A Brave Woman There Was...

Next week sees another intimate gathering, drawing on the life and works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Truly, London is overflowing with remembrances. Again, three performers; again, words and music; again, a Camden library. But all else is different.

This is billed as "an encounter with Mary Wollstonecraft":

The show has three phases. First you will hear extracts from the Original Stories for Children and meet one of the great, though lesser known, characters of English literature, Mrs Mason. 

Hooray for this long-lived Lost Daughter, who started life as Margaret King, Mary's doubly rebellious charge during that dire year of governessing.

The scene then moves to Paris, during Mary’s stay in France, and introduces you to another outstanding, though perhaps less widely known, feminist writer, Olympe de Gouges.  

Ah yes, Mary in France. Tumultuous years. Did these two ever meet? There is every reason to hope so - certainly they moved in overlapping circles - but, as far as I know, no hard evidence. If this encounter did take place, it must have been in the first half of 1793; Wollstonecraft left Paris in June for a few months, and de Gouges was arrested in August, I believe. 

Finally we see Mary at her birthday tea, formulating ideas for her “Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, despite some hindrance from a male visitor. 

And who might that be, I wonder? Talleyrand or Godwin? Either way, I expect they get served wine in a chipped teacup.

Nearly all the script consists of the words actually written by the two women, but presented in dramatic form. 

That is much the same approach as last month's The Two Marys: A Conversation Piece, also at a Camden library. The borough has a claim on her (via The Polygon, within Somers Town, and St Pancras). 

Most of the music dates from the period.

Just like the birthday concert!

I'm not sure whether Mary Wollstonecraft spent much time in Highate, then a village as distant from London as Newington Green, and more difficult to get to, in that the muddy hills were worse. Still, in the years since then the good burghers of Highgate have taken advantage of Mr Macadam's tar, and the roads are quite passable these days.

If you are free next Thursday, why not visit Highgate Library? 18 April, 7:15 for 7:30pm.

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Photo by Justinc. Used under the 

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.

The Two Marys: A Conversation Piece

Last night saw an encounter between Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, a rare one-off performance of The Two Marys: A Conversation Piece.  Sasha Hails played the mother, speaking with the wisdom of the afterlife, and Victoria Ross the daughter, still in the first grief of her widowhood in her mid-20s.

The setting was the very undramatic Camden Local Studies & Archives Centre. (The Centre is also hosting a temporary exhibition on historical religious buildings within the borough, some still extant, others demolished; this is exactly the sort of display that needs to be thoroughly preserved in the etheric afterlife. Roll on, digital humanities.) The Polygon, where Wollstonecraft spent the last period of her peripatetic life, and where her equally travel-hungry daughter began hers, lies within Somers Town, and of course St Pancras plays a key role for both writers, so Camden has a legitimate claim on them.

The two Marys were accompanied by David Cherniak's cello obligatto. The author herself was there: Judith Cherniak is an American long settled in London, who stamped her mark on the culture of the capital by setting up Poems on the Underground. (There's a celebration this Sunday at Keats House.)

I found the music mournful and the performance poignant. It begins with the young widow writing to Mrs Mason, her mother's former pupil who in turn offered maternal care to the Shelley entourage when they reached Pisa. (We've looked at before at this Lost Daughter, who started life as Margaret King.) She bemoans her fate and describes her distress, all alone without a friend in the world, or so it seems to her. The depths of her mourning embarrass those around her, both the English and the Italians. If only she could speak with the mother she never knew! And so the elder Mary arises from the chair in the corner, and approaches her daughter. They converse. They explain their lives to each other. They bond. And the audience sees the strong similarities between these strong women who never met.

Apparently the two-handed show first saw the light in September 1997, the bicentary of the Marys' birth and death, at the National Portrait Gallery. Wouldn't it be marvellous to put this on again? Maybe somewhere a little more atmospheric than the municipal library. Newington Green Unitarian Church, for example, site of the miraculous manifestation.

