guest post by Foz Meadows
Foz Meadows is a bipedal mammal with delusions of immortality. As well as being the author of Solace and Grief and The Key to Starveldt, she also reviews for A Dribble Of Ink and Strange Horizons, and is a contributing writer for The Huffington Post. She likes cheese, geekery, writing, webcomics and general weirdness. Dislikes include Hollywood rom-coms, liquorice and the Republican party.
Foz currently lives in Aberdeen with not enough books, her very own philosopher and a Smallrus. Surprisingly, this is a good thing.
Every time I see someone casually assert that the reason we don't know much about women in history is because women didn't do anything important until after they got the vote, and even then, most of what they've done since has been boring (hurr hurr), I experience a curious and overwhelming desire to punch that person right in the throat, if they're speaking, or to crack their hands, if they're typing, because – and you can quote me on this – anyone who makes this claim has absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Which is not, in and of itself, a crime, though it still deserves to be rectified. It's just that, regardless of how much or how little you've ever read about history, it takes a catastrophic failure of observational empathy to look at women in the world now – from famous figures like Aung San Suu Kyi and Malala Yousafzai to the women we see everyday, our friends and colleagues and family members, in all their infinite variety – and still conclude that women in the past were fundamentally different creatures.
Sometimes, the people who say this are apologetic about it. Well, you know, patriarchy and babies and all that – it's a shame, but what do you expect? – as though they've never known women who've broken rules or bucked expectations, or noticed when it was happening.
Sometimes, the people who say this are patronising about it. Well, as much as you might wish otherwise, women are just inherently inferior at some things – I know you believe in equality, but you have to be realistic! – as though, even if this were true (which it isn't), there still wouldn't be a meaningful number of exceptions worth talking about.
Sometimes, the people who say this are sneering about it. Well, if women were really so great, then how come everything important was invented by men? If you haven't done anything by now, it's because you can't – as though their comprehensive ignorance of women's achievements is somehow proof of their non-existence.
And on one level, I feel sorry for these people, because at some point in their lives, whether consciously or unconsciously, they've assumed there's so little worth knowing about women in history that they've never even bothered to research their hypothesis. But then, why should they need to? Most didn't learn about any important women at school, except maybe the Pankhursts and Emily Davison throwing herself under a horse; they likely see a gender disparity in the workplace (and even if they don't, the skewed representations of films and politics more than makes up for it); and every time they expose themselves to advertising or wider culture, they see us marketed as frivolous, self-objectifying, high maintenance, weight-obsessed, domestically oriented, shoe-fetishizing shopaholics whose main goals in life are finding a man and attaining perfect hair.
Now, before we go any further, let me make something abundantly clear: though being weight-obsessed is generally an indicator of an eating disorder or some other problem, and therefore not ideal (but still not a justification for mockery), there is nothing wrong with being frivolous, sexy, high maintenance, domestically oriented, shoe-loving and/or a shopaholic, any more than there's anything wrong with wanting a man or enjoying hair care. Whether individually or in combination, these traits should carry no negative connotation: they're just things to be, and that's fine. The problem is that, overwhelmingly, they're portrayed in our society as being a combination of:
a) negative-because-female;
b) inherently feminine;
c) “proper” female interests;
d) of no inherent interest to men;
e) toxic to “proper” masculinity; and
f) incompatible with, say, liking sports or maths or video games, or literally anything else not deemed to be conventionally feminine.
Which is why, to return to the issue of women in history, so many people end up thinking we never did anything beyond get married, have babies and die: they're used to seeing us as absent or lesser, and where presentations of women are prominent in our culture, they tend to be highly stereotyped into a negative caricature that privileges domesticity and physical appearance over any other type of achievement or self-worth.
Is it any wonder, then, that so many people blithely assume that extraordinary women in history didn't exist, or were so rare as to be meaningless?
Which is why I want to see the real truth told.
I want films about Ada Lovelace, the mother of modern computing, and Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood actress who also co-invented the technology now used to support wireless communication. I want to see stories about the Dahomey Amazons, the Night Witches and the other frontovichka; about Nancy Wake, the White Mouse, the gestapo's most wanted who once killed a sentry with her bare hands and lead seven thousand men into battle. I want to see a film about the rivalry between the reporters Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, who raced each other to be first around the world in 80 days 1889. I want to see stories about the Trung sisters, who repelled the Chinese invasion of Vietnam for three whole years. I want stories about Bessie Coleman, the first black female pilot, and Sarla Thakral, the first female Indian pilot. I want stories about revolutionary women, like Countess Constance Markievicz, Juana Galan, and the women of the Mexican revolution.
I could spend all day listing listing extraordinary women, and doubtless learn about a great many others in the course of hunting up links. I could tell you about queer women, trans women, and nonbinary individuals in history; about women of colour and white women, about young women and old women, about women in the sciences and the arts and every other field of human endeavour, all of them extraordinary – as, indeed, I've tried to do before.
But as much as I want to see these stories told and remembered, I also want us to tell new ones, too; not just celebrating women who exist now, but the possibility of women generally, through stories – whether fantastic or purely fictional – that acknowledge, not just our potential, but our humanity. It shouldn't be that in order to be deemed narratively interesting, a woman must eschew the traditionally feminine and do something we ordinarily associate with men (although stories of overcoming adversity and the expectations of culture are always fascinating): I want to see stories of women as political, social creatures, as mothers and wives and partners (though not exclusively to men) in stories not marketed and produced on the assumption that they'll only be of interest to other women. I want to see the full, diverse spectrum of female experience explored through narrative – and that can only start to happen when we look to our history, and realise the wealth and breadth of the precedent that exists for female endeavour.
And to anyone who's ever said that women did nothing interesting in history and is now overwhelmed by all this new information? Imagine yourself as Neo, rescued by Morpheus and waking aboard the Nebuchadnezzar. Why do your eyes hurt, child?
Because you've never used them before.
Women's History Month
Women's History Month is nearly, nearly finished. Because of this, today's posts are just a little different in focus. I've been doing too much teaching, perhaps, and I want people to have some thoughts with which to re-read all the earlier posts. Also, I really wanted to hear what these two women had to say.
