Speaking of being out in nature, here’s the second part of my introduction to the Olivier sisters, beginning with a letter that the poet Rupert Brooke wrote to the youngest, Noel (who was still a schoolgirl) about his idyllic life in the village of Grantchester. Her reply wasn’t quite what he was expecting… and years later Virginia Woolf asked her why she hadn’t married Brooke. I’ll be giving a talk about Woolf, Brooke and his ‘neo-pagan’ circle for this summer, and you can find more details about the course here.

If you’d like to read on, and support my work, you can subscribe below at a special rate this week. Our next 20th-century book club, The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) by Elizabeth Jenkins, is coming soon. I hope you’ll join us.

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My own talk ‘Sleeping on the ground and swimming in a river: Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke and the Neo-Pagans’ will be about the ‘Neo-Pagan’ circle that gathered around Rupert Brooke from 1908 to 1912, and its lasting legacy. Today I’m introducing the four Olivier sisters. ‘If Rupert conceived and developed the closest thing to a Neo-Pagan ideology,’ writes their biographer Sarah Watling, ‘the Oliviers were the driving force behind the outdoor gatherings for which the group became known.’ (More about her book, Noble Savages, in my next post.)

Read on for a glimpse of the group on one memorable outing in 1911.

‘Sleeping on the ground and swimming in a river’

In the early summer of 1911, an aspiring novelist called Virginia Stephen, 29, visited Rupert Brooke (aged 23 and already a published poet) at his rented lodgings at the Orchard in Grantchester. One night they bathed naked together in the river nearby, and it’s fair to say that Woolf (as she became when she married Leonard the following year) never forgot the experience. However, as her biographer Hermione Lee writes, ‘the week was more literary than libidinous. Conversation was incessant, manuscripts were scattered around, and Brooke read his poems to her.’1 Woolf was on the brink of major changes in her life and looking for fresh inspiration outside her sceptical, intellectual Bloomsbury circle. She wanted to find out more about Rupert’s friends, especially the beautiful Olivier sisters: Margery, Brynhild (always known as Bryn), Daphne and Noel (or Noël).

A few months later, Virginia bravely decided to join this group that she called, half-mockingly, ‘the Neo-Pagans’ on their annual camping expedition, this time on the edge of Dartmoor. Living under canvas during the summer months came naturally to the Olivier girls, who had grown up as free spirits, building huts and climbing trees in the woods around Limpsfield in Surrey. Not so Virginia, who arrived at the camp late at night with her friend Ka (Katherine) Cox. Hungry and tired, after walking for eight miles from the nearest railway station, the two women found that the others had disappeared on a midnight jaunt, leaving them only the remains of a mouldy summer pudding to eat in the dark.

Though the first night was hardly a success, Virginia did not give up easily; she got up early to help to prepare the morning porridge, joined the group for long tramps over the moor and swims in the River Teign, and was photographed sitting on the grass beside Rupert, smiling gamely and wearing a hippyish headscarf.

But she was not really suited to hayfields, or headscarves, and was soon safely back in Bloomsbury. ‘Oh dear, how the Neo-Paganism at that stage of my life annoyed me’, she wrote to Jacques Raverat in 1924. Their nature-loving unworldliness could never have lasted, but the outbreak of war, and Rupert Brooke’s early death in 1915, made the memory of those innocent days bittersweet.

In Part 2, as a perk for paying subscribers, there’s more about the Oliviers’ early life and what happened after Margery began her studies at Newnham College Cambridge. If you’d like to read it, and support my writing and research, you can upgrade your subscription below. Whatever you decide, thanks so much for reading, sharing and ‘liking’ this post, I really appreciate it.

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Hello, and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This week’s edition is mostly a dispatch from London, where last week I was honoured to be invited to St Paul’s Cathedral to give a talk about the historian and social activist Louise Creighton to mark International Women’s Day 2026. After my talk, it was a thrill to have the opportunity to visit a library designed by Christopher Wren, tucked away on the Triforium (gallery) level, that previously I had known nothing about. Because I’ve included quite a few photos of the library and other archive treasures in this post, your email provider might truncate it, so do click here to read in full via my website.

I arrived in busy Ludgate Hill early by train and, given the mild spring sunshine, decided to have my lunch outdoors at the aptly named café in the photo below. There were lots of office workers strolling past on their lunch break, a pensive-looking builder sitting on a block of stone and French teenagers everywhere, laughing and taking photogenic snaps of each other with St Paul’s dome as a backdrop. More worryingly for me, a rather tough-looking gang of London pigeons was demolishing leftovers on a table nearby. I feared they might be coming for my baguette for their next course, so decided to descend the steps opposite to the peace and safety of the St Paul’s Crypt.

