Anne of France, "Madame la Grande"

Anne of France, duchess of Bourbon and regent of France (died 14 November 1522)

One of the most powerful women of the late fifteenth century, Anne of France is relatively unknown today, at least to those of us whose first language is English.* While she is occasionally mentioned in the political biographies of her father, Louis XI of France, and her brother, Charles VIII, her own story remains unfamiliar--there have been no lavish feature films, costumed television dramas, or best-selling novels about her life, as there have been for her contemporaries in England, who fought so savagely during the Wars of the Roses.

Anne of France, detail,
Master of Moulins

Yet in the waning years of the fifteenth century, Madame la Grande, as she was known to her contemporaries, controlled the government of France for eight years, guiding it through a series of political crises that threatened the state from without and, perhaps more ominously, from within. 

Born in 1461, Anne was the third child of Louis of France and his second wife, Charlotte of Savoy, but the first to survive more than a few months after birth. Although we know where she was born—at the chateau of Genappe, some thirty miles north of Brussels—we do not know exactly when, only that her birth preceded the death of her grandfather Charles VII on 22 July of that year. 

Only a few months after her father became king, he began the process of securing political alliances through her marriage. On 27 November 1461, Louis betrothed his only child to Nicholas, the grandson of René of Anjou; by the end of 1462, that alliance was abandoned in favor of an Aragonese match, that project, in turn, giving way to proposals for her marriage to Edward IV of England, then to Francis of Brittany, and even to the French king’s own brother, Charles, duke of Berry.

Meanwhile, we have very few details about Anne’s childhood. On becoming king, Louis XI had installed his mother, his wife, and his infant daughter in the chateau of Amboise; there, the princess was attended by a demoiselle d’honneur, at least two chambermaids, several nurses, and a woman hired to rock her cradle. This female household has not been kindly assessed by Anne’s French biographers, who variously describe Amboise as a prison, an isolated fortress, or as a “royal gynecium”; we might instead regard it as a kind of “city of ladies,” a remarkable environment that made possible the development of a remarkable woman. 

Just as little is known about Anne’s life at Amboise, little has been written about her mother, Charlotte of Savoy, but that “little” is very negative. One contemporary noted that while she was “an excellent princess in other respects,” she was “not a person in whom a man could take any great delight,” another that she failed to inspire the king’s sexual desire. 

Modern historians, at least the few who have mentioned her, have been no more kind, dismissing her as a charming but lifeless non-entity, as a sad, prematurely aged romantic, as a saint-like figure “crowned with a halo of sweetness and modesty” who knew nothing about politics, or as “feeble in health and weak in character.” But surely she was something more. As the daughter of Anne of Lusignan, Charlotte of Savoy was raised by a mother of considerable political influence and skill, while the contents of her personal library indicate the breadth of her intellectual interests. 

Louis XI’s mother, Marie of Anjou, was also part of the Amboise household for the first years of Anne’s life. The dowager queen was the daughter of the formidable Yolande of Aragon, who for fifteen years ruled Anjou as its regent; while Marie may have been “delicate,” as one modern biographer has described her, she is also credited with having been the source not only of her son’s good sense but also for the “discreet work” of diplomacy that reconciled her husband and her brother.

Whatever else happened in the chateau of Amboise during Anne’s childhood, her biographer Jehanne d’Orliac seems rightly to have concluded that her intelligence was “ripened” there. Meanwhile, her father may certainly have abhorred the “intrigues” and “coquetries” of women in general, and the person of his wife in particular, but he must also have recognized both the political expediencies of a female regent and the ability of women to succeed in such a role. 

His paternal grandmother, Isabeau of Bavaria, had been regent of France, and, as we have seen, his maternal grandmother had ruled Anjou for her son. One sister, Yolande of Valois, was regent of Savoy for her son, Philibert, another, Madeleine, was regent of Foix for her daughter, Catherine, who inherited the throne of Navarre as queen regnant; in England, the king’s cousin Margaret of Anjou played an active role in the battle to preserve the throne of England for her son, Edward.

St. Anne, Anne of France,
Suzanne of Bourbon,
part of triptych
by the Master of Moulins

Whatever he felt about his queen, Louis left his son, the dauphin Charles, in the female universe of Amboise, while his daughter Anne became part of his court at Plessis-les-Tours; after her marriage to Pierre of Beaujeu in November of 1473, Anne seems to have spent much of the next ten years in the company of her father. “She is the least foolish of women,” he is famously to have said, “—and as for wise women, there are none.” 

When Louis XI died in 1483, his son and heir Charles was thirteen years old, arguably old enough to succeed to the French throne in his own right, but the aging king circumvented the argument. Just before his death, Louis transferred custody of his son to his daughter and her husband. His son-in-law was a loyal and firm presence, but lacked political skill or insight; Louis named Pierre of Beaujeu lieutenant-general of France. 

The twenty-two-year-old Anne, on the other hand, was different. To this “least foolish of women,” he entrusted the dauphin’s care and education, leaving to her the responsibility to govern France, if not the title of regent. Lacking the name of regent, Anne of France was nevertheless recognized as controlling the person of the king, the finances of the state, and the power of the realm. In his account of her role during the period from 1483 to 1491, historian John Bridge concludes, “We can affirm . . . that the lady of Beaujeu really governed France during the first years of the nominal reign of her brother.” 

