Back to the Future, Part 14: More Good News for Women--We're Still Missing!!

Back to the Future, Part 14: Women and Wikipedia

I rarely refer to Wikipedia in my posts. It's not that I'm a research snob (well, okay, I'm a research snob), it's just that I hope to include information in these entries on women that wouldn't necessarily appear at the top of the page after a quick Google search. 

Logo of WikiProject Women in Red

But here's the thing, which should surprise no one: women are vastly under-represented in Wikipedia. Despite many efforts to redress the balance, the "pages" of Wikipedia are heavily skewed toward men--male historical figures, artists, writers, musicians, politicians, athletes, even goddamn video game characters. Etc., etc. Ad nauseam. 

And now a bit of happy news about just how bad it is. 

According to an April 2019 report released by Wikimedia, of the 1,618,509 biographies in the English Wikipedia, only 287,852 of them are biographies of women!!! Just 17.79%!! (This is reported by WikiProject Women in Red.)*

This number--17.9%--is up from 15%, reported in 2014. Yay????

A similar number is reported by Le project les sans pagEs: "en octobre 2018, Wikipédia en français compte 547 599 biographies d'hommes, contre 94 021 de femmes, soit seulement 17,3%" (in October, French Wikipedia includes 547,599 biographies of men, compared to 94,021 of women, only 17.3 percent).

Logo of Le project les sans pagEs

Why the disparity? A recent story in the New York Times suggests that it's not because women don't care. Rather there are continued barriers to women writers and editors--Wikipedia is a place of "relentless harassment" for women. According to a report by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Foundation itself is "seriously concerned about the idea that cisgender women and transgender editors could be repelled from Wikipedia by online abuse."

It's not only the online abuse: there is a "systemic bias in policies," "implicit bias within the [Wikipedia] community," and "poor community health"--which includes, in addition to harassment, a lack of support for "gender equity work" and a "lack of diversity in leadership."

Banner posted by Wotancito,
Spanish "Women Love Wiki" project
("making women invisible in history is also violence")

I've filled this blog with complaints about women written out of history, women written out of the literature, women written out of art, the lack of public monuments for women's achievements, and, especially, the terrible treatment of women by "reliable" sources like the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. I'm always bitching about something, I guess . . .

Update, 16 April 2019, afternoon: And, then, there's this--

The man charged with throwing a 5-year-old boy off a third-floor balcony at the Mall of America told police he was angry at being rejected by women at the Minnesota mall and was "looking for someone to kill" when he went there last week, according to a criminal complaint Monday.

But, hey, he wasn't murdering his wife, his girlfriend, or his own child . . .

Update, 19 July 2019: For Jessica Wade's efforts to write women into Wikipedia, see Maya Salam's New York Times column, "Most Wikipedia Profiles Are of Men. This Scientist Is Changing That" (click here).

Update, 11 April 2020: For a profile of Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, the co-founder of Women in Red, see Rachael Allen's "Wikipedia Is a World Built by and for Men--Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight Is Changing That," published as part of The Lily in The Washington Post (click here).

*Update, 13 February 2024: The figures quoted on the Women in Red Project have recently been updated—as of 5 February 2024, a whole 19.74% of Wikipedia’s biography’s are about women. Woohoo!

Mrs. Gaskell and Mothers of the Novel

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (born 29 September 1810)

Among nineteenth-century women novelists (aside from the Brontë sisters, of course) Elizabeth Gaskell may be one of the best known to modern readers, if for no other reason than several of her works of fiction have been made into television series--in 1999, the BBC aired a four-part adaptation of Wives and Daughters; in 2004, the BBC produced a four-episode mini-series of North and South; and a 2007-2008 BBC adaptation of Cranford, starring Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins, earned BAFTA, Emmy, and Golden Globe awards. All three productions aired in the US on PBS.

Born on 20 September 1810 in Chelsea, Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was the daughter of William Stevenson, a Unitarian minister, treasury official, and journalist, and Elizabeth Holland, whose family also had strong Unitarian connections.

Elizabeth was the youngest of their eight children (only two of whom would survive infancy). Her mother died in 1811, just months after giving birth to Elizabeth, who at thirteen months old was sent to live with her mother's sister, Hannah Lumb, whom Elizabeth would later describe as "more than a mother."

The young Elizabeth Stevenson,
miniature portrait by
William John Thompson

William Stevenson remarried, raising a second family with his second wife, Catherine Thompson, while Elizabeth remained with her maternal family in Cheshire throughout most of her childhood. The Cheshire market town of Knutsford, where Elizabeth lived with her aunt, was transformed by fiction into the town of Cranford.

(Catherine Thompson Stevenson's brother, the miniaturist William John Thompson, would later paint the portrait of Elizabeth as a young woman I've included on this entry.)

In 1832, Elizabeth Stevenson married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister associated with the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester.

As the Gaskell Society describes it, Manchester in the early nineteenth century "was a great cultural and intellectual centre, boasting institutions like the Literary and Philosophical Society, the Mechanics Institute and the Athenaeum. It was at the forefront of the new industrial age, but this rapid growth, as well as generating much wealth, also led to uncontrolled urban development and appalling squalor."

In her new life in the city, Elizabeth Gaskell worked with her husband to offer aid and support for the poor and to teach reading and writing, in addition to Scripture, in the Unitarian Sunday school. She observed the radical politics and social tensions of the city--as she would write in the preface to her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), "I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want."

During the first years of her marriage, Gaskell gave birth to three daughters (1834, 1837, 1842), and she began writing, publishing several stories. But after the death of her son, who died of scarlet fever in 1845, just nine months old, Gaskell began writing a novel, at her husband's suggestion, as a way of distracting herself from her profound grief. 