From yesterday's programme:

September 1822, Genoa

Two months after Shelley's death, Mary Shelley fights off her anguish for the sake of her remaining child. She clings to her books: Shelley's poems; the works of her father, the philosopher William Godwin; the feminist writings of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her. In her despair, the young Mary pours her heart out in a letter to an English friend who was her mother's first pupil. If only she could conjure up her mother from the past, if only she could speak to her for an hour...

The British Library and the long S

The British Library website has chosen to feature A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with a photo of the opened book. You can see how Joseph Johnson still used those long Ss that look like Fs to today's eyes. (When I was a child, I thought our ancestors all had lisps.) The photographic quality allows you to see the actual texture of the paper, the slight mottled spots, the imperfect corners.

The national library of record has form, of course: that book and its author were stars of the show entitled Taking Liberties, a site thoroughly worth exploring. It was curated by a chap called Matt Shaw, who, in response to a query on Twitter, took the time to look into female readers in the first few decades of the Reading Room. Such is the wealth of BL resources that the exhibition site points us in turn to a 1792 map by Richard Horwood, showing all the houses not only of London and Westmister, but of Southwark too, just across the bridge from the booksellers' hub at St Paul's.... but before we get lost...

Timelines: Sources from History starts in the 1200s. By the 1790s, the publications that shaped our world are coming thick and fast. 1791 is represented by Tom Paine's Rights of Man, and 1793 by the execution of Louis XVI. Sandwiched in between are two pages from the dedication to Rights of Woman, with an explanation of its context. Since she is allegedly writing to Talleyrand, Mary Wollstonecraft reflects on the French way of doing things:

...the system of duplicity that the whole tenour of their political and civil government taught, have given a sinister sort of sagacity to the French character, properly termed finesse; from which naturally flow a polish of manners that injures the substance, by hunting sincerity out of society.

And, modesty, the fairest garb of virtue! has been more grossly insulted in France than even in England, till their women have treated as prudish that attention to decency, which brutes instinctively observe.  

Manners and morals are so nearly allied that they have often been confounded; but, though the former should only be the natural reflection of the latter, yet, when various causes have produced factitious and corrupt manners, which are very early caught, morality becomes an empty name. The personal reserve, and sacred respect for cleanliness and delicacy in domestic life, which French women almost despise, are the graceful pillars of modesty; but, far from despising them, if the pure flame of patriotism have reached their bosoms, they should labour to improve the morals of their fellow-citizens, by
teaching men, not only to respect modesty in women, but to acquire it themselves, as the only way to merit their esteem. 

Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. And how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she know why she
ought to be virtuous? unless freedom strengthen her  reason till she comprehend her duty, and see in what manner it is connected with her real good? 

A talk in the middle of England

A month from now is a talk from Lyndall Gordon on Mary Wollstonecraft: First of a New Genus.

When? September 11, 7pm.

Where? The Stony Stratford Library. Where?? It's one of the little towns swallowed by Milton Keynes. And its appeal?

Welcome to the community website for Stony Stratford. We offer FREE parking and 5* Loos so please come and visit us soon.

NB the site is run by the council. I found a picture of the pleasant-looking high street, but for some reason it won't load; you can have a look at it if you like.

More info on the talk here. It's free, but ticketed, and run by Friends of the Library, who provide cake and wine. And, no doubt, five-star toilets.

Luddite confounded: Mary goes Android

AKA, I do not really understand modern life, and nor would Mary Wollstonecraft, part 297...

...but fortunately some friends do, in this case the Chicago anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, who befriended me on Twitter, disclosed herself as a Lost Daughter (i.e. one whose thinking followed the path Mary had cut), pointed me towards poetry, and more recently has alerted me to Android apps. I do not understand how any organisation can make money selling items that are legally and widely available for free, as old books out of copyright are, but there you go: clearly I am behind the times. For £0.61 you can acquire a four-in-hand*:

This book contain collection of 4 books
1. Mary: A Fiction [1788]
2. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]
3. Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
4. Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman [1798]

William Godwin has one too; his costs a penny more, but offers seven books.