When Anne of France left the court in 1491, she was thirty years old, but rather than retiring, she was, instead, beginning a new phase of her political career. In the years following her marriage, she and her husband had been rewarded and enriched first by her father and then by her brother; when the duke of Bourbon, Pierre of Beaujeu’s oldest brother, died without an heir, she acted quickly and ruthlessly. In securing the title for her husband, she “gave herself alone the duchy of the Bourbons.” 

In gaining Bourbon, she secured independence for herself, and for her daughter, Suzanne, who was born on 10 May 1491. In her chateau of Chantelle, not far from the Bourbon capital of Moulins, Anne reigned as sovereign, signing acts with the royal formula Car tel est notre plaisir (“for such is our pleasure”) and reorganizing and codifying the laws of the Bourbonnais. 

She also recreated the “city of ladies” of her childhood at Amboise, educating and training a generation of young girls as they grew into women. As the inveterate gossip Pierre de Brantôme noted, “there were no ladies or daughters of great houses in her time who did not receive lessons from her, the house of Bourbon being one of the greatest and most splendid in Christendom”; on this point he had good authority, since his grandmother Louise de Daillon was among those daughters who had been brought up by Anne of France. 

And she also remained involved in affairs of state. When her brother invaded Italy in 1494, he arranged for his sister, not his wife, to manage in his absence, and like his father, in making this unorthodox arrangement he avoided the official designation of regent; instead, by the “express order of the king,” his queen Anne of Brittany was placed in his sister’s guardianship, and the government of France was “transported” to her court at Moulins. 

By the time the king returned from Italy in 1495, his son, the French dauphin, was dead; three years later, Charles VIII of France, not quite twenty-eight years old, was also dead. The new king was Louis XII, whose rebellion in the first years of Charles VIII’s reign had culminated in the aptly named “Mad War.”

At least one observer thought that Anne of France might intervene in the succession—it was reported that “she thought for a moment to claim the crown for herself, saying that ‘she was the first among the descendants of the kings of France.’” Although she had no such intention, the new king decided “to call his old adversary to his aid”; in exchange for her support, he awarded her more land, more titles, more revenue and, more important, the assurance that her daughter Suzanne would inherit Bourbon after Pierre’s death.

Although Anne of France would also survive Louis XII, we will end our discussion of her life here. It is important to note, however, that she never withdrew entirely from the political center of government; she regularly attended affairs of state, like Louis XII’s entry into Paris, to name only one example, and in 1503, when he fell ill, it appeared as if the king might called upon her to take control of the government of France once more. 

Although he survived this illness, when his death was imminent in 1514, he designated Anne of France to take charge of any posthumously born prince. She was in Paris in 1515 when Louis XII died, and it was again said that she would take control of the government herself. But that was just a rumor; she was in Reims for the coronation of Francis I and in Paris to witness his entry into the city. She herself would live until 1522, her life spanning the reigns of four French kings. 

By the time she died at the age of sixty-one, on 14 November 1522, Anne of France had outlived all her contemporaries, and Madame la Grande had become Madame la Vielle, “the old Madam.” Her brother had died in 1498, her sister Jeanne in 1505. Isabella of Castile, with whom Anne had conducted business for eight years, died in 1504. Ludovico Sforza, who had lured her brother to Italy and who had tried to arrange for the marriage of one of his sons to Suzanne, died in 1508. Anne saw her one-time enemy Louis of Orléans succeed her brother as king of France; Louis died in 1515. Anne of Brittany, married first to Charles VIII and then to Louis XII, was also gone; she died in 1514. And in what must have been a terrible series of blows, Anne’s grandson François, born in July 1517 and named after his royal godfather, died within months of his elaborate baptism. Just a year later, Suzanne gave birth to stillborn twins. Suzanne herself died in 1521, just thirty years old.

Her biographers have viewed the last months of Anne’s life as a period of “darkness and despair”: “She fell victim to the blows of a malady that remains mysterious to us,” comments one, adding that it was a malady “doubtless fed by grief.” Another concludes that “agony of mind and heart finished her off.” 

But one of Madam’s formidable contemporaries faced her own losses and defeats with the unflinching gaze so characteristic of Anne herself. “I am habituated to grief,” wrote Caterina Sforza, “I have no fear of it.” Surely Anne of France would have agreed.

And at some point in her life, probably toward the end of the fifteenth century, Anne of France composed a series of enseignements, or "lessons" for her daughter, Suzanne. Several years ago, as I was working on an English translation of her Lessons, I found myself remembering the words of Virginia Woolf.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf suggested that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” I found myself thinking of this claim as I was at work translating Anne of France’s lessons for her daughter. The process was a strangely intimate one: slowly, word by word, sometimes even letter by letter, I was deciphering the admonitions, advice, and warnings a fifteenth-century princess directed to her daughter, all the while and against all logic hearing my own mother’s voice in my mind. 

And then one day, midway through the process of turning French into English, I looked away from my pile of dictionaries to the framed portraits of Anne and Suzanne that sat on the desk where I was working. Studying their faces, I knew I had to find the quotation that I remembered. 

I did find it, about three quarters of the way through the slim volume, as Woolf was describing the struggle of women writers. Although they were confronted by “discouragement and criticism,” Woolf wrote, “that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them . . . when they came to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help.” And then the sentence: “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

Anne of France’s text seems at first to challenge Woolf’s claim, for in composing a series of lessons for her daughter, Anne did have a tradition of women behind her, and a rather long one. As she wrote, she could “think back” to Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies, written a hundred years earlier, a book that Anne had owned and read, a book that, in fact, she had inherited from her mother, Charlotte of Savoy, queen of France. 