That novel, Mary Barton, depicted the dire circumstances of industrial workers in the city of Manchester, profoundly affecting the public conscience. It also brought Gaskell to the attention of Charles Dickens, who included her work in his publications and helped her to become one of the most popular authors of her day.

Gaskell did not avoid controversy. Her novel Ruth, published in 1855, tells the story of a young seamstress who works in a sweatshop; seduced and betrayed by her lover, she attempts suicide and gives birth to an illegitimate child. Although the "fallen" woman ultimately redeems herself, she is never allowed to be happy or fully reintegrated into society--though after her death she is praised by those who knew her.

North and South (1855) is an example of what is now called a "social novel," focusing on the tensions between employers and workers from the perspective of a young woman who moves from her home in the rural south of England to live in the industrial town of Milton, a fictionalized Manchester.

Sylvia's Lovers (1863) is set during the Napoleonic period, and unlike her more well-known work, is a story of obsessive love, enforced military service (the notorious press gangs), dutiful marriage, and the eventual realization that an unloved husband is loved after all.

Gaskell's last novel, Wives and Daughters, was published in serial installments from August 1864 to January 1865, but Gaskell died before she completed the coming-of-age story of Molly Gibson, whose father remarries, bringing into the young girl's life a pretty but dangerous stepsister, Cynthia Kirkpatrick.

Gaskell was also a friend of the novelist Charlotte Brontë, whom she met in 1850, and she wrote the first biography of Charlotte, who died in 1855, based on their shared correspondence. The biography was published in 1857, and it provoked controversy--in her work, Gaskell suppressed some aspects of her friend's passion for the married Constantin Heger, while emphasizing the dissolute nature of Charlotte's brother Branwell and overemphasizing the Brontë sisters' isolation. Gaskell faced the prospect of lawsuits for her depictions of many Brontë friends and acquaintances who objected to Gaskell's depiction of them in the biography. 

Elizabeth Gaskell,
a photograph from c. 1860

Gaskell died suddenly of a heart attack on 12 November 1865 in Hampshire, where she was buying a home that was to be for her retirement. She was just fifty-five years old. Her last novel, North and South, was unfinished.

The Gaskell Society’s website, which I’ve linked to above, offers extraordinary resources. If you have access to this resource, an excellent account of Gaskell's life and work is Jenny Linglow's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (click here). 

If you enjoy podcasts, you will want to listen to this episode of In Our Time, "Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South" (click here).

Ann Radcliffe, "the Mighty Enchantress," and the Gothic Novel

Ann Ward Radcliffe, Novelist (died 7 February 1823)

A week or so ago, in writing about Caroline Lamb, I once again referred to the novelist Ann Radcliffe--and it was only then that I realized I'd never devoted an entire post to her! So today, on the anniversary of her death, I thought I'd write about her life.

The elusive Ann Radcliffe

In an earlier reference to Radcliffe, I noted that, along with a couple of other novelists, she'd saved me while I was studying for my Ph.D. exams. As a medievalist, I knew I was weak on a couple of the "later" periods I'd have to cover in my exams, especially the nineteenth century, and on genres that developed later, like the novel. 

While I'd always been a big reader, I'll admit to being bored to tears by Dickens. Well, not all of Dickens, but the novels that were then on the Ph.D. reading list--David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Honestly! I'd first read Great Expectations in high school, then it was required in a college class, and there it was again on the reading list . . .

In my reading for the exams, I figured I'd "covered" Dickens, to my satisfaction at any rate, with the Pickwick Papers, which I'd enjoyed enormously, and Bleak House, with its endless Jarndyce v. Jarndyce Chancery case. (And I have a soft spot for the horrible Grandfather Smallwood, decayed and sunken into his chair, always needing to be "shaken up" into position on his cushion!) 

Also on the list were Thackeray and Hardy, of course, and Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot, but, still. And so, avoiding the required--or, rather, expected reading--I found my way to what were then non-canonical choices. It was, after all, 1975, so writers like Fanny Burney and Anthony Trollope weren't on my list of mandated writers.

Among many other delights that distracted me, I "discovered” Gothic novels--in the eighteenth century, I preferred Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) to the work of "fathers of the novel" like Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Moving on, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) for the first time, which sent me back a few decades to John William Polidori's novella, "The Vampyre" (1819). 

But my favorite writer-I-wasn't-supposed-to-be-reading was Ann Radcliffe, whom I "discovered" during my Gothic-novel-reading phase. I didn't know much about her--well, to be honest, I didn't know anything about her, and I can't even remember now how I found my way to her novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, on the shelves of the University of Washington's Suzzallo Library. 

As I have since learned, there isn't all that much known about the life of Ann Ward Radcliffe. In its notice of her death, the Edinburgh Review commented, "She never appeared in public, nor mingled in private society, but kept herself apart, like the sweet bird that sings its solitary notes, shrouded and unseen."

She lived so much out of the public eye, in fact, that, as Lilia Melani writes, her contemporaries filled in the gaps: "Little was or is known about Radcliffe's life, so not surprisingly apocryphal stories sprang up about her: it was reported that she had gone mad as a result of her dreadful imagination and been confined to an asylum, that she had been captured as a spy in Paris, or that she ate rare pork chops before retiring to stimulate nightmares for her novels; several times she was falsely rumored to be dead."

The facts are few: Ann Ward was born in London in 1764, the daughter of William Ward and Ann Oates. Her father was in trade, selling buttons, thread, and ribbon, later moving to Bath, where he opened a porcelain shop. At some point Ann lived with a relative, Thomas Bentley, in Chelsea, a porcelain manufacturer who joined in partnership with Josiah Wedgewood, the maker of Wedgewood china. Wedgewood's daughter, Susannah, was the young Ann's one known friend. In Bentley's home, Ann also met the diarist Hester Thrale and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

In 1787, when she was twenty-three, Ann Ward married William Radcliffe, a journalist and editor of a London newspaper, The English Chronicle. Their marriage was happy--and, most important, Radcliffe supported his wife's writing career, which she began as a way of occupying the time while he was working outside the home.