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*Four-in-hand: a carriage drawn by four horses. Also, now, four books that can be read on one hand-held device.

Android image: Google [CC-BY-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Mary reaches the NYPL

Opening today is another opportunity to see the very notes Mary Wollstonecraft penned to William Godwin, while labouring to deliver the future Mary Shelley. Readers will remember the excursion with Japanese historian Chihiro Umegaki to the final days of the exhibition entitled "Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the legacy of a literary family". Here's my review of the enduring aspects of the exhibition (website, book, etc.)  It was put on at the Bodleian in collaboration with the New York Public Library, home of the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, and now has reached that institution, under the title "Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet".

Those interested in Mary Wollstonecraft should note the change of focus: the official website says "The exhibition, curated by Stephen Hebron, was shown in a slightly different form at The Bodleian from December 2010 to March 2011."  I called the English version Our Lady, Her Husband, Their Daughter, and the Tousle-hair'd Poet. It seems that in Manhattan, the parents are downplayed, and the young 'uns bigged up.

There is another confirmation that most people who have heard of Mary Wollstonecraft have done so only because they think she wrote Frankenstein:

"It's very exciting for people who don't know Shelley so well, people who are getting a first introduction to his poetry and Mary and his parents," curator Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger said in an interview about the exhibit, which delves into the radical politics that both Shelley and his wife identified with.

I very much doubt that Delinger said "his parents", but that is what the reporter heard, or what her editor "corrected" her copy to. That quote is from Frankenstein's Monster Alive at NYPL Shelley Exhibit. 

It's at the NYPL till Jean Baptiste Day, in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Love those American philanthropists!

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. 

Mary in the Paris Library

Mary Wollstonecraft spent some of her most exciting and life-transforming years in Paris, and a little while ago I went there in quest of her ghost. Today's post will cover one aspect of that pilgrimage, in the week when we mark the connection of Mary and France.

It is too apt that the Eurostar journey begins from St Pancras Station, passing a few metres from her (first) grave, in Old St Pancras Churchyard. That church, where she was married scant months before she was buried, is twinned with the one in Paris closest to the Gare du Nord, so I popped in to the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul to see if anyone there remembered Mary. The priest reached beneath his soutane and confounded my outdated expectations by pulling out the last thing I expected to see, a Blackberry, on which he called a parishioner who had been instrumental in setting up the twinning. So later that day I had a coffee with this Englishwoman, long resident in Paris, who confessed she knew little of Mary and nothing of her sojourn in France. She had a wealth of other information, though, the most useful of which was alerting me to the possibilities of the reference library.

Eventually I made it to the eye-catching inside-out Centre Pompidou, and found my way to the library, tucked away behind it. It proved to be one of the best city libraries I've ever been in, and I highly recommend it to any bookish visitor.  (One small touch: this was during the early flowering of the Arab Spring, and the librarians had arranged a little display of books and periodicals from the Magreb and elsewhere in the Arab world. The next day I was in the Institut du monde arabe, which has many excellent features, but nowhere in the building could I see any indication of the revolutions going on across North Africa, a shocking omission.) 

I looked up Mary Wollstonecraft every way I could think of, and came up with a modest haul. From this I conclude that she didn't make much of a mark in France, partly because there were times during her sojourn when she had to lie low (Imlay registering her at the American Embassy as his wife would only protect her so far, given that British citizens were personae non gratae once war was declared, and the couple had never been through a ceremony of marriage), and partly because there were so many momentous events going on, and so many distinguished foreign visitors, that her presence was of small interest. 

Following the publication of her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft was introduced to the French statesman and diplomat, Charles Talleyrand, on his mission to London on the part of the Constituent Assembly in February 1792. She dedicated the second edition of the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to him. In December 1792, she travelled to France...