And, although Anne addressed her lessons to her daughter, she clearly came to see herself contributing to the tradition she inherited, since her book was passed on to other daughters of other mothers: her lessons were published “at the request” of Suzanne, doubtless with her mother’s approval.

The opening page of the
first printed edition
of Anne of France's
Enseignements

This first edition, printed between 1517 and 1521, was followed by a second printing in 1534. A third edition was published the next year, this time dedicated to Marguerite of Angoulême, a daughter of another powerful mother, Louise of Savoy, and herself the mother of Jeanne d’Albret, who would become queen regnant of Navarre.

But, despite the status of Anne of France and her daughter Suzanne, and despite the fact that the book went through three editions within thirty years of its composition, her work disappeared. The tradition she had inherited was also lost—Christine de Pizan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies, composed in 1405 and widely circulated in manuscript, was printed in Paris in 1497, 1503, and 1536, but, in the words of Sarah Lawson, who published the first translation of Christine’s work in English, “by the seventeenth century hardly anyone had heard of her.”

We almost surely would not be able to “think back” to Anne’s text today if it weren’t for the work of one man, a nineteenth-century scholar named A. M. Chazaud. Chazaud never tells us how or why or when he became interested in Anne’s lessons for her daughter—it’s not even clear that he knew of the existence of her work before he traveled from France to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. 

As archivist of the department of Allier, formed from the old province of Bourbonnais, he may have gone to the Hermitage to work with a manuscript of the chronicles of Louis I, first duke of Bourbon; Chazaud returned to France to publish an edition of that fifteenth-century text in 1876. Whether or not he knew about Anne’s work before he arrived in St. Petersburg, while there he transcribed not only the chronicles of the duke of Bourbon but her text; he added an introduction, appended a discussion of her language, compiled a glossary, and published Les Enseignements d’Anne de France . . . à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon in 1878. 

While he does not tell us how he came to edit Anne’s text, Chazaud does explain how the book that Anne had given her daughter came to be in Russia, for the manuscript he found there was, in fact, Suzanne’s own copy of the book: Ce livre est à moy, Susanne de Bourbon, et l’ey eu de la meson de Bourbon was written on the first folio (“This book is mine, Susanne of Bourbon, and it comes from [literally 'I have had it from'] the house of Bourbon”).

The story of the manuscript’s journey from France to St. Petersburg is fascinating, and starting from the information Chazaud supplies, we can fill in a few more details of the manuscript’s odyssey. After the death of Suzanne’s husband in 1527, the Bourbon library became the property of King Francis I and was transferred from the library of Moulins to Fontainebleu. 

Later, the manuscript was a gift to Diane de Poitiers, who had been educated by Anne of France, and it became part of the library at her chateau of Anet. Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566) was not only raised by Anne of France, but her marriage was also arranged by Anne; after the death of her husband in 1521, Diane became the mistress of Henry II of France, son of Francis I, who probably presented her with the manuscript. There is no indication when she received the gift or when the manuscript left her library at Anet. 

Two brief notes in the manuscript indicate that on “the last day of the month and year of 1632” a certain Monsieur Baillet de Sainte-Barbe from the town of Dreux gave the book to an unnamed but very happy recipient who lived on Chantre street in Paris; once in Paris, the manuscript passed to the library of Pierre Séguier, chancellor of France under kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV. 

From the library of the chancellor, the book passed to his grandson, Henri-Charles du Cambout de Coislin, bishop of Metz, and from him to the library of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1791, in the midst of the French Revolution, some fifty of the Saint-Germain manuscripts were acquired by a Russian diplomat, Peter Dubrovsky, who was in Paris purchasing books for Catherine II, empress of Russia, and, ultimately, for his own growing collection. Anne’s manuscript was among Dubrovsky’s acquisitions; in 1805, it was transferred to the Imperial Public Library. 

And there it remained, at least for a time. The few scholars who have written about Anne’s text have assumed that the manuscript is still there, preserved for us, waiting for us to pick it up and touch the very pages that Suzanne turned as she read her mother’s words. But the manuscript is there no longer—it was sold at some point during the 1930s, and its current location, if it still exists, is unknown.**

And so, in the end, Anne of France’s book seems to illustrate rather than to challenge Woolf’s view that the “tradition” women have inherited is a fragmented and disrupted one. Like so many medieval texts, the survival of her work seems entirely a matter of chance—passed from hand to hand, the manuscript copy of her lessons also passed through more than four centuries of disaster, war, and revolution, only to be sold and then to disappear. 

And yet, despite the odds, her text did survive—one copy of the first printed edition, one of the second, two of the third, and, luckily, a careful edition of the manuscript itself, made before its disappearance. Chazaud’s 1878 edition, which itself survives in only a handful of copies, was reprinted in 1978, ensuring that Anne’s lessons could be passed on to a generation of scholars intent on recovering women’s history and enabling them, in Woolf’s words, to begin rewriting the “short and partial” tradition they inherited. 

From Anne of France to Suzanne of Bourbon to Diane de Poitiers to Catherine the Great to us. 

*This post has been adapted from material in The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan) and from Anne of France: Lessons for My Daughter (Boydell & Brewer).