Her first novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790), were published anonymously, but Radcliffe achieved some recognition with the publication of her third novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), which sold well and earned a strong profit for her publisher. 

Ann Radclife's most famous works, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) were as captivating to her contemporaries as they were to me, reading them nearly two hundred years later. While critics condemned Gothic fiction, as the style came to be known, as the "trash of circulating libraries," Radcliffe herself was wildly popular--and avoided critical trashing.

It was her contemporary, the essayist Thomas de Quincey, who called her "the great enchantress." For some critics, she was "the Shakespeare of Romance writers"; for others, including Sir Walter Scott, she was "the mighty magician." Not a mighty magician, but the mighty magician.

According to Dale Townsend,* writing about Radcliffe for the British Library online guide to her and her work,

Radcliffe became the most highly paid professional writer of the 1790s: in an age in which the average amount earned by an author upon receipt of a manuscript was £10, her publishers, G G and J Robinson bought the copyright for The Mysteries of Udolpho for £500, while The Italian garnered from Cadell and Davies a staggering £800. She was also the most emulated, copied and plagiarised author of the period.

A book of verse, published in 1816, did not sell as well. Radcliffe's final novel, Gaston de Blondeville; and St. Alban's Abbey, with Some Poetical Pieces (1826) was published after her death, as was Thomas Noon Talfourd's Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe, published at the same time as her final, posthumous novel. 

Like so many other writers--not just women--Radcliffe fell into obscurity late in the nineteenth century. I linked above to Richard Garnett's late nineteenth-century essay on Radcliffe, published in the Dictionary of National Biography--there, he writes, "Mrs. Radcliffe's novels may not be much read, either now or in the future. . . . "

But interest in Radcliffe's work has been revived; according to Townsend, "it was really only with the reawakened interest in the Gothic aesthetic initiated by the publication of David Punter’s The Literature of Terror in 1980 that Radcliffe and those of her school came to be regarded as a serious and legitimate object of academic enquiry."

Academic interest or not, Radcliffe is enormously engaging. Townsend's essay on the British Library site offers excellent information on Radcliffe and provides an amazing array of links to connect you to articles on the Gothic and on other Gothic writers and novels. Melani's discussion is excellent for its thematic analysis. And, hey!!!! There's even a brief article in my favorite source-to-be-pissed-off-at, The Encyclopedia Britannica!

But, the novels themselves!!! Many are available in well-edited, affordable Penguin and World's Classic editions, but you can also access her work at Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

*Update, 18 January 2024: Unfortunately, this resource is no longer available at the BL website, so the link takes you to the page as it is preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 

Frances Sheridan and Mothers of the Novel

Frances Chamberlaine Sheridan, Novelist and Playwright 

Frances Chamberlaine was born in Dublin some time during the year 1724--the date of her birth is unknown, and, unfortunately, her role as a novelist has been little known. I am posting about her today, 30 October, because it is the birthdate of her famous son, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, born on this day in 1751.

The daughter of the Rev. Dr. Philip Chamberlaine, an Anglican minister, and his wife, Anastasia Whyte, Frances was the youngest of five children. Her mother "dying soon after her birth," Frances had many obstacles to overcome in order to become a writer.

Not least of these obstacles, as her granddaughter noted, were the "disadvantages of education" Frances experienced--disadvantages that would have "crushed" a "less ardent mind."

Although Philip Chamberlaine was "an admired preacher," one who was "strict in the performance of all his duties," he wasn't in favor of educating his two daughters. He was "only with difficulty prevailed on to allow his daughter to read." As for teaching her to write? The good reverend doctor judged writing to be "perfectly superfluous in the education of a daughter."

Teaching a girl to write could only lead to disaster--to love letters and to the "exchange" of "confidential effusions" with other young women. Horrors!

Like many other aspiring women about whom I have posted in this blog (Moderata Fonte comes immediately to mind), Frances's three older brothers helped to educate her. Her oldest brother, Walter, not only taught her to write, he taught her Latin, for example. Her brother Richard taught her botany, which seems to have been of some medicinal use as she was said to have helped to treat the sick in her father's parish. 

By the age of fifteen, Frances had written a two-volume romance, Eugenia and Adelaide, somehow finagling the paper on which to write from the family's housekeeper (or, at least, this is the account that her granddaughter provides). This romance was published only after Frances Chamberlaine Sheridan's death; her daughter, Alice, successfully adapted it as a comic opera for the stage.

Her granddaughter relates that the young Frances also wrote a sermon that was so admired by those who heard or read it that she wrote a second--though her granddaughter says she has not been able to find a copy of them. These sermons "were long in the possession of the family," her granddaughter wrote, "and were reckoned to display considerable ability."

Frances seems to have written nothing else until she produced two pieces in defense of the actor Thomas Sheridan--a fracas had broken out at the Smock Alley Theatre (Dublin), which he managed. Frances defended his behavior in verse, "The Owls: A Fable," and in a pamphlet. The two were married in 1747.

Over the next few years, she gave birth to three children: Charles Francis (b. 1750), an author and politician; Richard Brinsley (b. 1751), the famed playwright; and Alicia (b. 1753), later Alicia LeFanu, also a writer. (Frances Sheridan's daughter, Alicia Sheridan LeFanu, is frequently confused with her daughter, the younger Alicia LeFanu, who authored Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, which you can access in full by clicking here.) 

After Francis Sheridan moved to London with her husband in 1754, she became acquainted with many writers, including Samuel Richardson, famed author of Pamela and Clarissa--who read one of her unpublished works and encouraged her to continue to write.