Pigeons and St Paul’s

It’s a cool, calm space down there, with a pigeon-free café and impressive tombs, statues and memorial stones everywhere you look, including Admiral Lord Nelson’s elaborate marble sarcophagus directly beneath the dome and the effigies of a Tudor couple. Amongst all this, you might not even notice the simply inscribed slab of black marble that marks the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren, ‘the Builder of this Cathedral Church of St Paul’s’. On a wall nearby there’s a plaque with a later dedication by Wren’s son that includes the famous words: ‘Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ (‘Reader, if you seek a monument, look about you’). You can see photo of this here.

At the entrance to the OBE chapel, there’s also a beautiful ledger stone marking the tomb of Mandell Creighton, Bishop of London from 1897 to 1901 and his wife Louise Creighton, whose ashes were added to the tomb following her death in 1936. This ‘Art Deco’ memorial stone was designed by James Powell and sons with help from Louise who, in the midst of her grief, suggested something similar to the black and white designs of the cathedral in Siena (a place she and Mandell loved). It was Louise who chose the line ‘Love is all and death is nought’ which is by Robert Browning, apparently, though I haven’t yet identified which poem it’s from.

In the end, the stonemason chose this ochre marble to depict the Bishop’s cope (ceremonial cloak) and the surrounding frame, see below. I think the colour works beautifully with the warm tones of the Crypt’s stone floor.

Amazingly, the real object was on display during my talk, in the circular room called, delightfully, ‘the beehive’. You can see my photo of it below. It’s made of red and gold silk with golden Japanese thread, and was made from material intended to be used for the coronation robe of Victoria, Princess Royal when she became German Empress and Queen of Prussia in 1888. But sadly, her husband died before the coronation took place, so instead it was made into a cope for the Bishop of London. Mandell Creighton wore it in 1897 for the St Paul’s service celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. As he stood with the Archbishops on the steps of St Paul’s to welcome the Queen in her carriage, an awestruck reporter from the Daily Chronicle reported ‘His cope was of a stuff that taxes possibility of description… upon his head he wore a skull-cap of pure cloth of gold.’ When Queen Victoria later wrote to thank Mandell, she told him she had worried about him overheating in the sunshine.

Louise Creighton

I’ve written here about Louise Creighton’s work as a public historian, and how three of her books were exhibited with books by Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and George Eliot at the specially constructed ‘Women’s Building Library’ in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. There’s more about her early life and how in 1890, with her friend Kathleen Lyttelton, she founded the Cambridge intellectual discussion club, the Ladies’ Dining Society, here. Reading her memoir again last week, I liked her refreshing honesty about how her crush on the writings of John Ruskin (‘I was… inclined to make Ruskin my prophet’) made her snobbish about any architecture that was not to his taste. ‘It is strange to me now to think that never before my marriage had I ever been inside Saint Paul’s nor dreamt that there could be anything to be said for city churches.’ (Memoir, p. 92)

When her husband became Bishop of Peterborough in 1891, then Bishop of London from 1897, there was little time for Louise to continue with her own historical writing. ‘I think my mind, such as it was, was a student’s mind’ she later wrote. ‘I loved hunting up information and following out obscure points. If I had had the training, and the time and opportunity, I believe I would have loved to do research work.’ (quoted in Covert, 2000, p. 304). I wondered, reading this, if she managed occasionally to escape from her duties and spend time in the hidden library of St Paul’s, which I visited for the first time after giving my talk last week. It’s an astonishing place, and I’m pleased to report that Louise Creighton’s Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton is on the shelves there.

On the Triforium

Carrying an armful of books, the organizer kindly led me up Wren’s ingenious cantilevered spiral ‘Geometric stair’ (there are some lovely photos of it here). We arrived on the Triforium, or interior gallery level, where, after carefully stepping over pipes and squeezing through a stone passageway, I looked up to see a mosaic ceiling that was as intricately decorated as Mandell Creighton’s cope (see my photo at the top). Just audible in that cool shady corridor was the sound of a choir practising on the cathedral floor far below. After going through a set of double oak doors I found myself in one of the best preserved eighteenth-century interiors in London, which – remarkably – has been kept in service since it opened in 1709 until it was closed for the four-year restoration project which began in 2018.