I'll do you a post with much linkage in April, so that you can easily catch up on posts that you've missed, or find the ones you want to re-read. After all there've been 30+ posts, and the whole Cranky Ladies series run by Tehani for her anthology. I won't give links to all the Cranky ladies posts, just to the posts away from my blog that were intended for both events - all two of them - plus a link to the page where you can find the rest - that saves me much work, and it's still an impossibly busy week.
And now I have to read and critique and then go and do my next teaching module and have a meeting. All my own work will be done in the evening, today. I meant to do more this morning, but this Monday doesn't much like me and is letting that sentiment show, so I've been hiding behind coffee for the last two hours.
And now... on to the first WHM post for today!
I'll do you a post with much linkage in April, so that you can easily catch up on posts that you've missed, or find the ones you want to re-read. After all there've been 30+ posts, and the whole Cranky Ladies series run by Tehani for her anthology. I won't give links to all the Cranky ladies posts, just to the posts away from my blog that were intended for both events - all two of them - plus a link to the page where you can find the rest - that saves me much work, and it's still an impossibly busy week.
And now I have to read and critique and then go and do my next teaching module and have a meeting. All my own work will be done in the evening, today. I meant to do more this morning, but this Monday doesn't much like me and is letting that sentiment show, so I've been hiding behind coffee for the last two hours.
And now... on to the first WHM post for today!
Women's History Month - guest post by Shana Worthen
Dr. Shana Worthen is a historian of medieval technology. She's published articles on the iconography of windmills, and on Lynn White, jr.; and teaches for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, although she lives in the UK. Eating tasty and thought-provoking food is a favorite hobby. She's helping to organize Loncon 3, this year's Worldcon, which you should all come to.
The first published English novel by a woman was written by Lady Mary Wroth. She also is the first Englishwoman known to have written a complete sonnet sequence. And she wrote at least one five-act play. Her accomplishments are impressive!
I first consciously heard of her when I moved near to where she had once lived, and started reading up on locals. How could I not be interested in fantastical literature written by a seventeenth-century woman?
Niece of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, Wroth is usually referred to by the surname gained through her unhappy marriage rather than her maiden name, which was the same as her famous aunt's married name. She was well connected on all sides of her family. Her mother, Glamorganshire heiress Barbara Gamage, was Sir Walter Raleigh's first cousin. Her father, Governor of Flushing as a result of his service in the war against Spain, was made Earl of Leicester in 1618. She hung out in Queen Anne's court. Ben Johnson dedicated The Alchemist to her, and praised her writing.
I almost bought some of her writings at the Medieval Congress at Leeds a few years ago, but Gillian beat me to the one copy they had. Despite being foiled by her promptness, she's also why I've finally read large swathes of The Countess of Montgomeries Urania. Committing to write this post ensured I finally got my own copy.
And so I've been reading the convoluted tales within tales of the relationships among the sprawling cast of the novel. Of Urania's crush, and then her first real love, which is erased by being thrown from a magical rock into the ocean, so she can be reused in a new romance. Of Pamphilia, "loyallest lady" to her often-unrequited object of affection, Amphilanthus, as she carves poems - but never his name - in trees. Of faked deaths. Giants. Lots of fallen royalty living sadly in caves. Travel by magical little boats. Travel by shipwrecks. One despairing lover mistaken by an unrelated despairing lover for a goddess. New friends promising to put each other back on their rightful thrones. Almost everyone is royalty of some sort or other. Of the nearby Mediterranean and eastern Europe as a surreally fictional places, despite being written about in a time when English knowledge of the rest of the planet was increasing so rapidly. Lots of people compose poetry. One woman is cured of her bad poetry by water immersion.
I haven't even mentioned yet the periodic magical enchantments which capture various combinations of lovers in their toils. The frontispiece illustrates one of them, the Throne of Love in Cyprus, whose captive lovers must await the arrival of the "valiantest knight, with the loyallest lady".
The affordable abridged version which I'm reading also has wonderful summaries of the excised sections. My favorite thus far, and indicative of the narrative's convolutions: "The group gets on Parselius's ship bound for Italy, only to find it occupied by pirates. The courteous pirate captain Sandrigal knells to Urania, whom he mistakes for Antissia, the lost princess of Romania, committed to his care ten years earlier for a sea voyage to Achaya....". (p. 57) [Parselius is Pamphilia's brother. Antissia, who shows up elsewhere in the narrative, is also in love with Amphilanthus; she's also the one later cured of her bad poetry. Sandrigal is killed shortly after telling his story.]
This edition also has a family tree. And a map. (The characters collectively visit most of the places on the map.)
Pamphilia is an authorial stand-in, of sorts, as Amphilanthus is of William Herbert, Wroth's lover, and brother of Mary Sidney. Urania, erstwhile shepherdess and eventual Queen of Naples, is a stand-in for Mary Sidney. Many of the numerous relationships in the text echo and rework aspects of Mary Wroth's own life: her unhappy marriage to Sir Robert Wroth, a Verderer of Epping Forest, in west Essex; her ongoing passion for her aunt's brother, who fathered the two children she had after her husband's death.
I have managed to write of her thus far with scarcely a word which she herself wrote. She wrote in eager phrases, lengthy series of them joined together into sentences; and in tightly-edited poetic verses, which occasionally appear, as written by one of the characters.
Here, then, is a brief example of travel by shipwreck:
The shipwreck has brought them to another enchantment, the enchantment of the Theater, where they rapidly end up lured in by glorious music and trapped. It's just another day in the extremely eventful lives of four of the main characters.
Urania was published in 1621, a roman-à-clef that scandalized many of her contemporaries, both because she was a woman and because of some peoples' suspicion that particular fictionalized episodes were libelous representations of themselves. While Wroth formally distanced herself its publication, the book had her name all over the title page (relatively speaking) and she wrote a sequel, albeit one which was not published until the twentieth century.
Much less is known about her life after the Urania controversy. That, plus debt, plus alienation from court life, perhaps thanks to her affair, led to greater obscurity. She left fewer traces in the surviving paperwork as she aged; but at least she kept her lifelong passion for writing.