In 1756 she sent him a manuscript of what has become her most well-known work, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. (In this novel, Frances pays tribute to her brother and his role in her education; the young Sidney Bidulph is taught by her older brother, Sir George.) The novel, written in the form of a journal, was published anonymously in 1761, dedicated to Richardson. In the mean time, in addition to writing, Frances Sheridan also gave birth to a fourth child, a daughter named Elizabeth, during this period.

She turned to drama, and two of her plays were produced at the Drury Lane Theatre--The Discovery, in 1763 (her husband played a leading role), and The Dupe, produced late in the same year. Both plays were published, the first in 1763, the second in 1764.

The Sheridans moved again, this time to Blois, France, in 1764. There Frances added a second part to her Sidney Bidulph and completed another comedy, A Journey to Bath.  She also completed an "oriental tale," The History of Nourjahad, which was published in 1767, the year after her death. (It was later dramatized by the novelist and playwright Sophia Lee, in 1788)

Frances Sheridan died in Blois on 26 September 1766. She was only forty-two years old. 

Frances Sheridan's works are now readily available: Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and Oriental Tales are each produced in an accessible World's Classics edition. The early Eugenia and Adelaide is available in print through Eighteenth Century Classics Online (I know that says "online"--and it is online if you have access to the database, but you can also purchase a paper copy through Amazon.)

You can read a brief biography from the Dictionary of National Biography by clicking here (this is not the most recent online DNB entry, which requires subscription access, but an earlier, freely available version). Alicia LeFanu's biography is available through the Internet Archive.

One of the things I love about this mother-of-the-novel is the way Frances Sheridan is the "mother" of women writers--her daughter, Alicia Sheridan LeFanu, her granddaughter, Alicia LeFanu, and her great granddaughter, a woman we've met before, Lady Caroline Norton.

More on Mothers of the Novel

Another "History" of the Novel that Fails to Mention Women!

I'm a little behind with my reading, so I just now dipped into the 16 May 2016 New Yorker magazine, only to discover Adelle Waldman's piece on Samuel Richardson, "The Man Who Made the Novel." 

For what it is, the piece is fine, I guess, though I find it hard to stomach Waldman's discussion of Richardson's most famous novel, Clarissa, first published in 1748, and most especially her depiction of the novel's principal male character, Lovelace. While summarizing the plot of Richardson's epistolary novel, Waldman fails to mention that Lovelace imprisons and rapes Clarissa and the broken young woman dies as a result of her agony and despair!! (Waldman draws her discussion of Clarissa to a close by saying, "One can't talk about 'Clarissa' without acknowledging its most notorious feature: its length." No--one can't talk about Clarissa without acknowledging its most notorious feature: the rape of Clarissa.)

Clarissa pleads with Lovelace,
illustration from the 1795 edition of
Clarissa

What really bugs is not Waldman's appreciation of Richardson the writer but her complete depreciation of the many women writers who also contributed to the development of the novel. Or, rather, her erasure of these women writers. For Waldman, Richardson is "the man who made the novel." The only other novelists she mentions are Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding. What is this? 1970? Sheesh. 

Waldman's view of the creation of the novel as an exclusively male accomplishment is pretty much that of my 1970 history-of-the-novel class, which the professor called "Fathers of the Novel." I'll link you here to the very first post in my 2015 daybook of women's history--in that post, while writing about the novelist Maria Edgeworth, I introduced the tag I've used throughout this blog, "mothers of the novel." (More on the source of that phrase, below.)

Actually, Waldman's view of the history of the novel isn't just straight out of my 1970 classroom, it is straight out of Ian Watt's 1957 The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding--according to Watt, it was the genius of these three men that created the novel.

Waldman may not consider Mary Wroth or Margaret Cavendish as worthy precursors to Jane Austen (she ends her piece by claiming Austen "seems to have felt a kinship" with Richardson), but it's hard to swallow that, in 2016, an article about the "making" of the novel fails to mention even one eighteenth-century woman writer who contributed to the development of the genre--Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, or Eliza Haywood, for starters. 

In 2016, there's no excuse for this kind of refusal to acknowledge women novelists. Okay, Austen may have read and appreciated Richardson. But as Dale Spender noted thirty years ago, the novel had mothers as well as fathers. And in her 1986 Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen, Spender lists some 568 novels written by 100 eighteenth-century novelists, all of them women.

As Spender notes, "Quantity alone does not satisfy the criteria for excellence. But quantity alone suggests that the criteria in relation to the early novels are not being made explicit. When during the 1700s so many novels were written by women and not one of them qualifies now for a prominent place in the literary heritage, it seems reasonable to claim that what is meant by the standards of excellence is that in order to be great, one must be a man."

For a contemporary woman novelist, like Adelle Waldman, not to have at least gestured toward the existence of women novelists in her piece on Samuel Richardson--much less to have acknowledged the possibility that women may have also had something to do with the development of the modern novel--is simply unforgivable.

And, by the way, while Waldman makes sure to mention the length of Richardson's Clarissa--"some nine hundred and seventy thousand words"--demonstrating Richardson's achievement, words-wise, by comparing Clarissa to War and Peace (560,000 words) and Infinite Jest (a "slender four hundred and eighty-four thousand")--might I point out that Madeleine de Scudéry's wildly popular novel, Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (Artamène or the Great Cyrus), published in ten volumes between 1648 and 1653--in other words, a hundred years before Richardson's novel--was over two million words long!

But, of course, the creators of the novel were all male. And English.

Frances Trollope and Mothers of the Novel

Frances Trollope (death of her son Anthony Trollope, 6 December 1882)

I discovered the novels of Anthony Trollope when I was supposed to be doing something else, and once I found him, I just couldn't get enough--luckily, there is a lot of Trollope, some forty-seven novels (he also wrote five volumes of short stories, several travel books, a handful of biographies, and an autobiography, among other works of non-fiction). 

