London immortals

There is no statue to Mary Wollstonecraft anywhere in the world. There is, however, a sprinkling of public memorials to prominent women in central London. The local chapter of United Nations Women organised a walking tour of half a dozen of them last Saturday. Despite the persistent rain, a goodly crowd assembled, including a pair of self-possessed twelve year olds. Each statue had its designated champion, telling us about their chosen person, from national heroine to forgotten obscurity. Here is the group, listening to the story of Edith Cavell, at the impressive memorial outside the National Portrait Gallery. I even found the opportunity to expound for the benefit of Mary on the Green.

The walk started in Bloomsbury at Tavistock Square, wandered via Lincoln's Inn Fields to the Strand, along to Trafalgar Square, then Pall Mall and Whitehall and finally Parliament, a satisfying circuit through literary, legal, and legislative London.

The full list was:

Louisa Aldrich-Blake (1865-1925), the first female surgeon in Britain.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a writer at the forefront of British Modernism.

Margaret MacDonald (1870 – 1911), a feminist and social reformer. 

Edith Cavell (1865-1915), a pioneering nurse more famous for her death. 

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), not only a pioneer of nursing but also of statistics.

Women in World War II, the only sculpture not of a specific person. 

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), the leader of the suffragette movement. 

There are others: Time Out lists Violet Szabo and Sarah Siddons. The labour of love that is London Remembers provides endless browsing fascination; here's their page on the military monument. And the Victorian Web is very good between 1837 and 1901, as e.g. with Florence Nightingale. 

I've spent ages and ages making a Google Map, Statues of prominent women, with links and everything. Do have a look. 

Fifty Shades of Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft inspired one of the entries in the newly released Fifty Shades of Feminism. "There's Something About Mary" is Bee Rowlatt's paean, and a taster of her book to come. On Saturday night, there she was at the Clore Ballroom in the Southbank Centre, being introduced by Sandi Toksvig. The readings were done in pairs: Bee read from the entry by Martha Spurrier, and the human rights lawyer returned the favour.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still living in her dust trail. She was a worldwide troublemaker, and a sea-faring single mother. 

The audience lapped it up. "What would Mary do?" is the new motto. 

The Virago website is (at time of writing) oddly unhelpful, but Amazon (for better or worse) has the regular description and GoogleBooks has what looks like a full list of contributors. Trusty Foyles was there on the Southbank spot, selling the elegant grey hardback. Behind the stage curtains, the contributors were all signing each others' copies.

The Women of the World festival, a three-day extravaganza over the past weekend, was definitely the biggest and glitziest of those events we rounded up for International Women's Day. But the others were good too, and there is still the sculpture walk to look forward to on 16 March.

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Photos: the top one is from gracious activist Kamila Shamsie.  Apologies for poor resolution, but the atmosphere is clear. "Bee with tea" is courtesy the author herself.

A round-up for International Women's Day

Time for a round-up of International Women's Day events that feature Mary Wollstonecraft.

There's "The Two Marys: A Conversation Piece", created by American writer Judith Chernaik, founder of Poems on the Underground. This one-off performance is sponsored by Camden Council, representing the place that embraced the end of the mother's life and the beginning of the daughter's. In a neighbouring borough there is a multifaceted celebration with a lot of music and an hour on Mary Wollstonecraft, by historian Clare Midgley, performance academic Anna Birch, and myself, reprising my IGNITE story-telling. That's organised by the Islington Unitarians in their post-Blitz hidden edifice on Upper Street. Their sister congregation in Newington Green, the church that nurtured Mary as a young schoolteacher, will be opened for the beginning of the Feminist (Or Is It?) walk by Hackney Tours. Simon Coles has chosen to offer the event as a fundraiser for Mary on the Green, the campaign for a statue, as has Hilary King, who is running an Alexander Technique taster session that afternoon. Stand tall, Mary Wollstonecraft fans!

Most of these are listed on Internationalwomensday.com, the corporate-sponsored "global hub for sharing International Women's Day news, events and resources". (Banner ad: "Discover BP's feminine side".) They provided the logo above, and straplines such as "The advancement of women is of prime importance to the economy, business and society. The support of corporate organisations supporting women is critical." I would argue that the support of copy editors is also critical, but I digress....

There are well over 1000 events on the IWD database, with more still being added; hundreds are happening in Britain. The search facility seems to be broken, so I can't see if any others list Mary Wollstonecraft as an inspiration, but one that intrigues me is a walking tour of "sculptures of remarkable women ... from Louisa Blake to Emmeline Pankhurst", led by the UNWomen UK London Committee:

We are the local representative, voice and champion for UN Women (formed in January 2011 from the amalgamation of UNIFEM and three other UN gender bodies) and support the work of UN Women in its mission for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

If only the tour could end up at a commemoration of England's first feminist!

Perhaps the most significant event will be the launch of Fifty Shades of Feminism, a compilation brought together by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach. It features a chapter entitled "There's Something About Mary" by none other than Bee Rowlatt, no stranger to this blog. The launch is part of the three-day extravaganza on the Southbank, WOW, the Women of the World festival. Sometimes there are good reasons to love London.

Last year for International Women's Day I wrote on the importance of education and on maternal mortality, in the eighteenth century and now, here in the Wealthy West but also in the Wider World. The year before that, on the 100th anniversary of IWD, Mary Wollstonecraft got yet another non-blue plaque, situated most fittingly on a school. Islington Council was behind that nod of appreciation.

If you need more inspiration, have a look at these wonderful posters for IWD 2013.

Caitlin Moran profers a glass of wine

Britain's best-selling feminist salutes England's first feminist:

If you could choose one subjugated woman from history to bring to 2012 in order to enjoy the freedoms that women have now, who would you choose? 