Urania, Book 2, ends mid-sentence, breathlessly looking forward.
The first published English novel by a woman was written by Lady Mary Wroth. She also is the first Englishwoman known to have written a complete sonnet sequence. And she wrote at least one five-act play. Her accomplishments are impressive!
I first consciously heard of her when I moved near to where she had once lived, and started reading up on locals. How could I not be interested in fantastical literature written by a seventeenth-century woman?
Niece of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, Wroth is usually referred to by the surname gained through her unhappy marriage rather than her maiden name, which was the same as her famous aunt's married name. She was well connected on all sides of her family. Her mother, Glamorganshire heiress Barbara Gamage, was Sir Walter Raleigh's first cousin. Her father, Governor of Flushing as a result of his service in the war against Spain, was made Earl of Leicester in 1618. She hung out in Queen Anne's court. Ben Johnson dedicated The Alchemist to her, and praised her writing.
I almost bought some of her writings at the Medieval Congress at Leeds a few years ago, but Gillian beat me to the one copy they had. Despite being foiled by her promptness, she's also why I've finally read large swathes of The Countess of Montgomeries Urania. Committing to write this post ensured I finally got my own copy.
And so I've been reading the convoluted tales within tales of the relationships among the sprawling cast of the novel. Of Urania's crush, and then her first real love, which is erased by being thrown from a magical rock into the ocean, so she can be reused in a new romance. Of Pamphilia, "loyallest lady" to her often-unrequited object of affection, Amphilanthus, as she carves poems - but never his name - in trees. Of faked deaths. Giants. Lots of fallen royalty living sadly in caves. Travel by magical little boats. Travel by shipwrecks. One despairing lover mistaken by an unrelated despairing lover for a goddess. New friends promising to put each other back on their rightful thrones. Almost everyone is royalty of some sort or other. Of the nearby Mediterranean and eastern Europe as a surreally fictional places, despite being written about in a time when English knowledge of the rest of the planet was increasing so rapidly. Lots of people compose poetry. One woman is cured of her bad poetry by water immersion.
I haven't even mentioned yet the periodic magical enchantments which capture various combinations of lovers in their toils. The frontispiece illustrates one of them, the Throne of Love in Cyprus, whose captive lovers must await the arrival of the "valiantest knight, with the loyallest lady".
The affordable abridged version which I'm reading also has wonderful summaries of the excised sections. My favorite thus far, and indicative of the narrative's convolutions: "The group gets on Parselius's ship bound for Italy, only to find it occupied by pirates. The courteous pirate captain Sandrigal knells to Urania, whom he mistakes for Antissia, the lost princess of Romania, committed to his care ten years earlier for a sea voyage to Achaya....". (p. 57) [Parselius is Pamphilia's brother. Antissia, who shows up elsewhere in the narrative, is also in love with Amphilanthus; she's also the one later cured of her bad poetry. Sandrigal is killed shortly after telling his story.]
This edition also has a family tree. And a map. (The characters collectively visit most of the places on the map.)
Pamphilia is an authorial stand-in, of sorts, as Amphilanthus is of William Herbert, Wroth's lover, and brother of Mary Sidney. Urania, erstwhile shepherdess and eventual Queen of Naples, is a stand-in for Mary Sidney. Many of the numerous relationships in the text echo and rework aspects of Mary Wroth's own life: her unhappy marriage to Sir Robert Wroth, a Verderer of Epping Forest, in west Essex; her ongoing passion for her aunt's brother, who fathered the two children she had after her husband's death.
I have managed to write of her thus far with scarcely a word which she herself wrote. She wrote in eager phrases, lengthy series of them joined together into sentences; and in tightly-edited poetic verses, which occasionally appear, as written by one of the characters.
Here, then, is a brief example of travel by shipwreck:
"At last they were quite carried out of the gulf and, being in the Adriatic Sea, the ship was tossed as pleased destiny, till at last she was cast upon a rock and split, the brave ladies saved while she awhile lay tumbling and beating herself, as hoping to make way into the hard stone, for those who could pierce the stoniest heart with the least of their looks." (p. 126)
The shipwreck has brought them to another enchantment, the enchantment of the Theater, where they rapidly end up lured in by glorious music and trapped. It's just another day in the extremely eventful lives of four of the main characters.
Urania was published in 1621, a roman-à-clef that scandalized many of her contemporaries, both because she was a woman and because of some peoples' suspicion that particular fictionalized episodes were libelous representations of themselves. While Wroth formally distanced herself its publication, the book had her name all over the title page (relatively speaking) and she wrote a sequel, albeit one which was not published until the twentieth century.
Much less is known about her life after the Urania controversy. That, plus debt, plus alienation from court life, perhaps thanks to her affair, led to greater obscurity. She left fewer traces in the surviving paperwork as she aged; but at least she kept her lifelong passion for writing.
Urania, Book 2, ends mid-sentence, breathlessly looking forward.
March 29, 2014
Women's History Month - guest post by Satima Flavell
Satima Flavell is a Perth-based writer, editor and reviewer. Her first novel, The Dagger of Dresnia, book one of The Talismans trilogy, is due for release shortly from Satalyte Publishing. When she’s not writing, Satima is generally mucking around on Facebook or lurching about in a dance class as either teacher or student. You can find out more at www.satimaflavell.com.au.
Ever since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by genealogy, and as soon as the internet became generally available, I took advantage of its potential for family history research. For five years, I spent my days doing little else but researching the lives of my British forebears. When I wasn’t at the computer, I was at the State Library, hunting down records. I managed to trace all my family lines back to the mid-1700s, and there were several that I was able to track back to medieval times.
In most cases, I know little of the people behind the names. I know when they were baptised, married and buried, but only in a few cases have I learnt enough about them to piece together some kind of biography. Sometimes, by looking at the social and political history of the times, it is possible to imagine what kind of lives our ancestors must have had, and all too often, it is obvious that they were not the favoured children of fortune.