On the St Paul’s website here there is fascinating information about this, along with the history of how the library’s collection was put back together after the Great Fire of London of 1666, which destroyed the medieval cathedral that had originally stood on this site. It had long been falling into disrepair when the young physicist and astronomer, Christopher Wren, who had designed Oxford’s Sheldonian theatre in 1662, was asked for his ideas on how to rebuild St Paul’s. As part of his research, Wren travelled to Paris to consider the designs that inspired the Louvre museum and the domed churches of the city. In the spring of 1666 he submitted his plan for the dome of St Paul’s and on 27 August it was accepted. Less than one week later, on 2 September 1666, a fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane and the ensuing conflagration destroyed much of the City of London including the old St Paul’s. It was thought that its thick stone walls would protect it, but in preparation for its planned restoration wooden scaffolding had been placed around the church, and the library’s entire collection of priceless books and manuscripts was lost.

Within days, Wren visited the site to view the devastation for himself, and drew up new plans for rebuilding the City. He also began work on his ideas for a completely new St Paul’s, with a dome, based on his interpretation of the European tradition of classicism. His plan was accepted in 1675, and building work began soon afterwards which was completed just 35 years later in 1710. Among his other projects at the time, including helping to rebuild London churches, Wren was also designing a new library for Trinity College Cambridge, which was built from 1676 until 1684 and is now famous as the Wren Library. Perhaps it was work on this that made him consider what sort of library he wanted for St Paul’s, as a place for a library to begin again. By 1710, the Library chamber was already being restocked with priceless texts, including one of only three surviving copies world-wide of Tyndale’s New Testament (1526). It was the first ever holy book to be printed in English, but viewed as heretical by the then Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall. He ordered copies of it to be bought up and burned in the yard of St Paul’s Cathedral itself. After Wren’s library opened, a copy of it was smuggled in, its pages inserted inside another book, to keep it safe; there’s a very good History Today article about it here.

Wren’s hidden library

It’s moving to think about how in 1710, even after all the destruction of fire and the deliberate book-burning of the past, there was a chance to start afresh. I love discovering how historic libraries began to build their collections, and it’s moving to think about how Wren, who studied and taught at Oxford and had just built a beautiful new library in Cambridge, was thinking about the importance of books in his design for his hidden library in St Paul’s. This compact library isn’t there to impress us with its grandeur and it isn’t reserved for Oxbridge students and scholars. Rather, it is a peaceful space, tucked away on the cathedral’s Triforium. It’s just far enough away from the streets outside and the business of a working cathedral for a reader to come in, find a quiet corner and open a book. I like to imagine that Christopher Wren wanted others to experience the tranquillity of studying in this beautiful place, as he had enjoyed his own studies years earlier.

Below there are some of my photos from my recent visit… and read on to find out how to book your own visit there. My thanks to the staff of St Paul’s for kindly inviting me to give a talk, and for looking after me so well.

(You can find out more about the recent restoration on St Paul’s website here. The Library at St Paul’s Cathedral is open to readers by appointment, 10am-4pm, Tuesday to Thursday. For enquiries relating to the Library materials, including individual reader visits, please contact the Librarian. To visit the room with a guide, please book a triforium tour in addition to a sightseeing ticket).

Further reading

‘Christopher Wren 1632–1723’ in Encyclopedia Britannica; The Hidden Rooms Of St Paul’s Cathedral; J. T. Covert, A Victorian marriage: Mandell and Louise Creighton (Hambledon, 2000); Louise Creighton, Memoir of a Victorian woman: reflections of Louise Creighton, 1850–1936, ed. J. T. Covert (Indiana U.P., 1994); Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren (HarperCollins, 2003); Adrian Tinniswood, His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren (Pimlico, 2002).

Coincidentally, this article has just been published in History Today, April 2026: ‘Good News: The Afterlife of Tyndale’s Bible’.

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Hello, and best wishes for International Women’s Day 2026. One of the things I particularly like to celebrate in my research and writing about women’s lives at the turn of the century is their network of friendships, and how opened doors to other connections and opportunities. This week features a brief introduction to Pernel Strachey (1876-1951) particularly in her connection to two other women: Virginia Woolf and the novelist and biographer Elizabeth Jenkins. Read on to find about a literary podcast I took part in last week about another Newnhamite, Jane Harrison, news of our next Twentieth-Century book and how another long-forgotten novel by Elizabeth Jenkins is being reissued.

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Introducing Pernel Strachey

In 1926 the artist Henry Lamb painted a portrait of Pernel Strachey (see above), wearing one of her distinctive and stylish brocade coats, holding a book and with her head tilted inquisitively to one side. ‘The strangeness and magic are all there,’ her former student, the novelist and biographer Elizabeth Jenkins writes of this portrait, ‘but do not exceed those qualities in the original.’ In her memoir The View from Downshire Hill (2004) Jenkins fondly recalls her time as a student at Newnham College Cambridge in the early 1920s, with particularly warm memories of her college principal Pernel Strachey, ‘to know whom, even slightly, was one of the experiences of a lifetime’.