** For the specific date the manuscript came into the possession of the Imperial Public Library, I am indebted to A. P. Romanov, Chief of Foreign Acquisitions, National Library of Russia, personal letter, 22 July 2002.  According to Romanov, the manuscript (then catalogued as MS. Fr. Q.v.III.2) remained at the Imperial Public Library from its receipt until 1849, when a group of illuminated manuscripts was transferred to the Hermitage Museum as part of a display. The manuscripts remained there until 1861 when, Romanov writes, “all illuminated manuscripts were returned from the Hermitage to the Public Library.” Then, according to Romanov, the manuscript was sold “through the ‘Antiquary,’” which was either “an antique store or an auction”; the library knows “nothing about its location.” 

One further query produced a confirmation from Marie-Elisabeth Boutroue, Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (Centre Nationale de la Recherche), Section de l’Humanism (Paris), who indicates that nothing further is known of the manuscript, but who holds out the hope that “with luck” it may perhaps be found someday (Email, 17 January 2003). 

Florence Nightingale: The Lady with the Lamp--Who's "Shrieking Aloud in Her Agony"

Florence Nightingale (departs for the Crimea, 21 October 1854)

There is perhaps no more unlikely spokeswoman for the horrors of nineteenth-century views of “true” womanhood than Florence Nightingale.* I say “unlikely” because I am assuming that many, if not most, readers are like me and still associate Nightingale with the carefully sanitized biographies they read when they were children. 

Florence Nightingale, c. 1860

Although I’ve been madly consuming newly published women’s biographies and histories during the last twenty years or so, Florence Nightingale remained “the lady with the lamp,” a saintly figure, the sheltered and pampered daughter of a wealthy English family who sacrificed marriage and motherhood in order to devote herself to ameliorating the sufferings of others. 

I am embarrassed to admit that, aside from dim memories of childhood books, the only clear image I had of Florence Nightingale came from the 1936 film The White Angel, starring the dark-haired Hollywood beauty, Kay Francis. It wasn’t until a very few years ago that I stumbled on the “real” Florence Nightingale and her angry, agonized essay, “Cassandra.” 

I should have known better, of course—the hint that there was something more to be known about Nightingale’s life was right there, all along, in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers,” Woolf writes, “there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony.” Woolf adds a footnote here—“See Cassandra. . . .” But I had read past Wolf’s signpost, completely overlooking it. 

Once I heeded Woolf’s command (her use of the imperative, “See”!) and read “Cassandra,” I was forced to reassess my childish views of the saintly “the lady with the lamp.” 

Nightingale’s angry “Cassandra” was written before she was able to realize her goal of dedicating her life to meaningful work—it was written, in fact, when she was in the midst of the blackest despair. Born in 1820, the young Nightingale seemed to conform to the expectations of her family and her class, but when she was not yet seventeen, she experienced a kind of religious vision. 

She later described this moment of awakening: “On February 7th, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to His service.” By the time she entered her twenties, still not sure what service God might have called her to, she rejected what she called the “useless trifles” of women’s lives. “What is my business in this world and what have I done this fortnight? I have read the ‘Daughter at Home’ to Father and two chapters of Mackintosh; a volume of Sybil to Mamma. Learnt seven tunes by heart. Written various letters. Ridden with papa. Paid eight visits. Done company. And that is all,” she wrote. 

She feared the emptiness of this kind of life—“I see . . . so many of my kind who have gone mad for want of something to do.” Expected to marry, Nightingale found no relief for her despair in the “conversation of all these good clever men” that should, she was told, “be enough” for her. “Why am I starving, desperate, diseased on it?” she wondered. 

She ultimately rejected marriage—to be married, she wrote, “would seem to me like suicide.” Equally objectionable was the kind of philanthropic do-gooding, visiting the poor and the sick, that was appropriate for women of her class. In 1845, she announced to her family that she had decided to become a nurse, but she had to overcome years of opposition before she could devote herself fully to her calling. Florence Nightingale was finally able to leave home in 1853, after her father settled the sum of five hundred pounds a year on her. (The parallel with Woolf here--a woman needs five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own--is uncanny.)

“Cassandra” was written between 1850 and 1851, just before those years of opposition ended. Although the first-person narrator of “Cassandra” is never identified with Nightingale herself, it is hard not to read the essay as a reflection of Nightingale’s own life—that is exactly what Woolf does, for example. 

The title of the essay alludes to the Greek Cassandra, to whom the god Apollo gave the gift of prophecy—but with the curse that no one would believe her prophecies. Although there is no reference at all to Cassandra in the body of the essay, the impassioned writer still seems to see herself as a prophet who is ignored. Is she also, like her Greek namesake, cursed? Is she doomed to know what should be done but to be forever unable to do it? 

Following her suggestive title, Nightingale begins her essay with an epigraph adapted from the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, an opening that certainly seems to emphasize the view that the writer sees herself as a prophet. The gospel opens with a reference to John the Baptist, introduced by a quotation from Isaiah: “I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” In Nightingale’s variation of the gospel verse, the “wilderness” of Isaiah becomes the “crowd” of nineteenth-century society: “‘The voice of one crying in the’ crowd.” 

But make no mistake—although she may occupy a space in nineteenth-century society, the narrator of the piece regards herself as isolated and deprived. She is “wandering alone in the bitterness of life without.” She writes that “such an one” might be tempted simply to sleep away her suffering like so many who “are not yet awake.” But “one alone,” like Nightingale, one who is both awake and “prematurely alive” to her suffering, “must wander out in silence and solitude.” She is fully alive and, like Cassandra, fully aware of the “evil” that others refuse to see, “and yet [she] has no power to discover the remedy for it.” 