Like everyone else, I have eight great-great grandmothers, and I name them here in love and reverence: Mary Gledhill, Edna Hemingway, Rebecca Mason, Eliza Wittington, Mary Ann Woodnorth, Mary Hartill, Susannah Jane Brookes and Raylee Bradley. That last name is something of a surprise – somehow, we don’t expect women born in 1815 to be called Raylee!
All these women were homemakers for much of their lives, but some did their home-making in more comfort than others. None of them was what you’d call well-off: their husbands all worked at semi-skilled trades or as manual labourers. On my father’s side (his forebears came from the Black Country of Staffordshire) the men were, without exception, coal miners, and some of their wives made nails at home, under contract to an iron-master. On my mother’s side, the men were employed in the woollen industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and their wives did not work outside the home. Mary and her Yorkshire-bred sisters would have enjoyed slightly better conditions than my Black Country foremothers, some of whom lived in two-roomed cottages with earthen floors.
Given that Mary Gledhill married at sixteen and had eleven children, including one mentally disabled daughter, and that she also brought up one of her grandchildren, it is saddening to know that when her husband, William Kilburn, died in 1854, she was obliged to go back to work as a labourer in a mill – at the age of sixty! No Widows Pension in those days, my friends, and very little charity. Even my mother, Mary’s great-granddaughter, spoke of ‘the workhouse’ in shuddering tones as being a fate worse than death.
Mary died in 1866 at the age of seventy-one. She would have lived her entire lived in cramped, possibly unsanitary conditions – flush toilets had existed before she was born in 1795, but only the very wealthy could afford them. She would have seen several outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever and no doubt seen neighbours die of those and other infectious diseases.
She lived in interesting times. As a child, she would have heard of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow occurred in the same year she was married. She was a young married woman when the first steam trains came into service. In middle age, she would have been amazed by reports of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and perhaps saddened by news of the war in Crimea. No doubt she would have heard of the work of Florence Nightingale, and praised her for it.
In the span of Mary’s lifetime, the lives of working people improved considerably. Her children were able to better themselves, thanks to the laws that forced mill owners to give their under-aged employees two hours of education a day. And of course, Mary’s grandchildren would have benefited from compulsory schooling and child labour laws that were passed in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
So ‘I dips me lid’ to Mary and the countless other women of that generation who spent their lives with few comforts, hardly any entertainment, and constant worry about money and health. I only wish they could have had the happy and comfortable old age that I’m enjoying now!
Ever since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by genealogy, and as soon as the internet became generally available, I took advantage of its potential for family history research. For five years, I spent my days doing little else but researching the lives of my British forebears. When I wasn’t at the computer, I was at the State Library, hunting down records. I managed to trace all my family lines back to the mid-1700s, and there were several that I was able to track back to medieval times.
In most cases, I know little of the people behind the names. I know when they were baptised, married and buried, but only in a few cases have I learnt enough about them to piece together some kind of biography. Sometimes, by looking at the social and political history of the times, it is possible to imagine what kind of lives our ancestors must have had, and all too often, it is obvious that they were not the favoured children of fortune.
Like everyone else, I have eight great-great grandmothers, and I name them here in love and reverence: Mary Gledhill, Edna Hemingway, Rebecca Mason, Eliza Wittington, Mary Ann Woodnorth, Mary Hartill, Susannah Jane Brookes and Raylee Bradley. That last name is something of a surprise – somehow, we don’t expect women born in 1815 to be called Raylee!
All these women were homemakers for much of their lives, but some did their home-making in more comfort than others. None of them was what you’d call well-off: their husbands all worked at semi-skilled trades or as manual labourers. On my father’s side (his forebears came from the Black Country of Staffordshire) the men were, without exception, coal miners, and some of their wives made nails at home, under contract to an iron-master. On my mother’s side, the men were employed in the woollen industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and their wives did not work outside the home. Mary and her Yorkshire-bred sisters would have enjoyed slightly better conditions than my Black Country foremothers, some of whom lived in two-roomed cottages with earthen floors.
Given that Mary Gledhill married at sixteen and had eleven children, including one mentally disabled daughter, and that she also brought up one of her grandchildren, it is saddening to know that when her husband, William Kilburn, died in 1854, she was obliged to go back to work as a labourer in a mill – at the age of sixty! No Widows Pension in those days, my friends, and very little charity. Even my mother, Mary’s great-granddaughter, spoke of ‘the workhouse’ in shuddering tones as being a fate worse than death.
Mary died in 1866 at the age of seventy-one. She would have lived her entire lived in cramped, possibly unsanitary conditions – flush toilets had existed before she was born in 1795, but only the very wealthy could afford them. She would have seen several outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever and no doubt seen neighbours die of those and other infectious diseases.
She lived in interesting times. As a child, she would have heard of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow occurred in the same year she was married. She was a young married woman when the first steam trains came into service. In middle age, she would have been amazed by reports of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and perhaps saddened by news of the war in Crimea. No doubt she would have heard of the work of Florence Nightingale, and praised her for it.
In the span of Mary’s lifetime, the lives of working people improved considerably. Her children were able to better themselves, thanks to the laws that forced mill owners to give their under-aged employees two hours of education a day. And of course, Mary’s grandchildren would have benefited from compulsory schooling and child labour laws that were passed in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
So ‘I dips me lid’ to Mary and the countless other women of that generation who spent their lives with few comforts, hardly any entertainment, and constant worry about money and health. I only wish they could have had the happy and comfortable old age that I’m enjoying now!
gillpolack @ 2014-03-30T16:22:00
I thought I was being terribly clever yesterday and today by reading a book that I could use in the work I was editing at all those odd times when I was just too tired to work. I'm not going to name the book, for right now it's totally annoying me.
About the only thing I can use it for is as an example of research so distracting that it throws me out of the story twice a page. Accents that should not exist, diminutives that are wildly improbable, historical errors that are so egregious that it would be much better if they were intentional. I already have an example of this sort of novel, and that's Michael Crichton's Timeline. This novel is really it crossed with The Da Vinci Code. I bet it's doing well in the airport shops - it would be good travel reading for someone other than me.
