emma_in_dream

I am nearly finished a biography of Georgy Zhukov and I think I will stop in 1945. Though he lived for several decades afterwards, 1945 was the high point. He had fought Germany to a standstill in Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, had rolled across Europe and liberated Warsaw (for a certain value of liberation, somewhat late) and finally captured Berlin. His afterlife could only be a disappointment.

Having read this, I see that Lois McMaster Bujold must have read a bit of Russian history when creating Barrayar. The political officers who could over-rule the military - Red Army during the civil war. Aral Vorkosigan even looks like Zhukov, burly and direct. And Zhukov is interestingly like Aral Vorkosigan in that he is sincerely and loyally committed to a totalitarian order. (Or, in the case of Barrayar, the glittering tinsel of neo-feudalism).

Oliver Heywood, a nonconformist minister who was imprisoned in the 1680s certainly knew how to party…


After dinner, Mr. Whitaker [another imprisoned Nonconformist minister] and I read in turn for an hour in Fox'es Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, Latin edition. Then went to my chamber; if my
wife were absent, I spent an hour in secret prayer, and God helped usually. After supper, we read in the book of Martyrs, studied, went to prayer, read in Baxter's paraphrase of the New Testament.

I want to shout out to Frederick Enoch, a very perceptive reader, who in 1846 bought a copy of the collected poems of the Brontes (published as Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell).


He was one of two – count them, two – people to buy copies of the book that year. Rather embarrassing for the authors, but their readership made up in quality for what it lacked in quantity. Mr Enoch wrote to them, praising the poems and asking for their autographs. He got what turned out to be the only document in the world with the ‘signatures’ of the three Bell brothers on it.


After the publication of *Jane Eyre*, the poetry sold like hot cakes, but Mr Enoch was ahead of his time.

In 1830 while at university, Henry Beecher was the centre of a whirl of dissipation. He played flute for the school band, was a leading member of the Temperance union, *and* enjoyed the rough and tumble of the theological debate society.

I am reading her biography and she apparently had a childhood nurse who had previously worked for Dorothy Wordsworth.


You know what I would like? Some kind of three dimensional computer program that you could use to show the relationships between writers in the nineteenth century.

I see that Frances Hodgson Burnett sold every word she ever wrote, from her first story at eighteen, to her last work fifty four years later. All of them were accepted on the first offer.

I had no idea writing was so easy. Falls about laughing.

I'm sure all my writer friends can confirm that this is their experience as well, especially the bit where various editors wrote to her voluntarily offering her more money than was in her contracts.

And more 19th Century Gossip

I have just finished a biography of Mrs Humphrey Ward, the author of *Robert Elsemere*, and her achievements are vast but puzzling.

On the plus side, she helped set up the first women’s college at Oxford and suggested naming it Somerville after the great mathematician. She was very good at working committees.

Also, she (sort of accidentally) set up a massive network of kindergartens, day care centres and schools for children with special needs in London.

She was a sort of atheist – believed that Jesus was an actual person but rejected the supernatural and miraculous elements and wrote several excellent intellectual novels on this theme. One of her daughters married into the Huxley family because apparently atheistic families were just that few on the ground in the 19th century.

At the same time, she was a prominent anti-suffragette who opposed women getting the vote. She spearheaded the anti-suffragette movement, arguing that most women were put off by the violent actions of the extremist suffragettes, did not want the vote and were content to influence events from behind the scenes. She got her son into Parliament so he could argue this in person. BTW: the suffragettes loathed him and every time he spoke on the issue they sent him postcards saying ‘Mother will be proud’.

I find this kind of argument hard to fathom. It’s not like anyone was *forcing* her to vote. They were just proposing that it become an option for others. It reminds me of the opponents of gay marriage. It’s not like it will be compulsory, which is the only way it could possibly affect the validity of anyone else’s marriage.

As an aside, my first (terrible) boyfriend’s (terrible) mother had exactly this kind of doublethink. She was the chair of Women Against Women Priests* and her argument was essentially that women could always do what she had done, which was to marry a priest and then run the social aspects of the church in an ostentatiously modest way and to make endless comments about what ‘my husband, the Minister’ thought.

So, Mrs Humphrey Ward, a very clever woman who believed that she could influence people without the vote. Which in her case was probably true, given that she was sufficiently respected as an author that former President Roosevelt requested that she write puff pieces designed to bring America into the war. The British High Command agreed and she was given special tours of munitions factories, war ships, troop ships and even taken to France to review the conditions as she produced pro-war propaganda for Britain.


Perhaps it was this combination of extremely conservative views and the popularity of her writing which peeved the modernists so much. Eg. HG Wells and Elizabeth von Arnim responded to an article of her deploring modern sexual morality by making love on top of the newspaper and afterwards burning it.




· Pronounced WARP, not a good acronym. Also, the losers, so nyeeeeer.