Probably Mary Wollstonecraft. Because that was so ballsy, you know? That was an era where there were people around who could still remember witches being burned. So not just to give her hope and make her realize that she did start something that was incredible, but also to reward her by letting her just sit back and listen to some Beyonce, and order a really fucking amazing steak, and some underwear that wasn't made of sacking cloth, and that wasn't full of nits. I would bring Mary Wollstonecraft back and show her the 21st century. Give her some wine.

The interviewer is a New Yorker called Chiara Atik ("a dating writer, a Lower East Side dweller, and a feminist"). The where and when is an American website called The Hairpin. The subject is none other than Caitlin Moran. She too seems to understand the virtues of poetical truth over historical accuracy.

International Women's Day, New York

Whether it is consciously for International Women's Day, I don't know, but on 9 March, the New York Public Library is hosting a lecture by Kathleen Lubey: Late Eighteenth-Century Feminisms: Mary Wollstonecraft and her Contemporaries. Need I remind you that the NYPL, and specifically the Pforzheimer Collection, provided much of the content for the exhibition at the Bodleian, Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family.

Kathleen Lubey, a researcher at the Library’s Wertheim Study and Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University, will contextualize Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical calls for gender equality within the intellectual traditions of English women writers in the decades preceding her feminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791).[sic]

Wollstonecraft’s most visible legacies—her daughter Mary Shelley, and modern feminism itself—make her recognizable in our time as a harbinger of democratic and egalitarian ideals.  But in her own time, Wollstonecraft’s calls for total equality for women, as well as her sympathies with French republicanism, alienated her from her female contemporaries and immediate predecessors, who envisioned more subdued programs for women’s improvement and social action.  Frances Burney, Hester Chapone, Anna Barbauld, and the women intellectuals known as the Bluestockings, while recognized as part of a proto-feminist lineage, recoil from the polemical tactics undertaken by Wollstonecraft, offering instead a varied spectrum of strategies for women’s social advancement, such as marriage, publication, private learning, and self-improvement.

Professor Lubey is author of articles on sexuality, pornography, and eighteenth-century culture in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and differences. Her book Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press.  “Late Eighteenth-Century Feminisms” is part of a new book project she is writing in the Wertheim Study, examining the relationship between private manuscript and published writing in eighteenth-century literary culture.

 Tomorrow: a second look at the second Vindication. 

Swedish conference programme

On the 23 February 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published a book that has become a milestone in the history of political philosophy and one of the founding texts of feminist political thought, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. On this the 220th anniversary of the birth of the Vindication we welcome all to a symposium dedicated to the philosophy and intellectual context of this remarkable thinker.

-- From the official conference website, for Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy and Enlightenment.  

I found out about this philosophers' confab in September, and now its organiser, Lena Halldenius, has written with more information on the proceedings. She also expresses no amazement that I will be, instead, at the other academic conference commemorating the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, though honestly that decision had much less to do with the weather (I love proper snow!) and much more to do with networking for Mary on the Green, the project to raise a memorial sculpture. We'll have more on Mary Wollstonecraft: Legacies, and Gainsville FL, in another post soon.

As for the Lund symposium, there is full info at PhilEvents, a website compiling events in philosophy, brought to you by the Institute of Philosophy, at the University of London. The symposium has a Facebook event page, and though its organiser professes technological modesty (a repeating virtue, see below), there are high hopes of the talks being podcast. Watch this space! Would anybody attending like to tweet the day as it goes along?

Four of the five speakers have already provided their philosophical abstracts. There is Martina Reuter, of Helsinki and Jyväskylä, on "Rousseau, Macaulay and Wollstonecraft on Negative Education", and Alan Coffee, of Birkbeck, on "Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life". I am particularly curious about the paper by Lena Halldenius herself, on "Drawing from the Original Source. Wollstonecraft on Morality and Nature":

My aim here is to analyze what acting morally means and requires in Wollstonecraft’s thought. This is usefully done partly by identifying what it is that makes moral agency so difficult. I argue that there are three components to Wollstonecraft’s theory of moral agency: an internal intellectual struggle, acting on a universal motive, and the activity of freely disposing of one’s person. The sometimes overwhelming difficulty of acting on the duty to be moral – despite a person’s very best intentions – makes up the stuff of Wollstonecraft’s novels. I will use her novels here to investigate how she lets ‘nature’ and its counterpoint ‘artifice’ serve to show of what this difficulty is made.

"The sometimes overwhelming difficulty of acting on the duty to be moral – despite a person’s very best intentions": yup, I can relate.

I am also interested in "Wollstonecraft on the Virtue of Chastity", as discussed by Sandrine Berges, who has been kind enough to write for this blog, and who I'll be sorry to miss.  Mary and the Slutwalk and Mary, molls, and modesty looked at the under-read chapter of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that begins with a paean to that virtue:

MODESTY! Sacred offspring of sensibility and reason!—true delicacy of mind!—may I unblamed presume to investigate thy nature, and trace to its covert the mild charm, that mellowing each harsh feature of a character, renders what would otherwise only inspire cold admiration—lovely!

The Bilkent philosopher doesn't write like that.

In the Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft offers one of the very few existing philosophical discussions of the virtue of chastity.  I argue that her account is Aristotelian, focusing as it does on the idea that chastity is a firm character trait rather than a natural disposition, and that it is a mean between a vice of excess and one of deficiency. Her account is somewhat complicated by the fact that she explains chastity as a derivative of modesty, not understood as a sexual virtue, but a just understanding of one's own worth. In that sense her account is very close to an account of modesty offered by Irene McMullin in her 2010 paper. The linking of modesty and chastity enables Wollstonecraft to give an account of chastity different from those of her predecessors, such that a feminist would be comfortable accepting it, but it also raises some potential worries about whether concerns of chastity place an unreasonable burden on women. I will argue that responding to these worries by further developing the account in fact gives us some of the tools we need to combat oppressive prejudices and related practices traditionally born of concerns for chastity.