The errors may not be as bad as they look. For instance, there may be a twist that explains them and makes it a convincing alternate reality. I'm reading it to the end in the hope that this is so. If it isn't so, I shall weep at wasted opportunity, for most of the things that bug me are easily fixed. Not all, but most. I could have been thrown out of the story less often and not been tempted to throw my head back and wail. That would have been a desirable outcome.
The trouble is, if the book's not useful to my research, it's just recreational reading and I don't really have time for that today, and also, recreational reading that makes one wince is recreational reading for the masochistic. This means I shall check my portable soup (which is cooling) and make some nice coffee, then get back to real work.
ETA: I decided to finish it. Now I'm seething. There are apparently only three major religions in the world. One of them has money as the source of power and buys the politicians it needs. There were Arabs in the Middle East 2000 years ago. And none of these or other errors played a major part in the narrative, which would at least have given them a reason for being there.
That tag for Friday "TGIF' - I shall apply it to some books from here on in - Thank God It's Finished.
And now I shall go back to working on how writers use history in novels, which, by odd circumstance, actually explains writers like this one. There is no need to write a novel with this level of problematic research, and, in fact, it reduces one's readership these days, but at least I can explain their existence. Technically (since I'm pretty sure some of you want to know) they're time travel novels, but in reality they're action thrillers. For action thrillers pacing and tension and plot twists are far more important to credibility than accuracy of setting. As in Crichton's Timeline, though, the science gets a major focus, so SF readers are likely to be lured in.
It's not a bad book (though the non-science research is shocking) but it really needs a genre tag to keep some of us out. I guess this means I have another example to balance Crichton's in my book, so reading it wasn't time wasted - it wasn't time spent happily, though.
About the only thing I can use it for is as an example of research so distracting that it throws me out of the story twice a page. Accents that should not exist, diminutives that are wildly improbable, historical errors that are so egregious that it would be much better if they were intentional. I already have an example of this sort of novel, and that's Michael Crichton's Timeline. This novel is really it crossed with The Da Vinci Code. I bet it's doing well in the airport shops - it would be good travel reading for someone other than me.
The errors may not be as bad as they look. For instance, there may be a twist that explains them and makes it a convincing alternate reality. I'm reading it to the end in the hope that this is so. If it isn't so, I shall weep at wasted opportunity, for most of the things that bug me are easily fixed. Not all, but most. I could have been thrown out of the story less often and not been tempted to throw my head back and wail. That would have been a desirable outcome.
The trouble is, if the book's not useful to my research, it's just recreational reading and I don't really have time for that today, and also, recreational reading that makes one wince is recreational reading for the masochistic. This means I shall check my portable soup (which is cooling) and make some nice coffee, then get back to real work.
ETA: I decided to finish it. Now I'm seething. There are apparently only three major religions in the world. One of them has money as the source of power and buys the politicians it needs. There were Arabs in the Middle East 2000 years ago. And none of these or other errors played a major part in the narrative, which would at least have given them a reason for being there.
That tag for Friday "TGIF' - I shall apply it to some books from here on in - Thank God It's Finished.
And now I shall go back to working on how writers use history in novels, which, by odd circumstance, actually explains writers like this one. There is no need to write a novel with this level of problematic research, and, in fact, it reduces one's readership these days, but at least I can explain their existence. Technically (since I'm pretty sure some of you want to know) they're time travel novels, but in reality they're action thrillers. For action thrillers pacing and tension and plot twists are far more important to credibility than accuracy of setting. As in Crichton's Timeline, though, the science gets a major focus, so SF readers are likely to be lured in.
It's not a bad book (though the non-science research is shocking) but it really needs a genre tag to keep some of us out. I guess this means I have another example to balance Crichton's in my book, so reading it wasn't time wasted - it wasn't time spent happily, though.
gillpolack @ 2014-03-30T13:38:00
Two of my favourite people took me out to see the new Muppet movie this morning. We had popcorn and I was given a pool noodle (I had to get one, to sort the hip, and they came in packs of three). I count this a morning well-spent, no matter how much work I have to cram into the rest of the day.
Also, My hot and sour soup is becoming portable soup, because I realised that I could make it using some of the same ingredients and it seemed a great shame not to sort out the technique while I'm so fresh from reading a dozen different recipes. It's not a complex series of techniques for anyone who has made bone-based soup or any kind of strained jelly, but it wouldn't have been as straightforward without that background. None of the 18th and 19th century recipes have all the steps, though one comes closer than the others and looks as if it would give the finest end result.
Mine is going to be at the nice-tasting end (and there are some recipes that are useful, but terrifyingly bland) but not the fine and beautiful end, for my hand slipped when I was straining and I can't be bothered straining again, for I am out of cloth and besides, really need a finer cloth for the second straining. The straining would be very entertaining to do in class, for it would result (there is no way round this) in bad jokes, often obscene. This is why it's a great pity that my teaching does not allow of cookery any more.
Anyway, I have the technique sorted and my portable soup is looking good. It's not clear, but it's only one more shrinking from being ready. I had the right sort of bone with the right sort of meat, and three kilos of bones are going to make about 10 walnut sized soup cubes, each which is supposed to dilute into a pint of delicious soup. This means I have heaps for sharing, should anyone greatly crave the experience. And if no-one does, I might take sections of cubes with me to class, to fortify me this coming week. In any case, today is the day of the week when I'm allowed a bit more carb (otherwise I get vitamin deficiency), so dinner will include coriander rice seethed in one of these walnuts of gluebroth* with much coriander and Tabasco and possibly a touch of artichoke and lemon. This recipe is not 19th century. I invented it originally because I really don't like beef broth and learned to flavour it when I discovered I love making the stuff.
Because we're nearing the end of the month, today you will get three posts for WHM. You've had the morning postal delivery, now you just need afternoon and evening. What a fine way to spend a Sunday!
*When my whole process is done - which will be in less than an hour - I will finally know what 19th century glue feels like, for the soup is named after that texture, one source said.