Nightingale confronts her readers with a bitter question: “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity—these three—and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?” In the first section of her deeply religious yet deeply despairing essay, Nightingale addresses fathers and mothers who consign their daughters to “the monotonous events of domestic life.” Denied any outlet for their passions, the daughters of these fathers and mothers “must act the farce of hypocrisy, the lie that they are without passion,” and find themselves trying, in vain, “to subdue the perpetual day-dreaming, which is so dangerous!” 

Nightingale believes that the dangerous fantasies filling young women’s minds are produced by the complete lack of any meaningful “interest” in their lives. And yet, even as she writes out of her suffering, this desperate voice crying out in the wilderness does not reject her suffering—in fact, as Nightingale observes, a life of suffering is far better than a life without it, for “out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure.” 

Interestingly, middle-class women like Nightingale do have rooms of their own. In “Cassandra,” Nightingale focuses her attention on the “drawing rooms” of Victorian homes where women live out much of their daily lives. The drawing room is a feminized space, although men do join women there at times during the day, after dinner, for example. But men’s lives and work are carried on outside this domestic space, whereas women must spend their lives at home, confined to such rooms. 

In the second section of “Cassandra,” Nightingale shows how arid a desert the drawing room is. She accomplishes this by putting an imaginary man into the reality of this woman’s world: “If one calls upon a friend in London and sees her son in the drawing-room, it strikes one as odd to find a young man sitting idling in his mother’s drawing-room in the morning.” She carries her imagined scene further—“But suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting round a table in the drawing-room, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books, how we should laugh!” 

But why, why, she asks, would this be so funny: “Now, why is it more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in the carriage? Why should we laugh if we were to see a parcel of men sitting round a drawing-room table in the morning, and think it all right if they were women?” 

The answer, Nightingale suggests, is that women are “never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted.” It is their “duty,” in fact, to be always ready, prepared to give up anything, at any moment, for “every trifler” who is “more selfish than themselves.” Women may be wasting their time on nonsense and trivialities in the drawing room, but that is only because they are always at someone else’s disposal—apt at any moment to be called away from whatever they are doing. 

“Women never have half an hour in all their lives . . . that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting some one,” she writes, and “[s]o women play through life.” Their time “is of no value”; instead they “are taught from their infancy upwards that it is wrong, ill-tempered, and a misunderstanding of ‘a woman’s mission’ (with a great M.) if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours.”

And so, to fill those numberless hours while they are waiting to be interrupted, women occupy themselves by “sitting in the drawing-room, saying words which may as well not be said.” They write letters to their friends. They busy themselves with needlework projects of varying kinds. They may play music or draw, but not seriously—such occupations are “only used by her as an amusement (a pass-time, as it is called).” 

The only escape from this stultifying routine, aside from the daydreaming that worries Nightingale, is marriage, but she rejects this as a plausible occupation for women. “Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death; and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced!” But women will find nothing in marriage but sacrifice—indeed, a “woman must annihilate herself” in marriage, Nightingale concludes. A wife must dedicate herself completely “to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it.”

A man “gains everything by marriage”—a woman, nothing. “The intercourse of man and woman—how frivolous, how unworthy it is!” she writes. “Can we call that the true vocation of woman—her high career? Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage—that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being—probably does not exist at present upon earth.” 

In her despair, Nightingale encourages women to wake up. As she nears the end of her essay, she addresses them directly, sounding not unlike Christine de Pizan addressing all womankind--present and future--at the end of The Book of the City of Ladies. “Awake, ye women, all ye that sleep, awake!” Nightingale writes, imploring women to think of accomplishing more than “nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.” 

In rejecting marriage and traditional “family values,” Nightingale knows that she is challenging the fundamental institutions of her society. In the end, knowing that her analysis of these institutions might be rejected or attributed to a “womanish” tendency to “complain,” she takes a radical move, co-opting her critics by recalling the example of Jesus: “Was Christ called a complainer against the world?” she asks.

Nightingale builds to her radical conclusion by teasing out the implications of her question: “People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying [H]is prayer, and so on; but if any one attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.” 

In rejecting notions of “true womanhood” that limit women to their constricted lives inside the family and their subservience to family interests, Nightingale reminds her readers of Jesus’s own rejection of his birth family—his mother, his brothers—and his substitution of a “true” family: “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother” (Nightingale is paraphrasing Mark 3:33 and 3:35). But Nightingale knows how dangerous redefining “family” is for a woman: “But if we were to say that, we should be accused of ‘destroying the family tie,’ of diminishing the obligation of the home duties,” she observes. 

The final section of “Cassandra” shows us a dying woman, speaking to those who will mourn her and who will lament the “good” that she “might have done.” The dying woman knows that, in fact, her “talent” and her “gifts” will be missed—the world will “be put back some little time” by her death. But those losses have already occurred. Her physical death, in fact, is less than her real death, “which has taken place some years ago,” when she had “to sacrifice” her own individual gifts, which might have changed the world, to “conventionality.” 

The picture Nightingale paints of this dying woman is bleak: “My people were like children playing on the shore of the eighteenth century. I was their hobby-horse, their plaything; and they drove me to and fro, dear souls! Never weary of the play themselves, till I, who had grown to woman’s estate and to the ideas of the nineteenth century, lay down exhausted, my mind closed to hope, my heart to strength.” The bitter truth is that the dying woman is freed only by her death; “Welcome, beautiful death!” she cries. 