 [Addendum: the conference now has a poster to download.]

Lost daughter: Jane Austen, part five (Gilbert)

And thus to the blog post by Lauren Gilbert, historical novelist, that started this whole series on the connections between Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft. Did the former read the latter? She begins with some good old fashioned archival research, of the sort that turned up the father of Claire Clairmont:

I contacted Jane Austen’s House and Museum, Bath Central Library, Jane Austen Centre, and Chawton House Library. No catalog of Rev. George Austen’s library is known to exist. (Jane Austen’s House and Museum does have a copy of the inventory of the contents of the Steventon Rectory but no catalog of his books.) The Bath Central Library indicated that VINDICATION was on the catalog for Marshalls Circulating Library on Milsom Street dated 1808; it is the only one they have in Jane’s time frame. Since VINDICATION was published in 1792 and was a well-known work, this argues that the book was probably available via a circulating library when Jane Austen lived in Bath, or visited in London or other cities.

So far, this is more or less what we already knew from part two, Margaret Kirkham's research decades ago. But  it goes on to mention a Lost Son to add to my little list of people influenced by Mary.

Jane is known to have had a copy of HERMSPRONG, or man as he is not by Robert Bage (philosophically, Mr Bage embraced the idea of the superiority of the “natural man”, considered women the equal of man and supported women’s rights, and was known to have had a high regard for Mary Wollstonecraft; these ideals are demonstrated by the story in HERMSPRONG). Jane’s copy is in the Huntington Library (her signature in all 4 volumes). This would argue a mind open to the ideas expressed in VINDICATION. There is also a theory that Jane would not necessarily referred to Mary Wollstonecraft’s work or influence, due to Mary’s unconventional morals and lifestyle (see Claire Tomalin and Miriam Ascarelli).

Lauren Gilbert concludes that JA "was exposed to and affected by" and indeed "profoundly influenced by" the second Vindication. "That Mary Wollstonecraft’s work was known to Jane Austen is not a point of serious debate that I can find." This agrees with what Lyndall Gordon says (part three in our series). JA's novels serve as warnings of what happens when women are raised to be, as Mary put it, "alluring mistresses" rather "than affectionate wives and rational mothers". The blogpost ends by claiming "almost direct references" in the novels to the polemic. Everyone's favourite spinster novelist:

... with her light touch and subtle humor, highlighted the issues Ms. Wollstonecraft raised. While she could not very well have acknowledged this influence at the time she published, Ms. Wollstonecraft’s reputation being what it was, I think Jane Austen clearly carried Ms. Wollstonecraft’s ideas regarding the education of women, and a higher concept of marriage, forward.

This is in agreement, in more restrained form, with the enthusiastic theories of Arnie Perlstein, part four in our series, who holds JA to be a secret radical feminist: if you hold the texts up to the candleflame in the right way, the invisible lemon juice darkens, and the hidden message become legible.

Next up: a whole book on Women in Revolutionary Debate: Female Novelists from Burney to Austen.  And the Loiterers - like the current Idler, not dawdling at all.

Jane Austen, by her sister Cassandra. (1773-1845) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Part of a linked series:  Jane Austen: a lost daughter? Part one, Part two: Kirkham and Ascarelli, Part three: Gordon, Part four: Perlstein, Part five: Gilbert, Part six: Russo and Broemel.
Part of a very loose series on lost daughters and sons: Margaret King (Mrs Mason) , Millicent Garrett Fawcett, C19 American women's rights advocates, Claire Clairmont, Voltairine de Cleyre, William Gladstone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Amartya Sen

Lost daughter: Jane Austen, part four (Perlstein)

We have been looking at the opportunities Jane Austen had to read Mary Wollstonecraft. The consensus is overwhelming that the opportunity was there: there are family connections, tenuous but real, as pointed out by Claire Tomalin,  and access to circulating libraries during Austen's years in Bath. More importantly, though, is the textual evidence that the ideas laid out in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- the need for rational education and a marriage of mutual respect -- find fictional flesh in the examples and counter-examples of the novels, as we saw the other day. I even found a hidden clue, a secret nod, embedded in the name of one of the most contentious characters.

The first post of this series touched on the difference between Tory feminism and Enlightenment feminism, drawing on Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction by Margaret Kirkham, which we looked at in more detail in the second post. This book, in its 1983 original or its 1996 second edition, I'm not quite sure, was reviewed by Margaret Doody. I haven't seen the review, but it was thoroughly picked apart by one Arnie Perlstein, an unlikely, to put it mildly, contributor to the discussion. There is no more passionate defender of Jane Austen as a radical feminist than this outsider. I think we can call him, as Ms magazine called Bob Lamm when he liberated Mary from the dungeons of the National Portrait Gallery, a male feminist.

The biography on his blog:

I'm a 59 year old independent scholar (still) working on a book project about the SHADOW STORIES of Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays). I first read Austen in 1995, an American male real estate lawyer, i.e., a Janeite outsider. I therefore never "learned" that there was no secret subtext in her novels. All I did was to closely read and reread her novels, while participating in stimulating online group readings.

Then, in 2002, I whimsically wondered whether Willoughby stalked Marianne Dashwood and staged their “accidental” meeting. I retraced his steps, followed the textual “bread crumbs”, and verified my hunch. I've since made numerous similar discoveries about offstage scheming by various characters.