Also, My hot and sour soup is becoming portable soup, because I realised that I could make it using some of the same ingredients and it seemed a great shame not to sort out the technique while I'm so fresh from reading a dozen different recipes. It's not a complex series of techniques for anyone who has made bone-based soup or any kind of strained jelly, but it wouldn't have been as straightforward without that background. None of the 18th and 19th century recipes have all the steps, though one comes closer than the others and looks as if it would give the finest end result.
Mine is going to be at the nice-tasting end (and there are some recipes that are useful, but terrifyingly bland) but not the fine and beautiful end, for my hand slipped when I was straining and I can't be bothered straining again, for I am out of cloth and besides, really need a finer cloth for the second straining. The straining would be very entertaining to do in class, for it would result (there is no way round this) in bad jokes, often obscene. This is why it's a great pity that my teaching does not allow of cookery any more.
Anyway, I have the technique sorted and my portable soup is looking good. It's not clear, but it's only one more shrinking from being ready. I had the right sort of bone with the right sort of meat, and three kilos of bones are going to make about 10 walnut sized soup cubes, each which is supposed to dilute into a pint of delicious soup. This means I have heaps for sharing, should anyone greatly crave the experience. And if no-one does, I might take sections of cubes with me to class, to fortify me this coming week. In any case, today is the day of the week when I'm allowed a bit more carb (otherwise I get vitamin deficiency), so dinner will include coriander rice seethed in one of these walnuts of gluebroth* with much coriander and Tabasco and possibly a touch of artichoke and lemon. This recipe is not 19th century. I invented it originally because I really don't like beef broth and learned to flavour it when I discovered I love making the stuff.
Because we're nearing the end of the month, today you will get three posts for WHM. You've had the morning postal delivery, now you just need afternoon and evening. What a fine way to spend a Sunday!
*When my whole process is done - which will be in less than an hour - I will finally know what 19th century glue feels like, for the soup is named after that texture, one source said.
Women's History Month - guest post by Laura Goodin
Laura E. Goodin's stories have appeared in publications including Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, Daily Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, The Lifted Brow, Wet Ink, and Adbusters, and several anthologies. Her plays and poetry have been performed internationally. She attended the 2007 Clarion South workshop, and is working toward a Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia. She lives on the South Coast of New South Wales with her composer husband (her actor daughter has flown the nest), and she spends what little spare time she has trying to be as much like Xena, Warrior Princess, as possible. She's online at http://www.lauraegoodin.com and http://facebook.com/laura.e.goodin.writer.
I'm haunted by a ghost. She wanders in that way you wander at a party when you can't leave but don't want to talk to anyone. She sways to avoid the ghost of Hamlet's father, of Banquo, of bulky, jovial Sir John. She pauses, though, to reach an insubstantial and wistful hand to two little princes, who may remind her of her own dead son.
Like all ghosts, she has a strange and troubling story. A grown woman, capable and at least relatively prosperous, she married – for reasons unclear – a brilliant, restless teenager, who left her before too many years to go to London and do, of all things, theatre. I see her roll her eyes, even now. Even though his success kept her and the girls well, she saw him seldom, bore the grief for a dead child essentially alone. She outlived her husband by seven years, famously given the "second-best bed" in the will. There's not much more to say, really. But questions – no shortage of them.
Why did she marry the just-beyond-boy William Shakespeare? The glib answer – because she was knocked up – merely begs the question. Why was she intimate with him? What did she see in him? Was she the only one to see it in him, or did he turn heads across Warwickshire? (Later portraits are less than flattering; his appeal was likely more charisma and wit than hottitude.) Did she, seeing his genius, encourage him to go to London? Was theirs, perhaps, a true partnership?
I find it easy to imagine her appeal for him: his jones for strong, smart, capable women is obvious in his plays, and there's no reason to doubt he'd been any different back in Stratford. She and her stepmother had successfully been managing her family's property and raising her younger siblings for quite some time after the death of her father. She knew what was what – she was clearly not one to take any crap, not one to naively let herself be beguiled, impregnated, and abandoned.
Did she resent her husband's absence? Or did she push him out the door? Was it a disgusted dismissal of this man, this disappointment, or a falsely cheerful push, designed to hearten both of them against crying as he turned is face toward London?
I've been to Stratford. You can walk across the town of Shakespeare's day in a blink. That was the size of illiterate, family-bound Anne Hathaway's world. Yet her husband had all London at his feet, words that that would shake heaven and earth ringing in his brain, and the very reaches of time and space at his fingertips. But – what if he had stayed in Stratford?
Do we have Anne Hathaway to thank for William Shakespeare? Was her desperate loneliness and grief the price paid to ensure his genius?
And yo, what's with the second-best bed thing?
The Anne Hathaway who haunts me is not forthcoming with her answers. But from what glimpses I get of her, I'm not happy with the Anne-as-victim story, left alone with three impossibly small children (including twins, no less) to weep after a wastrel husband. I'd rather think of her as part of a team, and not the weaker part, either. I like to think that together, Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare made sure these words, this poetry, these characters and plots and jaw-dropping revelations about what it is to be human – that these things were set loose for all time to come.
I wish I could thank my ghost for what I suspect she did.
I'm haunted by a ghost. She wanders in that way you wander at a party when you can't leave but don't want to talk to anyone. She sways to avoid the ghost of Hamlet's father, of Banquo, of bulky, jovial Sir John. She pauses, though, to reach an insubstantial and wistful hand to two little princes, who may remind her of her own dead son.
Like all ghosts, she has a strange and troubling story. A grown woman, capable and at least relatively prosperous, she married – for reasons unclear – a brilliant, restless teenager, who left her before too many years to go to London and do, of all things, theatre. I see her roll her eyes, even now. Even though his success kept her and the girls well, she saw him seldom, bore the grief for a dead child essentially alone. She outlived her husband by seven years, famously given the "second-best bed" in the will. There's not much more to say, really. But questions – no shortage of them.
Why did she marry the just-beyond-boy William Shakespeare? The glib answer – because she was knocked up – merely begs the question. Why was she intimate with him? What did she see in him? Was she the only one to see it in him, or did he turn heads across Warwickshire? (Later portraits are less than flattering; his appeal was likely more charisma and wit than hottitude.) Did she, seeing his genius, encourage him to go to London? Was theirs, perhaps, a true partnership?