After I finished reading his most well-known works--the six novels that comprise the Barchester Chronicles and the six Palliser novels--I just started reading my way through the shelves, alphabetically by title (not very discriminating, I know). I love Trollope, and shortly after I retired, I decided to read the two series again--I'm hoping to avoid another full-on attack of Trollope mania, however.

The novelist Frances Trollope,
mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope

That said, although I was vaguely aware that Anthony Trollope's mother had also been a writer, it wasn't until a couple of years ago, when my son gave me a Nook for Mother's Day, that I discovered the work of Frances Trollope.

After I'd downloaded onto my new e-reader all the novels by Margaret Oliphant I could find--the free ones, at any rate--I searched for books by "Trollope," and up came Frances Trollope's name. So I downloaded The Widow Barnaby, and I was hooked.

Born on 10 March 1779, Frances Milton was the daughter of William Milton, the vicar of Heckfield (Hampshire) and his first wife, Mary Gresley.

When Frances was just five or six years old, her mother died shortly after giving birth to a son. Following her father's remarriage in 1800, to Sarah Partington, Frances and her sister Mary moved to London, where they took up residence with their nineteen-year-old brother, Henry, who was working for the War Office.

In 1809, when she was thirty years old, Frances married a London barrister, Thomas Anthony Trollope. Over the course of the next nine years, she gave birth to seven children (her first baby, a boy, died at birth). Her husband proved to be volatile and unpredictable, his temper harsh, and his finances a disaster.

In 1827, Thomas Trollope's situation grew worse--Thomas had expected to inherit a considerable estate from his childless uncle, but on the death of his childless uncle's wife, the man had remarried, and his new wife had borne a child, displacing Thomas as heir. Deprived of his expectations and facing ruin, Thomas Trollope had to break up his established home.

Frances Trollope traveled to the United States with some hope of improving her family's economic situation and establishing her second son, Henry, in a career. How exactly she planned to do that isn't clear, but she headed first to Nashoba, a utopian community established by the social reformer Frances Wright, whom she had met briefly in London.

As her son Anthony would later recall, his mother's journey was "partly instigated by the social and communistic ideas of a lady whom I well remember, a certain Miss Wright, who was, I think, the first of the American female lecturers." The Nashoba Commune, founded in Memphis in 1825, was a multi-racial community focused on providing an education for freed slaves. 

When Frances Trollope arrived at Nashoba, the community was on the brink of collapse. She moved on to Cincinnati, still in search of a way to make money for her family and find a career for Henry. She opened the Cincinnati Bazaar, which proved to be exactly what the citizen's of the city dubbed it, "Trollope's Folly" (it is sometimes said to be the first shopping mall in the United States).

It wasn't until she returned to England and began writing that she found her way to success. In 1832, at age fifty-two, she published an account of her travels, Domestic Manners of the Americans.

It was a scathing critique of the country and its hypocrisy: "With one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves, you will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties."

Beyond Americans' oppression of their slaves and their dispossession of Native Americans, Trollope regarded American women as particularly oppressed by a repressive brand of religiosity:

How is it that the men of America, who are reckoned good husbands and good fathers, while they themselves enjoy sufficient freedom of spirit to permit their walking forth into the temple of the living God, can leave those they love best on earth, bound in the iron chains of a most tyrannical fanaticism? How can they breathe the balmy air and not think of the tainted atmosphere so heavily weighing upon breasts still dearer than their own? How can they gaze upon the blossoms of the spring and not remember the fairer cheeks of their young daughters, waxing pale, as they sit for long sultry hours, immured with hundreds of fellow victims, listening to the roaring vanities of a preacher, canonized by a college of old women? They cannot think it needful to salvation, or they would not withdraw themselves. Wherefore is it? Do they fear these self-elected, self-ordained priests, and offer up their wives and daughters to propitiate them? Or do they deem their hebdomadal freedom more complete because their wives and daughters are shut up four or five times in the day at church or chapel?

Trollope's book was a sensation--loved by the British, loathed by the Americans. (Mark Twain would later write that Frances Trollope was "handsomely cursed and reviled by this nation" for having told the truth.) Most important for her financial situation it sold "like wildfire."

Trollope continued writing and produced several more travel books, but she also turned her attention to fiction, publishing The Refugee in America in the same year as Domestic Manners, followed by an anti-Catholic novel, The Abbess, the next year, 1833.

Trollope's output was varied, and she wrote in many different genres. Her 1836 anti-slavery novel, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: or Scenes on the Mississippi, is widely regarded both as the first anti-slavery novel and as an important influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852.

Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which began its serial publication in 1840 (Trollope was the first woman to publish her novels in monthly parts), was one of the earliest of the so-called industrial novels, focusing on the conditions in factories in Manchester and, in particular, on the issue of child labor. Her novel influenced the passage of the Factories Act of 1844 that reduced hours for child laborers between the ages of eight and thirteen (they still worked a horrific number of hours, but at least some regulations were enacted).

In Jessie Phillips, a Tale of the Present Day (1843), Trollope focuses on issues of sex and class--Jessie Phillips is a poor young girl seduced and abandoned by a squire's son. Because of the "Bastardy Clause" of the 1834 "New" Poor Law, "illegitimate" children were the the sole financial responsibility of their mothers, so Jessie is unable to get any support from her child's father. It's a desperate tale--after the death of her child, Jessie is accused of infanticide, Jessie herself dies, and her seducer commits suicide. This novel influenced some modifications to the Bastardy Clause in 1839, and a new law, in 1844, that allowed an unmarried woman to seek some financial support from a child's father.