In hindsight, it was my luck not only to be a lawyer, but also a lifelong solver of NY Times and other difficult American crossword puzzles. These both trained me to spot complex patterns based on fragmentary data, to interpret cryptic clues of all kinds, and, above all, not to give up until I’ve completed the puzzle--and literary sleuthing Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays) is, bar none, the best puzzle solving in the world!

If you like fisking, take a look: Margaret Doody's misguided review of Margaret Kirkham's Pioneering, Prescient & Spot-On 1982 book Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction. I didn't see this until later. I first came across his forensic examination in November, when he claimed that Jane Austen was haunted by the Ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft, and got in touch in the comments. (Dear reader - please do the same!)

He posts about once a day, essays or diatribes rich in iconoclastic ideas and mad enthusiasm. I suspect the lawyering is a bit slow in Florida at the moment, and I for one am glad of it, if that gives room for the flowering of amateurism (a term of high praise in Wollstonecraft Towers). Here is a fair flavour of his argument:

I think JA was haunted by the Ghost and the memory of Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman who was brave enough to speak out on behalf of women very publicly, and who, after her death, was vilified because she had been so brave.

It's no accident, therefore, that JA alluded SPECIFICALLY to the very radical polemical novel CALEB WILLIAMS (written in 1809), which, after all, just happened to be written by Godwin, who just happened to have been the husband of...............Mary Wollstonecraft!

Here is an example of the sort of convoluted crossword theory he favours. I'm not saying he's wrong; I'm just saying  you need to have a special sort of mind to follow the thread. Ariadne and the Minotaur?

So it means that when I interpret Henry Tilney as having an epiphany about his mother's death as a result of Catherine's detective work at the Abbey, this is deeply connected to JA's allusion to Godwin's 1809 novel, a novel written a few years AFTER Godwin had a chance to see how the Far Right seized on his Memoir of his dead wife as grounds for crucifying her reputation in the court of public opinion.

So JA is telling us, covertly that (i) in a way, Godwin was Henry Tilney, because he eventually "got it" that he had screwed up, and he wrote Caleb Williams as penance, and (ii) in another way, Godwin was GENERAL Tilney, who did regret the role he played in bringing about his wife's death.

He speculates about Godwin's role:

And the most awful thing is that Godwin "killed" his wife TWICE, and both times it was "involuntary womanslaughter"--the first time, by getting her pregnant, leading to her physical death in childbirth, and the second time by writing her Memoir (perhaps trying to resurrect her), but having it backfire, and instead leading to the public assassination of her character!

And he sums up his view of Jane Austen's feminism:

I believe that for a very long time, maybe her whole adult life, JA played with the idea of going public with her true feelings. But in the end of the day, every time she put quill pen to paper, she chose to go undercover -- but I get the very strong sense that she always felt ambivalent about that painful decision. The regret that Catherine and Eleanor express when they talk about Mrs. Tilney is, I think, JA's own regrets....

So Northanger Abbey is in a very real sense JA's eulogy to the greatest feminist "heroine" of her time.

He also speculates in Jane Austen the radical but covert feminist Part 268 that Mary Bennet is Jane Austen's alter ego, named after Mary Wollstonecraft.  He agreed that I was barking up the right tree as regards name clues, and commented that Mary Bennet is "the most important surrogate for Mary W in all of Jane Austen's fiction":

...what you have is Mary Bennet as JA's covert self portrait! JA has led the reader down the garden path, seeing if we will take the bait and join with the rest of the Bennet family in unjustly and at times cruelly scorning Mary, but hoping that we will struggle with our inner Mr. Bennet and instead realize that we've been guilty of a wrong first impression of Mary, and reconsider.

So we have a surface parody of Mary, but a veiled anti-parody which vindicates Mary (who I claim is named after Mary Wollstonecraft). And I claim exactly the same sort of anti-parody in Northanger Abbey which has a surface parody of Catherine, but a covert anti-parody which vindicates Catherine's keen perceptions.

Enough to make anyone dizzy. Next time, a look at the post that kicked this all off, from historical novelist Lauren Gilbert.

Jane Austen, by her sister Cassandra. (1773-1845) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Part of a linked series:  Jane Austen: a lost daughter? Part one, Part two: Kirkham and Ascarelli, Part three: Gordon, Part four: Perlstein, Part five: Gilbert, Part six: Russo and Broemel.  
Part of a very loose series on lost daughters and sons: Margaret King (Mrs Mason) , Millicent Garrett Fawcett, C19 American women's rights advocates, Claire Clairmont, Voltairine de Cleyre, William Gladstone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Amartya Sen

Lost daughter: Jane Austen, part three (Gordon)

We have been looking at whether Jane Austen was influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft.  Kirkham and Ascarelli think so. Today we look at the views of Lyndall Gordon, Mary's most recent biographer.

She contends that the young Jane very likely had the opportunity to read Mary's works. In the chapter "Vindication" of her 2005 Vindication, she points out that The Female Reader, an anthology which Mary compiled for Johnson, was published when Jane was 14, "reading at home, and the perfect recipient for this book". There are plenty of Austen parallels, examples in each of the six canonical novels, and the juvenalia as well, that show the folly of the miseducation of daughters and of unequal marriages. Her novella ''Catherine'' appeared within a year of Rights of Woman. "Wollstonecraft's ridicule of women's inflated gush and plaything eduction reappears in Austen's ridicule of Camilla" and her useless, ladylike accomplishments. "Wollstonecraft's voice sounds once more when Elizabeth Bennett will not grovel to imperious Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride and Prejudice", in contrast to the vacuous Bingley sisters, who focus all their attention on marriage and men.  The biographer links the two women backwards as well, crediting Mary with an "infallible Austen eye for the tendency of able men to mate with inferiors". See also her essay on Persuasion: "Jane Austen is often co-opted for conservatism, but her novels question traditional authority and female artifice."