I find it easy to imagine her appeal for him: his jones for strong, smart, capable women is obvious in his plays, and there's no reason to doubt he'd been any different back in Stratford. She and her stepmother had successfully been managing her family's property and raising her younger siblings for quite some time after the death of her father. She knew what was what – she was clearly not one to take any crap, not one to naively let herself be beguiled, impregnated, and abandoned.
Did she resent her husband's absence? Or did she push him out the door? Was it a disgusted dismissal of this man, this disappointment, or a falsely cheerful push, designed to hearten both of them against crying as he turned is face toward London?
I've been to Stratford. You can walk across the town of Shakespeare's day in a blink. That was the size of illiterate, family-bound Anne Hathaway's world. Yet her husband had all London at his feet, words that that would shake heaven and earth ringing in his brain, and the very reaches of time and space at his fingertips. But – what if he had stayed in Stratford?
Do we have Anne Hathaway to thank for William Shakespeare? Was her desperate loneliness and grief the price paid to ensure his genius?
And yo, what's with the second-best bed thing?
The Anne Hathaway who haunts me is not forthcoming with her answers. But from what glimpses I get of her, I'm not happy with the Anne-as-victim story, left alone with three impossibly small children (including twins, no less) to weep after a wastrel husband. I'd rather think of her as part of a team, and not the weaker part, either. I like to think that together, Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare made sure these words, this poetry, these characters and plots and jaw-dropping revelations about what it is to be human – that these things were set loose for all time to come.
I wish I could thank my ghost for what I suspect she did.
Women's History Month - guest post by Jenny Blackford
Their Cold Eyes Pierced My Skin
by
Jenny Blackford
Two years ago, my reputation was as clean as yours.
It wasn't safe—
a woman's name's not safe until she's dead,
sometimes not even then—
but it was safe enough. The young men of the village
and their tender peach-like buttocks
never moved me, nor did the girls,
however soft their hair or bright their eyes,
nor the worn-out husks of older folk,
tired from scrabbling out their lives
on our unforgiving stony mountainside
far from Mycenae.
But the two centaurs who hunted in the valley,
the year I turned eighteen—
oh, they were different,
alive and free.
Their hair curled down their backs like wild black waterfalls;
their cold eyes pierced my skin.
My fingers ached to comb their tails,
to smooth their strongly-muscled flanks.
I told no one, of course. Who could I tell?
My virtuous ever-weaving aunt? No.
I could not even whisper at my mother's grave,
sorrowing her ghost.
Two years ago, as I have said, my name was clean. These days,
the gossips in the street need only point
at the spring grass under the trees,
and the boy child who frolics there: my son.
But they don't know the half of it.
I succumbed, not to a local man or youth,
but to the lure of shining hooves
and glossy hides. Of course, there's more:
for any mountain girl who's ever milked a ewe or two, perhaps a goat,
has seen the ram or he-goat led to her in spring,
his huge balls heavy in their leather sack.
My centaurs were the same: formidable.
I loved them both, inseparably, as they loved me
And one another.
So, for a time, I truly lived.
My centaurs hunted hare and deer; I tickled fish;
I learned their summer songs, and danced with them, and drank their wine,
lolling on soft sweet grass far from my father and his farm—
but autumn came.
I saw the two I loved watching the birds make arrows in the sky
as they flew south;
soon my horse-men must go,
wild things that they were.
They stroked my hair and kissed the rounding mound
low on my abdomen: our child.
I cried and sulked, and was a fool.
They sang me songs of long-ruined palaces,
of stars fallen to earth,
of queens who wept gold tears.
I would not go with them;
they could not stay.
My lovers galloped south. I lingered for a month,
sure they would return for me—their love—
but I was wrong.
When winter came, I had no choice.
I walked the bitter path, stony and steep, back to my father's house.
Despite his threats, I would not name the man who took my honor.
How could I have?
The priestess shook her head, when in my fear
I asked what to expect: a foal,
to turn my father's world completely upside down? A boy?
The goddess could not be second-guessed, she said;
children bring joy and pain.
I had not hoped for much;
her own mind has been hazed with sorrow,
since the night her daughter went to the naiads' spring,
and did not return.
After my longest day and night of pain, my aunt held up my baby boy:
ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes.
No curling mane, no swishing tail.
Life would be easier for him that way, I knew.
But when I closed my eyes
and touched his feet,
I felt not baby flesh but tiny hooves.
I smiled a secret smile.
My boy. Our boy.
I weave and spin, as women must, and look out from the door
as my son scampers on the grass
under the oaks.
Is that a tail flicking in the sun?
I blink and it's not there.
I blink again, and smile to see
his shining hooves.
First published in The Pedestal Magazine Issue 70
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=22713
by
Jenny Blackford
Two years ago, my reputation was as clean as yours.
It wasn't safe—
a woman's name's not safe until she's dead,
sometimes not even then—
but it was safe enough. The young men of the village
and their tender peach-like buttocks
never moved me, nor did the girls,
however soft their hair or bright their eyes,
nor the worn-out husks of older folk,
tired from scrabbling out their lives
on our unforgiving stony mountainside
far from Mycenae.
But the two centaurs who hunted in the valley,
the year I turned eighteen—
oh, they were different,
alive and free.
Their hair curled down their backs like wild black waterfalls;
their cold eyes pierced my skin.
My fingers ached to comb their tails,
to smooth their strongly-muscled flanks.
I told no one, of course. Who could I tell?
My virtuous ever-weaving aunt? No.
I could not even whisper at my mother's grave,
sorrowing her ghost.
Two years ago, as I have said, my name was clean. These days,
the gossips in the street need only point
at the spring grass under the trees,
and the boy child who frolics there: my son.
But they don't know the half of it.
I succumbed, not to a local man or youth,
but to the lure of shining hooves
and glossy hides. Of course, there's more:
for any mountain girl who's ever milked a ewe or two, perhaps a goat,
has seen the ram or he-goat led to her in spring,
his huge balls heavy in their leather sack.