Several years after her return from the Crimea, in 1860, Florence Nightingale suffered a physical collapse. Like so many women, she was prescribed complete bed rest. As Monica Baly and H. C. G. Matthew write in their Oxford Dictionary of National Biography essay on Nightingale, her collapse may have been the result of a recurrence of the debilitating Crimean fever she had suffered in 1856, although it may also have been a cardiac problem of some sort. Others have suggested a calculated psychosomatic component to Nightingale’s illness, that it was perhaps “psychoneurosis with a purpose,” a “protective” mechanism by means of which Nightingale could avoid her family and devote herself to her work. 

The specific causes of Nightingale’s illness weren’t critical to its treatment, however, because whatever the source, the prescription for the peculiarly female diagnosis of hysteria was the same. As Baly and Matthew note, the “accepted medical wisdom was that excessive mental exertion on the part of a woman was unnatural and would lead to breakdown: the standard treatment was complete rest and quiet. Florence Nightingale took to her bed or couch because the doctors ordered it. . . .” 

But, while she spent the next twenty years as an “invalid,” seeming to accept her role as patient, Nightingale didn’t entirely follow doctor’s orders. She refused to give up her work. She knew that, without work, a woman’s isolation and inactivity would destroy her. And so, for the twenty years she spent in her “sickroom,” Nightingale carried on with her work, reporting on sanitation in India, involving herself with the training of midwives, recommending improvements in hospital design, and supporting reform in English workhouses. 

After the death of her mother in 1880—in other words, after some twenty years—Florence Nightingale rose from her bed, left her sick room, and re-entered the world. She certainly wasn’t as vigorous as she had been, nor was she actively involved in government service. Although she may have been “increasingly out of touch” with developments in public health care, she lived another thirty years . . . 

Conventionally dated to 1852, Florence Nightingale’s “Cassandra” was privately published in 1860, in the second volume of her Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. It was not widely available until 1928, when it appeared as an appendix to Ray Strachey’s The Cause: The History of the British Women’s Movement. Nightingale’s essay is available in Myra Stark’s Cassandra, an Essay by Florence Nightingale. The text is also available in Mary Poovey's Cassandra and Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale.

The 1936 film starring Kay Francis as Florence Nightingale, The White Angel, is not currently available on video or DVD, but you can occasionally catch it on Turner Classic Movies. I still enjoy it whenever it's broadcast.

There are many excellent biographies of Nightingale, but you might start with the materials available online at the website of the Florence Nightingale Museum.

Most of all, though, follow Woolf's command: "See Cassandra!"

*This post has been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own.

Fanny Burney and Mothers of the Novel

Fanny Burney (born 13 June 1752)

A few years ago, I was fortunate to have in class a wonderful student who had returned to college after taking several years off. She had a family, a job, and a full load of classes. She also had a problem--she needed one more class in her major so she could graduate at last, and when it came time to register for her final semester, nothing fit into her schedule. She had one other problem too--she was frustrated that she hadn't read any women novelists aside from Jane Austen.

Fanny Burney, c. 1784,
in a portrait by Edward Francisco Burney--
and I want that hat!!

So we sat down to think through an independent study, she bought a copy of Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen, and we began putting together a syllabus. As I recall (I'm sure I still have a copy of her proposal on a thumbdrive somewhere, but I'm too lazy to search it out), she put a good ten or twelve novels on her reading list--a number I thought was completely unrealistic--but she wasn't willing to cut down the list. She was excited and ambitious.

She read Aphra Behn's Oronooko and was ready to start on Maria Edgeworth, but then decided to skip ahead to the heftiest book on her desk, Fanny Burney's Camilla, published in 1796. And that was as far as she got on her original list. It wasn't that the novel (which runs to 900 pages in the paperback edition on my shelf) was so long that she couldn't finish it and quit--it was, rather, that once she had raced through it, she was on to the rest of Burney's novels. What had started out as a sort of survey of women novelists turned into an intensive reading of Fanny Burney. And that was fine with me.

I'm sure it would have been fine with Virginia Woolf, too. Of the key role that Burney played for the women writers who would come after her, Woolf famously wrote, "Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney" (from the fourth chapter of A Room of One's Own).

The self-educated Burney had begun her career in "scribbling," as she called it, when she was a child, writing in a journal for her own amusement. She published her first novel, Evelina; Or a History of a Young Woman's Entry into the World, in 1778, writing anonymously and arranging for publication without the knowledge of her father. (Burney wrote in secret and even disguised her handwriting so no one would be able to recognize the manuscript as hers.) The novel was a great success.

Burney went on to write plays, three more novels (the last, The Wanderer, published in 1812), and to continue her journal writing, which extended for some seventy-two years after the first entry, dated 27 March 1768. Although her authorship was revealed shortly after Evelina's publication by George Huddesford in his "Warley, a Satire" (1778), subsequent novels continued to be published without her name. Her next, Cecilia, was written by "the author of Evelina," Camilla "by the author of Evelina and Cecilia," The Wanderer "by the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla."

In 1810, suffering from pains in her breast, she consulted physicians and was diagnosed with breast cancer. On 30 September 1811, she had a mastectomy, operated on by doctors she described as "7 men in black" and without anaesthesia (for a brief history of surgery before the advent of anaesthesia, click here). Burney survived both breast cancer and surgery--she died on 6 January 1840.

All of Burney's novels are available online today: Evelina and Camilla are at A Celebration of Women Writers, all four are available through Project Gutenberg. In addition, all of the novels are available in affordable paperback editions, like the Oxford World's Classics edition of Evelina I've linked to above.