Here's a passing reference to the impact of Mary Wollstonecraft, and how she has become embedded in how we now read Austen, even had the author not intended it. Olwen Hufton's two-volume overview of women's history in Western Europe, The Prospect Before Her: 1500-1800, mentions Fanny Price "in her clear-sighted notions of the appropriate, and her eschewing of the trivial, [as] something of a spiritual legatee of The Vindication."

Coming up next: an outsider reads the canon. We meet Arnie Perlstein, and you won't forget him.

Jane Austen, by her sister Cassandra. (1773-1845) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Part of a linked series:  Jane Austen: a lost daughter? Part one, Part two: Kirkham and Ascarelli, Part three: Gordon, Part four: Perlstein, Part five: Gilbert, Part six: Russo and Broemel.  
Part of a very loose series on lost daughters and sons: Margaret King (Mrs Mason) , Millicent Garrett Fawcett, C19 American women's rights advocates, Claire Clairmont, Voltairine de Cleyre, William Gladstone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Amartya Sen

Lost daughter: Jane Austen, part two (Kirkham and Ascarelli)

In the last post we looked at the Wikipedia article on Styles and themes of Jane Austen, more specifically the section on gender. Was Austen a feminist? Had she read Mary Wollstonecraft, and what did she think of her? The article is well referenced, and that section draws heavily on two sources, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, a 1983 monograph by Margaret Kirkham, and a 2004 essay by Miriam Ascarelli, A Feminist Connection: Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft

Kirkham's book was re-issued in 1996, when she wrote a lengthy preface in which she brings the intervening years of criticism into focus. (Thirteen years between first and second editions: I notice that more than another thirteen have passed.) From that preface:

This book was first published in 1983 when feminist criticism was becoming respectable, but it evolved from much earlier. During the 1960s research on the history of the theatre in Bristol and Bath led me to think about life in Bath at the turn of the nineteenth-century, when Austen lived there. Reading the newspapers, in search of items about plays and players, I picked up other information....I began to get a clearer picture of the milieu in which Austen lived from the age of twenty-five to thirty and to wonder why more had not been written about it....

...by the early 1970s, with feminism in the air, oddities in the Austen biography began to connect with more general questions about how women's Lives were written (especially by brothers and nephews) in the nineteenth-century. Then came Lloyd W. Brown's 1973 article, making direct comparison of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. Previously I might have thought it unlikely that Austen had read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, since I had imagined her reading as confined to what was there in her father's or brothers' libraries, or what might have been on the shelves of a country circulating library, but by 1973 it was clear that in Bath, Austen would have had no difficulty in choosing her own reading, from extra-familial shelves....

There was no direct evidence that Austen had read Wollstonecraft, in Bath or at any other time, but it now seemed much more likely. In any case, the similarities between parts of the Vindication, and ideas and attitudes apparent in the Austen novels had come to seem too striking to ignore.

Kirkham's book (first or second edition? not sure) was reviewed by Margaret Doody. I haven't seen the review, but it was thoroughly picked apart by one Arnie Perlstein, an unlikely Janeite, as he is the first to admit. I'll have more on him and his view of Austen as a radical feminist in another post.

The Wikipedia article also draws on a more recent essay. Ascarelli summarises the arguments around Jane Austen's possible feminism -- "or to use the proper scholarly term, proto-feminism" -- contending that yes, she was a "formidable feminist critic". She concludes, "Why, then, does Austen fail to give Wollstonecraft any credit for contributing to her thinking?" answering her own question,"I think it was simply too dangerous." She refers to Claire Tomalin as an Austen biographer, but of course she began the biography-writing phase of her career with Mary Wollstonecraft -- the first one, I believe, since the start of second-wave feminism. So Tomalin, now all over the media with her bicentennial Dickens book, may be in a uniquely rich position to comment on the influence of the polemicist on the novelist:

How could a young Jane Austen not take notice [of the furore around the posthumous Memoirs]? Austen biographer Claire Tomalin offers some convincing biographical evidence that Austen is likely to have known of Mary Wollstonecraft and her work. She notes that Sir William East, the father of one of George Austen’s former pupils, was a benefactor of Wollstonecraft. Furthermore, Sir William was a neighbor and friend to Austen’s uncle, James Leigh-Perrot. After Wollstonecraft attempted suicide in 1796, Sir William was credited with being particularly kind to her during her recovery. While this does not specifically link Austen and Wollstonecraft, it makes it plausible that the Austen family knew of Wollstonecraft and her ideas (Tomalin 158).

Jane Austen probably made a mental note to stay away from partisan politics and to keep her thoughts about Wollstonecraft to herself. Thanks to her skills as a writer, her balancing act worked. She managed to infuse her books with a Wollstonecraft-like feminist critique that is less politically charged but just as potent.

Coming up next, Lyndall Gordon and more examples of reading Jane.

Jane Austen, by her sister Cassandra. (1773-1845) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Part of a linked series:  Jane Austen: a lost daughter? Part one, Part two: Kirkham and Ascarelli, Part three: Gordon, Part four: Perlstein, Part five: Gilbert, Part six: Russo and Broemel. 
Part of a very loose series on lost daughters and sons: Margaret King (Mrs Mason) , Millicent Garrett Fawcett, C19 American women's rights advocates, Claire Clairmont, Voltairine de Cleyre, William Gladstone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Amartya Sen

Jane Austen: a lost daughter? Part one

There has been much speculation about whether Jane Austen read Mary Wollstonecraft, and if so, what the novelist made of the polemicist. I've been meaning to write about this possible connection, having lightly touched some months ago on the secret nod by which "Jane Austen's choice of the name Fanny Price [was] a coded reference to two of the most formative people in Mary Wollstonecraft's life" -- Fanny Blood and Richard Price. I have been spurred to write more by this week's offering by Lauren Gilbert, author of the recent Heyerwood, a Georgian/Regency romantic novel. Did Jane read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? A very good question. I'll look briefly at, and devote a few linked posts to, the main arguments -- or at any rate the argumentative. I have five lined up so far.