My centaurs were the same: formidable.
I loved them both, inseparably, as they loved me
And one another.
So, for a time, I truly lived.
My centaurs hunted hare and deer; I tickled fish;
I learned their summer songs, and danced with them, and drank their wine,
lolling on soft sweet grass far from my father and his farm—
but autumn came.
I saw the two I loved watching the birds make arrows in the sky
as they flew south;
soon my horse-men must go,
wild things that they were.
They stroked my hair and kissed the rounding mound
low on my abdomen: our child.
I cried and sulked, and was a fool.
They sang me songs of long-ruined palaces,
of stars fallen to earth,
of queens who wept gold tears.
I would not go with them;
they could not stay.
My lovers galloped south. I lingered for a month,
sure they would return for me—their love—
but I was wrong.
When winter came, I had no choice.
I walked the bitter path, stony and steep, back to my father's house.
Despite his threats, I would not name the man who took my honor.
How could I have?
The priestess shook her head, when in my fear
I asked what to expect: a foal,
to turn my father's world completely upside down? A boy?
The goddess could not be second-guessed, she said;
children bring joy and pain.
I had not hoped for much;
her own mind has been hazed with sorrow,
since the night her daughter went to the naiads' spring,
and did not return.
After my longest day and night of pain, my aunt held up my baby boy:
ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes.
No curling mane, no swishing tail.
Life would be easier for him that way, I knew.
But when I closed my eyes
and touched his feet,
I felt not baby flesh but tiny hooves.
I smiled a secret smile.
My boy. Our boy.
I weave and spin, as women must, and look out from the door
as my son scampers on the grass
under the oaks.
Is that a tail flicking in the sun?
I blink and it's not there.
I blink again, and smile to see
his shining hooves.
First published in The Pedestal Magazine Issue 70
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=22713
Women's History Month - guest post by Yaritji Green
Yaritji is currently taking a break from life. She is out sitting on her father’s country. She is thinking about coming to the city but is in no hurry. There is beauty in her surroundings. The red sand. The Balgo Hills. The infinite stars in the sky. Sitting with her people, hearing their stories, their songs. Yeah, she’s not sure when she’s going back to the city.
I went to one of the oldest primary schools in Queensland. My family lived in a church house in a well to do suburb. I was the only Indigenous student until my brother started school there. I was made to know from day one fitting in was not going to be easy. Black skin, Black name. I was an outsider. School wasn’t exactly my favourite place to be, but I did like the library.
The library was a wonderful place. It was my doorway to different worlds where I went on many adventures. I raced through forests, chased by Baba Yaga. Sat on wishing chairs. Listened to Aesop’s Fables. Travelled the zodiacs with Ludo and Renti. Fought alongside Vikings to earn my place in Valhalla. But my favourite place to be was running with Thowra.
I read The Silver Brumby in one evening. Then I read it again. And again. I did read the rest of the series but that first book captivated me. When I opened up the pages, I wasn’t Yaritji anymore I was a part of the book. Elyne Mitchell whisked me from suburban 80s Brisbane to country New South Wales. I was there the day Bel Bel gave birth to Thowra. I understood her fear of being hunted. I understood being different just as Thowra was different, the whiteness of his coat setting him apart from the others in his herd.
Elyne Mitchell made the country come alive. Running through the mallee scrub. Knowing the country. Making sure to make no tracks. Being invisible to survive. Avoiding the man on the horse, and his dog.
.
Reading Mitchell’s bio, I read of privilege and wealth. A woman who lived on a large country property. It was a working property. She learned the country she lived in by being out in country. She carried a note book, she spoke to the men who worked on the land. She knew enough of country to make it a living part of the book. Mitchell created an environment for Thowra to stand out in. But what I liked the most about the bio was Mitchell wrote it for her daughter who would wait beside her mother waiting for pages to be typed out.
I was in Alice Springs, doing a Certificate III in Creative writing at Batchelor College, when I saw in the newspaper that Elyne Mitchell had passed on. It felt like a close friend had died. A part of my childhood survival. This lady had had helped me even though she never knew me. She created a safe haven for me and probably for many other young readers.
I went to one of the oldest primary schools in Queensland. My family lived in a church house in a well to do suburb. I was the only Indigenous student until my brother started school there. I was made to know from day one fitting in was not going to be easy. Black skin, Black name. I was an outsider. School wasn’t exactly my favourite place to be, but I did like the library.
The library was a wonderful place. It was my doorway to different worlds where I went on many adventures. I raced through forests, chased by Baba Yaga. Sat on wishing chairs. Listened to Aesop’s Fables. Travelled the zodiacs with Ludo and Renti. Fought alongside Vikings to earn my place in Valhalla. But my favourite place to be was running with Thowra.
I read The Silver Brumby in one evening. Then I read it again. And again. I did read the rest of the series but that first book captivated me. When I opened up the pages, I wasn’t Yaritji anymore I was a part of the book. Elyne Mitchell whisked me from suburban 80s Brisbane to country New South Wales. I was there the day Bel Bel gave birth to Thowra. I understood her fear of being hunted. I understood being different just as Thowra was different, the whiteness of his coat setting him apart from the others in his herd.
Elyne Mitchell made the country come alive. Running through the mallee scrub. Knowing the country. Making sure to make no tracks. Being invisible to survive. Avoiding the man on the horse, and his dog.
.
Reading Mitchell’s bio, I read of privilege and wealth. A woman who lived on a large country property. It was a working property. She learned the country she lived in by being out in country. She carried a note book, she spoke to the men who worked on the land. She knew enough of country to make it a living part of the book. Mitchell created an environment for Thowra to stand out in. But what I liked the most about the bio was Mitchell wrote it for her daughter who would wait beside her mother waiting for pages to be typed out.
I was in Alice Springs, doing a Certificate III in Creative writing at Batchelor College, when I saw in the newspaper that Elyne Mitchell had passed on. It felt like a close friend had died. A part of my childhood survival. This lady had had helped me even though she never knew me. She created a safe haven for me and probably for many other young readers.