(From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) (Tallyrand's visit was the occasion of the Anecdote of the Chipped Teacup, immortalised in skin.)

Mary arrived in Paris an intellectual celebrity in her own country, and her Vindication had been translated into French, but that did not mean that her ideas would be taken up in the circles that mattered. 

Here is an annotated list of the more relevant items that I found in the reference library collections:

Price: Political Writings. Editor, D. D. Thomas. 

Chronology. 1758 appointed morning and afternoon preacher, Meeting house, Newington Green. 1770 becomes morning preacher at Gravel Pit, Hackney. 1783 Relinquishes afternoon service at NG too. (Yes, I do see the implications of this. More another time.)

The correspondence of Richard Price, 3 vols. No mention of Mary.

Une anglaise defend la Revolution francaise. Reponse a Edmund Burke par Mary Wollstonecraft. Introduction de Marie-Odile Bernez. Note the change of title - not a direct translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Men. The 2003 introduction is good; perhaps one day I'll do a round-up of all the introductions to the many and various editions of Mary's main works.

And, because I was aware of this lost daughter, I went looking for her in the catalogue: Flora Tristan, your time has come! (Or it will, on Thursday.)

La Vie de Flora Tristan: Socialisme et feminisme au C19. Jean Baelan.

In London in 1839,  Flora Tristan meets Mrs Wheeler, "the only socialist woman I met in London". This must be Anna Doyle Wheeler, of whom Wikipedia says, "A staunch advocate of political rights for women and equal opportunities in education, she was friendly with French feminists and socialists."

Femmes philosophes, femmes d'action. Michael Paraire. 2004. Le Temps des Cerises. 

Brief biographic sketches of eight female philosophers, mostly French. Flora Tristan is second. The section on her legacy (Posterite des idees, page 35) states:

Par le projet qu'elle a imagine dans L'Union ouvriere, la philosopher a influence la redaction du Manifeste du parti communiste (1848) de Marx et Engels. Des phrases comme "proletaires unissez-vous", "L'homme le plus opprime peut opprimer un autre, qui est sa femme. Elle est le proletaire du proletaire meme", "L'emancipation des travailleurs sera l'oeuvre des travailleurs eux-memes" appartiennent a l'oeuvre de FT. Par ailleurs en liant le probleme de la femme au probleme social, elle a indisuctablement influence des femmes comme Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) mais aussi le feminisme tout entier.

I also learned that there was a hotel (re?)named the Maison de Grande-Bretagne, on the rue Jacob, where Colonel Blackden and Joel Barlow lodged. More on places in Paris on Wednesday; before that, a review of Marge Piercy's City of Darkness, City of Light.

Photo by Jean-Alexis AUFAUVRE (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Shelley-Godwin Archive gets $300 000

The (U.S.) National Endowment for the Humanities has just given $300 000 to the Shelley-Godwin Archive. This is a treasure trove dedicated to the study of Mary Wollstonecraft, her husband William Godwin, their daughter Mary Shelley, and the tousle-hair'd poet Percy Bysshe. One of the main partners is the Pforzheimer Collection, which was so supportive of the exhibition I reviewed at the Bodleian, "Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the image of a literary family", covering the same foursome. (A version is due to be exhibited at New York Public Library in February 2012, apparently, although their website provides little information.)

It is a valuable project, showcasing the best of digital humanities, but it appears to repeat the limitations of the exhibition. As I wrote in March, "My main criticism of Shelley's Ghost is that, while attempting to tell the story of a literary family, it shortchanges the mater familias. There just wasn't enough about MW." The Archive project will start with the other three members of the family:

While this project is just the first phase of the Archive, it will in itself constitute a rich stand-alone resource. In this initial phase, project partners will also digitize copies of Shelley’s major philosophical poem, Queen Mab, with his extensive reworking; the first two volumes of Mary Shelley’s journals; and manuscripts of two novels by William Godwin, Fleetwood and Cloudesley.