Claire Harmon's Fanny Burney: A Biography seems to be out of print, but used copies are readily available. Margaret Ann Doody's excellent Frances Burney: The Life in the Works combines biography and careful critical assessment of all Burney's literary output, including the plays, poetry, journals, and letters. 

Aphra Behn: She Made Her Living by Writing

Aphra Behn (died 16 April 1689)

Aphra Behn's life is every bit as filled with adventure as the plot of her most popular play, The Rover--at least in Behn's own telling or, rather, tellings, of her life story.

What was her "real" name? Was her father a barber or a gentleman? Did she really travel to Surinam--the setting of much of her most famous novella, Oronooko--and meet an African prince? Did she marry the man whose name she would use, Behn, throughout her literary career? 

Aphra Behn in a 1670 portrait
by Peter Lely

So many details about Behn's life are unknown or unclear or obscure. Indeed, in a roundtable discussion on Aphra Behn at the Sorbonne in 1999, Germaine Greer referred to the early-modern writer as a "palimpsest," that is, a writing surface with its text erased and reused, then erased and written on again, each rewriting leaving traces of what had been written before. Only, Greer noted, Behn was the one who had "scratched herself out." 

While Behn may (or may not) have been born in 1640, thrown into debtor's prison, or been a Catholic, what is known is that she was an English spy in Antwerp, began working for two theatrical companies, the King's Company and the Duke's Company, as a copyist, and then, in 1670, began to write.

Not only did she write, but she wrote a play, The Forc'd Marriage, a play that was produced. Unlike many early-modern women writers whom we will meet later this year--writers like Margaret Cavendish, for example--Behn wrote plays that would be staged, that attracted audiences, that would earn her money--and that, most importantly,  would earn her a place in literary history.

From 1670 until her death, Behn made a living with her pen. She wrote and published volumes of poetry, nineteen plays, and several works of fiction, shorter and longer. Her novella Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave, A True History, with its transnational and transatlantic appeal and its exploration of race and the horrors of slavery, is now the most widely read of her prose works, but the three-volume epistolary novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister is her most extensive prose work--the first volume a scandalous (and thus hugely popular) roman à clef.

Behn's output also includes translation, for example her 1688 A Discovery of New Worlds, an English version of the French writer Bernard le Bovier de Fonatenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondese, a popular work of science, in the form of a literary dialogue, explaining Copernican theory and speculating about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. At the time of her death, she was working on an English translation of poet Abraham Cowley's Latin Plantarum libri sex, six books on plants.

Although she died in poverty, Behn left women a rich inheritance. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf notes that the notoriety of Aphra Behn was used to warn women away from attempting to live the life of a writer. "Death would be better!" these imagined scolders claimed. But Woolf does not condemn Behn for the life she led. Behn had, by "some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote." And, finally, Woolf offers a memorable tribute to Behn: 

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, . . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

There are many affordable and accessible editions of Behn's two most popular works, Oroonoko and the wonderful comedy with three adventurous women looking for love, or at least marriage, The Rover. Aside from these two works, it's easy enough to read further--free Kindle versions are available of most of Behn's work, and you can find her plays and fiction online at sites like Project Gutenberg.

I also recommend Janet Todd's excellent biography, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Todd is particularly good on Behn's politics--like many of the earliest women writers in England, Margaret Cavendish, Delarivier Manly, and Mary Astell,* for example--Behn was politically conservative.

For a great introduction to Behn's life and work, if you're not ready for Todd's full-length biography, there is an excellent treatment of Behn at The Poetry Foundation--biographical information, critical assessment of her work, a complete bibliography, and suggestions for further reading; to access, click here.

You may find that the best introduction to Aphra Behn--or a great supplement, if you are a Behn enthusiast--is the discussion on Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 program, In Our Time. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Should you be of a mind to "let flowers fall upon [her] tomb," Behn is buried in Wesminster Abbey.

*For Margaret Cavendish, click here; for Delarivier Manly, click here; and for Mary Astell, click here. 

Remembering Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (died 28 March 1941)

I've already noted Virginia Woolf as one of the founding mothers who have inspired this daybook project. Today there is perhaps no more popular figure in English departments and women's studies courses alike than Virginia Woolf.*

And if products are any indication, Virginia Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own has moved out of the classroom and into pop culture. You can buy t-shirts, mugs, aprons, refrigerator magnets, towels, and totes emblazoned with the title of Woolf’s book or with quotations from it. All these products, and more, are available online with a search engine, a few mouse clicks, and a credit card. You might even be able to buy some of these items at the A Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, though I’m not sure about that.

Virginia Woolf, 1927

You might remember the Roz Chast cartoon, published in the 26 May 2007 New Yorker, which “updates” Woolf’s title—among other things, the twenty-first century woman is looking not just for a room of her own, but a room with “adequate ventilation,” “near a grocery store,” and not “please God” in Queens, all for “under $2000 a month.” You can buy a matted print of this cartoon at the New Yorker website for $139.