I won't attempt to summarise all the academic and popular writing on this subject. What strikes me is the passion with which many seem to want Jane Austen to be what I call a Lost Daughter, that is, someone significantly influenced by MW, even if that influence has to be expressed covertly. And, of course, I am not a little envious (in the positive, aspirational sense) of how much attention Jane Austen receives, not only from the academy, but in overwhelming public support. She is widely read for pleasure, and even more widely appreciated in endless cinematographic re-imaginings. Both scholars and enthusiasts come together in venues such as the Jane Austen Society of North America. I could wish for nothing better for Mary Wollstonecraft - academic interest in her works is re-awakening, in fields beyond women's studies, and I have hopes for Mary: the Movie, but as yet there is no Mary Fan Club or Wollstonecraft Society. Give me time....

Wikipedia (which, as I've said before, provides an excellent overview of Wollstonecraft's life, work, and circle) give a good short introduction to the possibilities of a link. Styles and themes of Jane Austen

has, at the time of writing, 174 references, to dozens of scholarly works, even if it hasn't jumped through the time-consuming hoops to win the bronze star of a Featured Article. It sums up, "There is intense scholarly debate regarding whether or not Austen's works follow in the tradition of Enlightenment feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft." Stripped of its informative but distracting links, and of the references, which you can follow up there if you wish, the relevant section reads:

Since the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, the question of to what extent Austen was a feminist writer has been at the forefront of Austen criticism. Scholars have identified two major strains of 18th-century feminism: "Tory feminism" and "Enlightenment feminism". Austen has been associated with both.

Tory feminism, which includes such writers as Mary Astell and Dorothy Wordsworth, is a tradition of thought which recognized that "women were treated as an inferior class in a man's world". Writers in this tradition urged women to counter this discrimination through moral and spiritual self-cultivation and charitable service to the family and community. [Marilyn] Butler has argued that Austen belongs to the Tory feminist tradition because of her stylistic and thematic affinity to the writings of Maria Edgeworth Moreover, Austen's "heroines' subordinate role in the family,...their dutifulness, meditativeness, self-abnegation, and self-control" are characteristics shared by the heroines of conservative authors such as Jane West and Mary Brunton.

Enlightenment feminism, which includes such writers as Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, is a tradition of thought that claims that "women share the same moral nature as men, ought to share the same moral status, and exercise the same responsibility for their conduct". Margaret Kirkham has argued that Austen is part of this tradition because, for one, her "heroines do not adore or worship their husbands, though they respect and love them. They are not, especially in the later novels, allowed to get married at all until the heroes have provided convincing evidence of appreciating their qualities of mind, and of accepting their power of rational judgement, as well as their good hearts." Anne Elliot, the heroine of ''Persuasion'', is an example of such a protagonist. Kirkham argues that Austen knew and admired the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, particularly A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Moreover, she and others argue that Austen's novels followed in the tradition of the radical Jacobin novels of the 1790s, which often dealt with feminist issues.

The main works referred to are Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, a 1983 monograph by Margaret Kirkham, and A Feminist Connection: Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, a 2004 essay by Miriam Ascarelli. I'll write more about these next time.

Jane Austen, by her sister Cassandra. (1773-1845) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Part of a linked series:  Jane Austen: a lost daughter? Part one, Part two: Kirkham and Ascarelli, Part three: Gordon, Part four: Perlstein, Part five: Gilbert, Part six: Russo and Broemel. 
Part of a very loose series on lost daughters and sons: Margaret King (Mrs Mason) , Millicent Garrett Fawcett, C19 American women's rights advocates, Claire Clairmont, Voltairine de Cleyre, William Gladstone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Amartya Sen

Life grows more animated

Recently I was able to share with you the two-minute animation of Mary Wollstonecraft's life that begins the Dutch humanist TV programme on her philosophy and legacy. Only this brief clip was available, because Blogger restricts video uploads to YouTube, and YourTube restricts uploads to 15 minutes - or so we thought. Twitter sprang to the rescue with a work-around, and now the whole thing can be viewed here:

I am delighted to report that Dutch humanists are so egalitarian that they do not fob off the petty tasks by job rank. Instead, I have it on excellent authority that the head of the whole "Dare to Think" endeavour,  Eveline van Dijck, took upon herself the tedium of uploading the episode to YouTube. So yes, dear reader, the entire half hour of Mary Wollstonecraft can now be seen on the web's favourite video-sharing site: the charming animated biography, my Twitter conversation with Leon Heuts the philosopher-journalist, the animated-in-the-other-sense studio discussion, the day-in-the-life-of  two contemporary feminists,  Marieke Bax, a high-powered executive in a chauffeured car,  and Maruja Remijn Bobo, a gender studies lecturer on a classic bicycle with toddler accessories.  

The video is also available on Vimeo, where I can see captions (kindly explained in Marjorie's comments on my blogpost). And in case you'd forgotten, we've tracked the progress of this project from April's first contact to June's Twitter conversation, from September's press release to October's broadcast, from November's partial translation to December's partial animation. So count today's post, and the successful upload, as a winter solstice present to us all.