That was from the NYPL press release. There is a slightly different take on it from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities:

Humanities scholars, curators, and information scientists are partnering from MITH, the New York Public Library (NYPL), the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, and the British Library, to put manuscripts and early editions of these Romantic writers online and freely accessible to the public. MITH Director Neil Fraistat, renowned scholar in both the digital humanities and Shelley studies, will serve as co-Principle [sic] Investigator along with Elizabeth C. Denlinger, Curator of the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library.  

This is the cutting edge of digital humanities (or so I am led to believe):

Tools and functions will include the ability to collate texts, overlay images of the original manuscripts and view them side by side, search the complete text, and tag content with user annotations. 

The stated focus is Romanticism, rather than the Enlightenment: 

MITH, in addition to its partners, seeks to cultivate and further the Shelley-Godwin Archive as a comprehensive, accurate and accessible digital resource for British Romanticism scholars, in order to provide the platform for an intellectual journey into nineteenth-century verse, history, and letters. 

I wish them all luck, and have signed up at the Archive for updates, so I will add more news to this blog, if and when the team turns its talents to Mary Wollstonecraft.

Shocking omission, part one

Our friendly philosopher, Sandrine Berges, who mused last week for us on the place of Mary Wollstonecraft in her professional life, has posted on her (new, temporary?) blog The Forbidden Sister about the difficulties of finding out what Mary read. In The disappointing ghost, she writes:

Oh yes, and whatever people say, there aren’t that many books or articles about her work. Not that many written from a philosophical perspective, that is. So one thing I’d very much like to know, is what books she’d read, what she knew about, and what is likely to have influenced her.

(My working definition of the digital humanities, by the way, would emphasise online tools that make this sort of search easy and automatic. Who influenced whom.)

Sandrine discovers a book entitled The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price. She is rightly shocked that David Oswald Thomas saw fit to include barely a passing mention of our Mary. She doesn't say, but I suspect the date is significant: Thomas published in 1977, early days in the recognition of Mary by the second-wave feminists.

In a book that professes to show how ‘Price contributed to the intellectual life of his own time’, I find it seriously amiss that Wollstonecraft’s relationship to Price should not be discussed. In other words, it sucks big way.

IANAH, remember? Nor is Sandrine ("So I tried pretending I was a historian, went online to look at archives and all"). It seems to me that it ought to be fairly straightforward to see who a person influenced, because they get quoted. Of course, in practice it isn't that easy: George Eliot read, quoted, and indeed wrote an essay about Wollstonecraft; Gladstone repeatedly read and annotated Wollstonecraft while he was planning the structure of the state education system, but probably didn't quote her publicly, as she was persona non grata for a Victorian politician to be hobnobbing with. (I would love to be corrected on this: did Gladstone acknowledge his indebtedness to her in shaping his thoughts?) Still, since MW is our target person, there is no shortage of intellectual descendants, and, generally speaking, it is not too hard to find out who they were. However, there are an awful lot of omissions in the historical record, which is why, with depressing cynicism, I have entitled this post "part one": I know for a fact there are some, and suspect there are many, such omissions.

What seems harder to find out is who influenced our target. Unless that person kept meticulous records of everything she read and everyone she spoke to, it is hard to know. If someone like Gladstone dies and creates a library as his main bequest, fine; you know where you are.  (He even wrote an essay called "On Books and the housing of them".) But if your target moved around a lot, borrowed and lent books, went through periods of poverty or homelessness (dire or partial) which necessitated the shedding of belongings, then their books at death, or at any moment of snapshot, may in no way reflect their overall reading and thus their literary influences. Mary is much closer to that end of the spectrum. What was in Mr Ardent's Yorkshire library? What was in the Clares'? And, as Sandrine was trying to discover, what was in Richard Price's? Those books opened Mary's mind!