Both The Abbess and Father Eustace (1847) were anti-Catholic novels, and both employed some conventions of the Gothic novel. Trollope turned her attention--and a satiric point of view--to the failings and corruption of Evangelicals within the Anglican Church in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), sometimes regarded as her best novel. In the hypocrisy and self-interested quest for power among churchmen that she depicts, this novel makes a nice link to the Barchester novels of her son.

But for me, Trollope's Widow Barnaby trilogy is where to begin. As I said, I first stumbled on The Widow Barnaby (1839) quite by accident, downloading books onto my new Nook. I was thrilled to discover that two novels followed: The Widow Married: a Sequel to The Widow Barnaby (published serially from 1839 to 1840, and as a single-volume novel in 1840), and The Barnabys in America: or Adventures of the Widow Wedded (published serially from 1842 to 1843, and as a book in 1843).

Trollope moved to Florence after the death of her husband (1835) and a daughter (1838). By the time of her death there, on 6 October 1863, she had published thirty-four novels and six travel books.

I spent more than forty years in English departments at universities--I started graduate school in 1972 and retired as an English professor in 2014. Never once did I hear the name of Frances Trollope. But, to be fair, Anthony Trollope was never on a syllabus either.

Anthony Trollope is experiencing a bit of the spotlight at the moment--it's the 200th anniversary of his birth, and Julian Fellowes, of Downton Abbey fame, has just adapted Trollope's Dr. Thorne into a multi-episode TV miniseries. You might enjoy Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker essay, "Trollope Trending." It's a great essay--one of my favorite contemporary essayists and one of my favorite novelists, but I do have one big complaint. In his essay, Gopnik reduces Frances Trollope to this demeaning aside: "His mother, the travel writer and novelist Fanny Trollope, wrote volumes on 'domestic manners.'" He then adds, as if that weren't dismissive enough, "[n]ovelists of manners . . . die as their manners age." No, Adam Gopnik!! Read some Frances Trollope!!!

You can find Frances Trollope's work at Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, you can download free editions on your Nook or Kindle, and you will find there are many reprint editions available (though they tend to be quite expensive).

Sarah Fielding and Mothers of the Novel

Sarah Fielding (born 8 November 1710)

As I've written before, when I had a college course in the history of the novel, the syllabus was headed "Fathers of the Novel." And, of course, chief among those "fathers" was Henry Fielding, the author of, most famously, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749).

Sarah Fielding

But I didn't learn for decades that Henry Fielding's sister, Sarah, was also a novelist--she certainly wasn't part of my college syllabus. 

Rather than the Eton education her brother received (Henry Fielding also studied law at the University of Leiden), Sarah Fielding was sent to a girls' boarding school in Salisbury. As she would later write, the "education" offered to girls in such schools was minimal; they were taught "to read and write and to talk French and dance and be brought up as gentlewomen." Later, under the guardianship of her maternal grandmother, she had a tutor who taught her Latin and Greek. 

Sarah's first published work was a letter, from "Horatio" to "Leonora," included in her brother's The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742). In the next year, her fictionalized story of Anne Boleyn was included in Henry Fielding's A Journey from This World to the Next, collected and published in his Miscellanies.

Her first novel, The Adventures of David Simple, followed, in 1744--it was published anonymously, its author attributed as "a lady" and prefaced by a note indicating that "distress in her circumstances" motivated her publication. The novel proved so popular that it was followed by an epistolary sequel, Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple in 1747 and, in 1753, a concluding novel in the series, David Simple: Volume the Last.

In the mean time, she had also published the novel that is widely considered to be the first children's novel in English, The Governess: Or, Little Female Academy (1749). In a structure reminiscent of frame-tale narratives like Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, this novel takes place over the course of ten days in a boarding school run by Miss Teachum. Each day, a brief story is read aloud to the girls, followed by an extended narrative of the life of one of the young students: Jenny Peace, Sukey Jennett, Dolly Friendly, Lucy Sly, Patty Lockit, Nancy Spruce, Betty Ford, Henny Frett, and Polly Suckling.  (It is in this novel that Fielding describes the education generally offered to girls, quoted above.)

Sarah Fielding had always written, at least in part, to earn money--and by 1754, her brother, who had also written as a way of providing income for his family, had died. She struggled with poverty for the rest of her life, completing four major works before her death in 1768.

The first, published in 1757, was a fictional double biography, or, rather, an "autobiography," The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia: autobiography because the two women, Cleopatra and Octavia, told their own stories from "beyond the grave." 

The History of the Countess of Dellwyn was published in 1759, and perhaps what is now her most well known novel, The History of Ophelia, in 1761. This novel contains a preface that, as Peter Sabor writes, "de[nies] her own authorship": 

I am obliged to fortune for the papers I now offer to the public. I little imagined when I bought an old bureau that I was purchasing a work of fancy, for such I must suspect this little work to be . . . I have not been able by any inquiry to find out the author or the lady to whom it was addressed, but I hope I shall not give offence to either of them by the publication. . . .

In the novel that follows, a young woman writes her story to an unnamed female correspondent--the whole of the novel is one extended letter. 

Sarah Fielding's last publication was her translation of Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, published in 1762; this was the only one of her works published under her own name. The title notes its author as "Sarah Fielding." As Sabor notes, "Fielding, who had been tutored in Latin and Greek by Arthur Collier[,] was one of the only women in England with sufficient Greek" to be able to complete such a translation." 

In her letters, Fielding seems to suggest that the work for which she wished to be remembered was this translation. I think, however, that for today's readers, her novels, in particular The History of Ophelia, are most engaging, for they address the social and economic issues facing women in the late eighteenth century. In his entry on Sarah Fielding for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Clive Probyn notes that in her novels Fielding "clearly focuses on the powerlessness of the unhappily married woman who, because of economic dependence, becomes the easy victim of patriarchy." 