Life grows animated

Hurray! Here at last is the charming animated biography, just a couple of minutes long, prepared by the Humanist TV station for their episode on Mary Wollstonecraft, part of a series of twelve great philosophers from Socrates to Sartre. An unofficial translation is available, but trust me, you don't need any Dutch to understand and enjoy the whiz through Our Lady's life from abusive childhood to literary triumph, from Newington Green to Paris and always back to London. All the crucial names are there: Fanny Blood, Joseph Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gilbert Imlay, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

(Blogstuff: I mentioned that the episode was available on Vimeo, but as Blogger only allows YouTube videos -- not even uploads from one's own computer -- I thought I would not be able to provide the clip. Trusty researcher Josephine Krikke came to the rescue, emailing me the link to the YouTube version. So far only this short segment of the broadcast is on YT, but if the production team does decide to put the whole episode there, I'll be happy to host it here, and hope to pull in a few more viewers to their excellent project. If TV in your country isn't doing thought-provoking programmes like this, ask the powers that be why not.)

Formal Fawcetts fall for first feminist

The Fawcett Society wishes to find out more about Mary Wollstonecraft, and you are all invited: a week today, Tuesday 8 November, 7pm at Newington Green Unitarian Church, where Mary was radicalised. Dress warmly. The official announcement of this free, open, public meeting is here.

Technically, it is not Fawcett itself that will be soaking up the Wollstonecraft atmosphere that evening, but the East London branch, possibly with their North London sisters. (No doubt they will all take turns, sitting in Mary's pew.) Why do I call the Fawcetts "formal", aside from my woeful weakness for alliteration and allied alphabetical amusements? (And MW wasn't strictly speaking the first feminist.) Because they are the respectable face of British feminism, so much so that they don't even use the f-word. "Fawcett is the UK’s leading campaign for equality between women and men. Where there's an inequality gap between women and men we're working to close it." They lobby Parliament -- effectively. They wear suits and ballgowns, metaphorically and for all I know literally, and they Get Things Done. All power to them. 

As consummate campaigner and secular saint (enough already! - Ed.) Peter Tatchell pointed out, street activists recognise the value of committed negotiators who can get inside the establishment and talk to the power brokers in language they understand. What those who risk arrest don't like is when the besuited intermediaries ignore or belittle their contribution. Without OutRage! noisily and creatively demonstrating, Stonewall wouldn't have had its phone calls to MPs returned, or so went his argument. OutRage! acknowledged this interdependence but Stonewall didn't, or so he said, way back when. See Animal Liberation Front and RSPCA; see Black Power and the civil rights movement; see toffee-hammer-wielding suffragettes and patriotic patient persistent (I said stop! -Ed.) suffragists. I don't know the precise parallel to gender issues -- Riot Grrrls got co-opted into commercial music*, Guerrilla Girls never made it to the National Gallery -- but at any rate, Fawcett is the Stonewall of feminism, and they do what they do very well. "We make real differences in women’s lives by creating awareness, leading debate and driving change. Our lobbying power means we have real influence right at the top of UK politics and among those who make decisions."

The Fawcett ethos is one of liberal reform: "Our vision is of a society where women and our rights and freedoms are equally valued and respected and where we have equal power and influence in shaping our own lives and our wider world." I like to think its members would sit well with the Rational Dissenters of Newington Green, the ones who opened a young schoolteacher's eyes not to the injustices of the world -- she was well acquainted with them already - but with the political dimensions to these injustices. "We campaign on women’s representation in politics and public life; on equal pay, on pensions and poverty; valuing caring work; and the treatment of women in the justice system."

I'll do my show and tell (as I did a year ago at Ignite -- so sad to be missing this autumn's version! -- but if you haven't got tickets by now, you have no chance anyway, so might as well come along to Newington Green). We'll certainly cover the latest developments with Mary on the Green, and perhaps trade campaigning tips. The quiz on Mary (and democracy, and wonderful women worldwide) which I devised for my visit to the neighbouring Stoke Newington WI will not, after all, be reprised -- or not on this night. There is another event coming up, however...stay tuned.

The final reason for my fondness for the Fawcett Society is historical: "We trace our roots back to 1866, when Millicent Garrett Fawcett began her lifetime’s work leading the peaceful campaign for women’s votes."  This was the woman who wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, cleansing Mary's memory and claiming her as a forerunner of the suffrage movement:

The remarkable degree in which she was ahead of her time is shown on almost every page of "The Vindication." She claims for women the right to share in the advantages of representation in Parliament, nearly seventy years before women's suffrage was heard of in the House of Commons. She knows that few, if any, at that time would be found to sympathise with her, but that does not prevent her from claiming for women what she felt was simple justice. She also perceives the enormous importance of the economic independence of women, and its bearing on social health and disease.

I claim MGF as a Lost Daughter.


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*Oh. Oh no. Riot Grrrls has had its domain squatted by a lifestyle brand, with stockists. Don't look. Oh if you really have to look. Whereas the Guerrilla Girls were media savvy from 1985, and keep a firm hold of their brand name.

The 1891 intro is here. This version (held by Keele) seems to start mid-essay, 

and I can't find anything better at the moment.  Images from the Fawcett Society , 

One War Art for the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, John Gray's blog for the stamp, 

and Guerrilla Girls for the satirical movie poster.

A book to save up for

British Library, by Christine Matthews

You just know that with a series title such as International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought, the forthcoming tome on Mary Wollstonecraft is not going to be something to read in the bath.  Working 27.5 hours at current UK adult minimum wage will get you 588 pages of hardback quality. You have until April to save up that £160, or to persuade your favourite library to acquire a copy upon publication. It sounds fantastic, though:

The essays in this collection represent the explosion of scholarly interest since the 1960s in the pioneering feminist, philosopher, novelist, and political theorist, Mary Wollstonecraft. This interdisciplinary selection, which is organized by theme and genre, demonstrates Wollstonecraft's importance in contemporary social, political and sexual theory and in Romantic studies.