Meanwhile, The New York Review of Books gallery displays five different David Levine caricatures of Virginia Woolf, from 1966, 1970, 1977, 1978, and 1980, but the Woolf t-shirt that first went on sale in 1983 isn’t offered any longer. There’s no reason to be disappointed, however. You can still buy a Levine caricature of Woolf on a postcard—in fact, two different postcard books include Woolf. She’s in the “Women Writers” set, of course, but I am happy to see that she’s also included in the series of “Writers” postcards, and either collection is a bargain—twenty cards cost just $9.95. She is also one of the writers pictured on the David Levine mousepad, available for $12.95.**

Cartoons and caricatures published in the New York Times and in The New York Review of Books may suggest Woolf appeals just to elitists or to snobs, but all the t-shirts and mugs show that her reach extends far beyond the realms Manhattan and academia. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway in 1962. I was only eleven then, and just fifteen when the 1966 film version, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, played in theaters. I was too young to see the movie but old enough to conclude that Virginia Woolf must be a terrifying figure. (The show's fiftieth-anniversary Broadway revival was critically acclaimed.) In fact, Albee’s title, if not the play itself, seems to have generated a lot of anxiety about Woolf. 

Even so, Masterpiece Theater invited Virginia Woolf into the living rooms of American homes in 1991, airing Eileen Atkins’s one-woman dramatization of A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s life and work have also inspired a few feature films—Orlando was released in 1992, Mrs. Dalloway in 1998, and Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in The Hours, released in the U.S. in 2003. Not that these have necessarily been huge box-office hits—more of my students know that Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell starred in A League of Their Own than recognize the allusion to Woolf in the film’s title. 

Still, this 1992 Penny Marshall film proves that it’s not just snobs who love playing with Woolf’s title. I admit that we academics do seem to be particularly fond of this sin—the allusion to Woolf has become something of a staple of critical essays about women writers. Sally Alexander’s “Room of One’s Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias” (2000), José Esteban Muñoz’s “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in New America” (2008), and Turgay Bayindir’s “A House of Her Own: Alice Walker's Readjustment of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in The Color Purple (2009), to name only three examples, show how irresistible Woolf’s title is. 

Even more audacious, perhaps, is multi-media artist Kabe Wilson’s 2014 novella Of One Woman Or So, by "Olivia N'Gofri," a "painstakingly rearranged" assemblage of "the 37,971 words" found in A Room of One's own. Wilson describes his process as a four-year exercise in "linguistic mathematics": he spent “day after day in a hot computer room combing through the latest draft, trying to balance out conjunctions and pronouns across the sentences, needing to stay extremely focused in case [he] made a mistake."

And yet it’s not just writers, literary critics, and filmmakers—there is Deborah Felder’s 2005 A Bookshelf of Our Own: Works That Have Changed Women’s Lives, Deborah Owens’s 2009 A Purse of Your Own, a finance book for women, and Rachel Bowlby's 2013 A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories. In 2007, to commemorate its thirtieth anniversary, the Canadian journal A Room of One’s Own shortened its name to Room, but added the tagline “A Space of Your Own” to its print cover and online logo. A 2009 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) featured “A Room of One’s Own,” a display of the work of several women artists “exploring the notion of private space, weaving new connections between mental projections and exhibition space.” In Istanbul, “Room of One’s Own” was the title of the first exhibition of 2010 at the Outlet Independent Art Center and featured the work of eight Turkish women artists. And Jazz pianist Rachel Z's 1996 Room of One's Own is available as a CD or as an MP3 download. 

Woolf’s title is so popular that “a room of one’s own” even has an entry in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions, and the online Urban Dictionary offers this definition for “Virginia Woolf”: “FemmeNazi lesbian psycho bitch whore who wrote books such as A Room Of One's Own.” (With two clicks of your mouse you can get this definition on your own “custom Urban Dictionary mug” for $21.95). There is also “A Doghouse of One’s Own,” a 2008 blog post from a writer who calls himself the “Spanish Inquisitor.” One reader of the piece wondered whether this is a pseudonym for “Virginia Wolf,” but the Inquisitor identified himself as a “55 year old, white, married male, a lawyer by trade, living in America, and an atheist.” 

  

As all of these products and references indicate, Virginia Woolf’s book is thoroughly embedded in the popular imagination, but it wasn’t always this way. A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929 by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press in England and by Harcourt Brace in the U.S., sold well. As Woolf notes in her diary, her “next year’s income” had been “made” by the book’s sales. But, despite the book’s popular success and the range and significance of Woolf’s literary output, interest in her work began to wane after World War II. Like so many women writers before her, Woolf all but disappeared. 

If any single work can give us a glimpse of her “official” status and reputation some twenty years after her death, it may be the multi-volume Oxford History of English Literature. J. I. M. Stewart’s Eight Modern Writers, published in 1963, includes a chapter on James Joyce, born in 1882, the same year as Woolf, and a chapter on D. H. Lawrence, born three years later. But Woolf is not one of Stewart’s select “eight.” In more than six hundred pages of literary history, he mentions Woolf’s name only three times, once noting the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and a second time citing the “revealing absurdity” of her view of Joyce himself. (The third reference, from Stewart’s introduction, remarks that Woolf dismissed the Edwardian novelists and poets writing before the First World War because they represented the “thick dull middle class of letters.”) 

Today, although new books go out of print faster and faster, there are at least ten print editions of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own currently available at Amazon, in paper back and hardbound, and several Kindle editions. There is a bilingual edition (Chinese-English), and there are translations available in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Polish, Czech, and Japanese--I don't claim this as a comprehensive list. Romania even issued a Woolf postage stamp in 2007.

All the literature courses and women's studies students in the world can’t account for those numbers. 

As we know, historical memory can be brief--so today is a day for remembrance.

*This entry has been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own.

**Many of the products listed here are no longer available, but (at least as of March 2021), you can still buy a couple of different Levine prints and the mousepad! OOOOPPSS! As of March 2022, no more mousepad!