Fielding's works are now easily accessible online at sites like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, and there are various print-on-demand versions available. But I particularly like the Broadview Editions, which are not only affordable but well edited and introduced: Sabor's edition of The History of Ophelia and  Candace Ward's edition of The Governess are excellent. 

There is also a Penguin edition of The Adventures of David Simple by Linda Bree, who has also published a critical introduction to Sarah Fielding's work.

Charlotte Turner Smith and the Revival of the English Sonnet

Charlotte Turner Smith (died 28 October 1806)

Although she is now acknowledged as a key figure in the Romantic movement, important for reviving the English sonnet, Charlotte Turner Smith was largely forgotten until the twentieth century.

Charlotte Turner Smith, 1792
chalk portrait by George Romney

Born on 4 May 1749, Charlotte Turner was the daughter of a wealthy but improvident father.

In 1765, at the age of fifteen, she was married off to a wealthy but improvident husband, Benjamin Smith. 

About the whole arrangement Charlotte Turner Smith would later write that her father had turned her into a "legal prostitute."

Although she detested her husband, who proved to be not only improvident but uneducated, uninterested in his wife's intellectual pursuits, and violent, the couple had twelve children, the first born in 1766, the last in 1785. (Only two of Charlotte Turner Smith's children died in infancy, but just six would survive their mother.)

After her husband was arrested and imprisoned for his debts in 1783, Charlotte Turner Smith began the career that would continue until her death--she wrote and published a volume of poems, Elegiac Sonnets (1784). She had spent seven months in debtors' prison with her husband and negotiated his release with the success of her book. The book of poetry was printed at her own expense, her decision proving to be financially sound--with additional material, added periodically, the book went through nine more editions by 1800.

In the mean time, Smith fled to the continent with her husband after his release, hoping to avoid the debts he still owed. There she continued to write in order to support the family. In 1785 the two returned together to England, but by 1787 Smith left her husband.

She turned her attention to novels, since she believed that fiction would provide her more of an income than poetry. Her novels helped to establish the conventions of the Gothic tradition, though they also included political themes, particularly focusing on the legal and economic disadvantages of married women and on slavery, among other topics. (Her husband's family had West Indian plantations and had brought slaves with them into England.) She also involved herself in the cause of the French Revolution on behalf of the Republican cause.

In the years twenty years before her death, she published ten novels, then, when her fiction became less popular, a series of children's books and even history. 

Despite her efforts, she died in poverty.

Her contemporaries knew and valued her work--Samuel Taylor Coleridge credited her with reviving the English sonnet as a form, and Walter Scott praised her descriptions of the natural world. However, William Wordsworth's judgment proved correct: Charlotte Turner Smith was "a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered."

By the time Wordsworth wrote about Smith, in the 1830s, her work had already all but disappeared. But it is now our great fortune to know that Charlotte Turner Smith and her work have been revived.

There are several affordable paperback editions of her Elegiac Sonnets and of her novels. Online, I like the texts available through the British Women Romantic Poets Project (access by clicking here). Her works are also available through Project Gutenberg and Google Books. 

Charlotte Turner Smith is buried in St John Churchyard, 
Stoke-next-Guildford, Surrey

Kate Chopin: Awakening the American Woman

Kate Chopin (died 22 August 1904)

In these daily posts I have mentioned--on more than one occasion, I'm afraid--that in all my years of college and graduate school I never read a woman writer before Jane Austen. I should also add that I had only one American literature class as an undergraduate, and only one more as I was completing my Ph.D. coursework.

Kate Chopin, 1894

So I never read the work of the American novelist Kate Chopin (born on 8 February 1850). In fact, I am not alone--her greatest work, The Awakening, was published in 1899, but it was widely condemned for its treatment of marriage and adultery (a wife's adultery, that is). The book didn't earn her much money in royalties, and after her death, Chopin's name--and her work--fell into obscurity.

Although one book on Chopin's short fiction was published in 1932 (Daniel S. Rankin's Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories), the re-awakening of interest in Chopin occurred during 1969, just as the second-wave feminist movement was taking hold. (Ironically, because Chopin did not consider herself a feminist or support women's suffrage.) Per Seyersted, a professor of American literature in Oslo (yes, that one--Oslo, Norway!) published two works on Chopin: Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography and The Complete Works of Kate Chopin.

Despite the revival of critical attention that followed, I myself didn't read any Chopin until many years later, when a student advisee, working on a project in an education class, asked if she could give a presentation in my course on medieval women's literature. She was so persuasive that I said yes--even though she was working on a short story written by Kate Chopin. Megan's presentation was on Chopin's brief "The Story of an Hour," and she attended my class a week early, her hands full of photocopies, asking students to read the short story before her presentation. (You can read it by clicking here.) It was so short--and Megan herself was so excited--that no one in my class objected.

After that, impressed by my student's work with Chopin--and that she could get a classroom full of students to read something, even something short, that wasn't on their syllabus--I decided to read Chopin's novel The Awakening (although Chopin wrote about a hundred short stories, she wrote only two novels).

I never thought I'd get a chance to read The Awakening with students, however (since I am a medievalist), but in the year before I retired, I finally had the chance to teach a class in which I could assign not only a "modern" novel (for me, anything in the nineteenth century is modern!), but also an American novel.

I can't recommend it enough. The novel's treatment of race is provocative (and some students found it objectionable), but its view of "traditional marriage" and its anatomy of the fate of a woman who acts on her passion are very compelling. Although you can buy very affordable and well-presented modern editions (I particularly like the Norton Critical Edition), you can also access the novel at Project Gutenberg or at the Internet Archive. 