It goes all the way back to the beginning, and I hope it will set to rest for once and for all the misconception that both author and magnum opus  were shunned on its publication:

The book examines the reception of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman but it also deals with the full range of her work from travel writing, education, religion and conduct literature to her novels, letters and literary reviews.

Most of the content, or possibly all of it, is reprints. Some of the essays go back over a century; some are much more recent: 

As well as reproducing the most important modern Wollstonecraft scholarship the collection tracks the development of the author's reputation from the nineteenth century. The essays reprinted here (from early appreciations by George Eliot, Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf to the work of twenty-first century scholars) include many of the most influential accounts of Wollstonecraft's remarkable contribution to the development of modern political and social thought. The book is essential reading for students of Wollstonecraft and late eighteenth-century women's writing, history, and politics. 

London Library, by Bill Johnson 

It is from Ashgate, which I hadn't heard of before. Others in the International Library of Essays include Tom Paine, Jeremy Bentham, Rousseau, Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Edmund Burke, and many others. This volume has been edited by Jane Moore, from Cardiff University, a reader in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy -- NB not history.  She wrote a rather more slender book on MW in 1999, at the request of the British Council, part of "a series of innovative critical studies introducing writers and their contexts to a wide range of readers".


What tense should we use for the forthcoming heavy-weight volume: has been edited? Is being? It can't take another six months to print and distribute a book, even if the physical presses are in deepest China. It's funny, isn't it: despite the rush-rush of modern life, so commented upon, some things were much quicker in Mary's day, particularly in the publishing business. Lyndall Gordon says A Vindication of the Rights of Men is "no hasty pamphlet" (chapter 7 of her biography Vindication), but from Mary's letters we know that as she was writing her books, the printer's devil was knocking on the door, wanting to take the manuscript pages to Joseph Johnson for typesetting. No luxury of writing an entire draft, and going back over it before the publisher saw it: rush-rush indeed.


And just look at the contents! This is only partial, but my goodness, am I partial. Random good bits in bold.

Part I Survey of the Work and Reputation:

• Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot; 
• Mary Wollstonecraft: her tragic life and her passionate struggle for freedom, Emma Goldman; 
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf; 
• Feminist studies and the discipline: a study of Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Sapiro; 
• On the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, R.M. Janes; 
• Mary Wollstonecraft: texts and contexts, Gary Kelly; 
• Remembering Mary Wollstonecraft on the bicentenary of the publication of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Sylvana Tomaselli. 

Part II Contexts: History, Politics, Culture: Wollstonecraft and Social, Philosophical and Political Theory: 

• Mary Wollstonecraft: 18th-century commonwealthwoman, G.J. Barker-Benfield; 
• Wollstonecraft, feminism, and democracy: 'being Bastilled', Virginia Sapiro; 
• Mary Wollstonecraft and the 'reserve of reason', Simon Swift; 

Wollstonecraft, Gender and Enlightenment: 

• The Enlightenment debate on women, Sylvana Tomaselli; 
• Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment desire, Janet Todd; 
• Wollstonecraft, Education and Conduct Literature: Her demands for the education of woman, Emma Rauschenbush-Clough; 
• Mary, Mary, quite contrary, or, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft compared, Regina Janes; 
• Advice and enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and sex education, Vivien Jones; 

Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution/Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution: 

• 'The grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward': Wollstonecraft, history and revolution, Jane Rendall; 
• Gender in revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Furniss; 

Wollstonecraft and Religion: 

• For the love of God: religion and the erotic imagination in Wollstonecraft's feminism, Barbara Taylor; 
• Sibylline apocalyptics: Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Job's mother's womb, Mary Wilson Carpenter; 

Wollstonecraft and Romanticism: 

• Death in the face of nature, self, society and body in Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, John Whale; 
• Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: the shaping of self and subject, Mitzi Myers; 
• 'No equal mind': Mary Wollstonecraft and the young Romantics, Harriet Jump;

Wollstonecraft, Femininity/Sexuality/Feminism: 

• Mary Wollstonecraft and the wild wish of early feminism, Barbara Taylor; 
• Wild nights: pleasure/sexuality/feminism, Cora Kaplan; 
• (Female) philosophy in the bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and female sexuality, Gary Kelly; 
• Wollstonecraft, Slavery and the Orient: Mary Wollstonecraft and the problematic of slavery, Moira Ferguson; 
• Wollstonecraft's Death: The death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vivien Jones. 

Part III Texts, Novels, Literary Reviews, Letters: 

Wollstonecraft's Literary reviews:

• Mary Wollstonecraft's contributions to analytical review, Sally N. Stewart; 

Wollstonecraft's Fictions – Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman: or Maria, a Fragment: 

• Mary Wollstonecraft: the gender of genres in late 18th-century England, Mary Poovey;
• Wollstonecraft and Godwin: reading the secrets of the political novel, Tilottama Rajan;

Wollstonecraft's Letters: 

• Letters Written…in Sweden: toward Romantic autobiography, Mitzi Myers; 
• Mary Wollstonecraft's letters, Janet Todd

Note the lacunae: no Lyndall Gordon, no treasure ship, no modern philosophers, no Claire Tomalin, no suffragettes, no charting of the C19 rehabilitation (no Elizabeth Robins Pennell, who I'm rather fond of). But still...


Somehow I have to get my hands on a copy.

Images from Wikimedia Commons.