There are many great secondary materials about Chopin--biographies and critical studies--but a great place to start is at the website of the Kate Chopin International Society, where you will find an extended biography, Chopin texts, criticism, teaching guides, and information about films, translations, and podcasts about Chopin and her work.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Shelley) and Mothers of the Novel

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley 

For too long, Mary Shelley was more or less a footnote to the life of her spectacularly famous husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. When I took a course on the Romantic poets as an undergraduate, a great deal of class time was devoted to the sexual adventures of the charismatic Shelley and Byron, and of course Mary Shelley's name came up during that discussion--at age sixteen she eloped with the already-married Shelley!!! She gave birth to an out-of-wedlock baby!!! But I had no idea that, before her name was Shelley, she bore the name of not one but two extraordinary political thinkers and writers, her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. 

Mary Shelley, c. 1840,
portrait by Richard Rothwell

While Mary's identity as an individual--her own accomplishments, even her name--were never discussed in my 1971 classroom, her singular "achievement" was also subject to doubt. Like many, even today, my professor didn't believe that Mary Shelley was the author of Frankenstein; he thought the novel should be credited whole, or in large part, to Persey Bysshe Shelley, not to Mary. And so, in writing about her, I've relegated his birthday (4 August) to serving as the occasion for today's post. 

Born on 30 August 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is an extraordinarily accomplished woman irrespective of her relationship to Shelley. In fact, I've sometimes wondered what she might have achieved if she had never met him. As it is, over the course of her life (she died on 1 February 1851, at age fifty-three), she published some two dozen short stories, six novels, two travel narratives, children's literature, biographies, poetry, criticism, and reviews. She wrote two unpublished plays. She edited her husband's literary work. Her journals cover the years from 1814 to 1844. Her letters fill three volumes. 

The list of just the titles of books and novels is impressive:

• Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, the Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris (1808);
• History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (including contributions by PBS, 1817);
• Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; revised editions published in 1831 and 1833) 
• Matilda (1818-19, but first published in 1957); 
• Maurice; or the Fisher's Cot (1820, but first published in 1998); 
• Valperga: or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823); 
• The Last Man (1826); 
• The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830);
• Lodore (1835); 
• Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, volumes 86-88 of The Cabinet of Biography, Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia (1835-1837); 
• Falkner: A Novel (1837);  
• Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France, volumes 102 and 103 of The Cabinet of Biography (1838, 1839); 
• Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844).

But, of course, what is most astonishing is that all of this was achieved despite the social, legal, and financial obstacles Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Shelley) faced--not to mention the physical difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, and the loss of three of the four children to whom she gave birth. 

For many years after my college course in Romantic literature, I didn't think about Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. But Janet Todd's 2007 Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle started me off on a brief period of self-education. (In my defense, I consider myself a medievalist who has spent much of her career writing about early-modern history, politics, and literature--I would always tell my students that if something happened after 1603, I didn't know anything about it, and I really didn't care. Not completely true, but true enough.)

Reading about the women in this "Shelley Circle" is revealing----these brilliant and ambitious women paid a terrible price for daring to share the revolutionary political, religious, and sexual ideals of men like Shelley and Byron. The men are regarded as geniuses whose work has become central to the literary canon and whose early deaths have been mythologized, while the women in their lives, when they are not invisible, have been regarded as disposable, their struggles reducing them to suicide, madness, or despair. 

Todd's book is the most complete account of MWG's older sister, Fanny Wollstonecraft (Mary Wollstonecraft's child with the American "speculator," Gilbert Imlay). Fanny committed suicide at age twenty-two.

As for Percy Bysshe Shelley's young wife (the woman he abandoned when he ran away with the teenaged Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin), Harriet Westbrook was also sixteen when she eloped with PBS. She was just nineteen and pregnant with their second child when Shelley abandoned her and eloped with MWG. Harriet committed suicide in 1816, when she was just twenty-one. There is a biography from 1962 by Louise Schutz Boas, Harriet Shelley: Five Long Years--it's long out of print, but there are used copies available, and it's well worth reading. There's also a good essay, here, by Lynn Shepherd.

Claire Clairmont, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's step-sister (the daughter of Godwin's second wife), accompanied her sister and Shelley when they eloped. She may or may not have had a sexual relationship with Shelley, but she certainly had an intimate and deeply emotional relationship with him. She also became, briefly, Byron's mistress, and she gave birth to his child, a daughter, whom she reluctantly transferred to Byron's custody and carelessness. The little girl died at age five. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton's 1992 Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys is out of print, but used copies are available. Claire Clairmont had many aspirations beyond those of being Byron's lover--she wrote, she taught music, she worked as a governess, she traveled and lived abroad (Florence, Vienna, Russia, Dresden, Pisa, Paris). She died in Florence in 1879 at age eighty, outliving all the others.

Miranda Seymour's excellent 2002 biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary Shelley, is richly rewarding. There is an excellent and detailed essay on Mary Shelley and her work at the Poetry Foundation, which you can access by clicking here.

Claire Clairmont, c. 1812,
portrait by Amelia Curran,
a painter and friend of PBS

Most of MWG's work is available today in carefully edited paperback editions and via Google Books or Project Gutenberg--since there are so many possibilities, I won't link to them here.

Update, 2018: This marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. I highly recommend Jill Lepore's New Yorker essay, "The Strange and Twisted Life of Frankenstein," which you can access by clicking here.

You may also enjoy a couple of recent podcasts, including "'It's Alive!' Frankenstein at Two Hundred" (On Point, 12 February 2018, with Jill Lepore, click here) and "Mary Shelley and Her Monster" (History Extra, 11 January 2018, click here.)

You will definitely want to check out the "collective reading and collaborative annotation experience" at Frankenbook: 

The project launched in January 2018, as part of Arizona State University’s celebration of the novel’s 200th anniversary. Even two centuries later, Shelley’s modern myth continues to shape the way people imagine science, technology, and their moral consequences. Frankenbook gives readers the opportunity to trace the scientific, technological, political, and ethical dimensions of the novel, and to learn more about its historical context and enduring legacy.