If you’d like to read on, please consider subscribing to support my work. There’s a reduced price on an annual subscription this April if you’d like to join the 20th-century Book Club, and that price will never increase for as long as you choose to stay.

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Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This week I’ve been sorting through my previous posts on literature, and updating some of my personal favourites based on research into writers whose works I love. This one is about E.M. Forster, author of Howards End (1910) which is one of my favourite books, and my quest to find a mantelpiece designed by his architect father that was deeply important to him. Over the next few months I’ll be republishing my top ten literary posts, all without paywalls, and I very much hope you’ll enjoy reading them.

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In a black-and-white 1958 BBC Monitor documentary, the camera pans over a murky King’s College. ‘Cambridge’, says the voice of E. M. Forster, ‘is a place for the very young and the very old.’ And, he might have added, for tourists of all ages, all year round. There were not many of them about on a recent wet Wednesday afternoon, however. On King’s Parade, a young man in a red anorak stands in the rain, optimistically twirling a board. ‘Fancy a punt trip today? Half-price?’ At the entrance to King’s, a morose porter was checking the tickets of the handful of visitors to the Chapel. I had an appointment to see E. M. Forster’s former ­college rooms, which are not on the tourist trail. They are now the postgraduate students’ common room (known as the ‘Grad Suite’) at King’s, and a student had agreed to show me round.

Forster was sixty-seven when he returned to Cambridge in the autumn of 1946, having being made an honorary fellow by King’s ­College. He was grateful for the offer of a large study ‘in’, with lodgings nearby – after his mother’s death he had nowhere else to live – but unenthusiastic about moving. There were some small comforts to be drawn from the prospect of having his former classics tutor Nathaniel Wedd’s room in ‘A’ staircase, where he had first been encouraged to write.

He was also pleased to have his more important belongings about him. ‘The mantelpiece which my father designed in 1876 is already there’, he told his friend, the Belfast writer Forrest Reid in 1947, ‘and when it is up I shall sit down in front of it, as I have done ever since babyhood, and shall think, “What next?”’

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November’s book news

• Last week I was lucky enough to attend a conversation between two eminent Austen scholars, Janet Todd and , whose latest book is Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Unntamed Jane (St Martin’s Press). Devoney revealed, among other things, that in the 1940s Pride and Prejudice was almost made into a musical starring Judy Garland.

• Did you know that there’s going to be a new film version of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919)? Described as an ‘unromantic comedy’, it tells the story of Katherine Hilbury, a young woman who does everything she can to avoid love and marriage in order to pursue her passion for astronomy… and has a suitably starry cast including Timothy Spall and Lily Allen. Can’t wait.

• ’s new Substack ‘Whatever Works’ is full of good things. ‘November is for reading’ was one of my favourite posts recently, and has encouraged me to place a different book in various comfortable corners of my house, and read for just ten minutes at a time.

• How wonderful that the archive of the 19th-century writer Amy Levy has been acquired by Cambridge University Library and is now being opened to researchers. “We specialise in papers of literary authors with connections to Cambridge, from Siegfried Sassoon to Anne Stevenson and J. H. Prynne,” says Senior Archivist, John Wells, “but there’s something especially appropriate about Amy Levy’s archive finding a home in the Library, given her status as one of the first generation of women to attend the University.” I wrote about Levy’s long friendship with her Newnham College tutor Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, below.

• Do you enjoy those ‘Books Of The Year’ lists that proliferate in the broadsheets at this time of year? Personally I can’t resist them, especially in the TLS and the Financial Times. In Martin Wolf’s ‘best economics books of 2025’ in the FT recently I was pleased to see Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power by Victoria Bateman (Headline/Seal Press), which I’m currently reading. As Bateman warns, “some of the most unequal societies today are ones in which women were once relatively equal, meaning that equal opportunities can never be taken for granted”. I mentioned the economist Mary Paley Marshall’s influential Economics of Industry (1879) in my ‘best books’ round-up last year, which included the excellent Literature for the People by . It’s now out in paperback, and on display in the Cambridge University Press bookshop.

• Looking for seasonal reading? Then sign up for ’s Ultimate Literary Advent Calendar (including L.M. Montgomery, Charles Dickens, or Louisa M. Alcott). If you’re looking for bookish present ideas, see Dear Mrs Bird author ’s delightful ‘50 Tip Top Gifts for Booklovers’ (most of us would appreciate one of her Very Special Presents (VSPs), including a Nancy Mitford box set, I suspect) and ’s Bookish Christmas Gift Guide.

• Like many people, I’m enjoying ’s Substack about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, written by academic and author, Dr Karina Jakubowicz. This post about Woolf’s friendship with the artist Gwen Raverat is poignant.

• Have you ever found anything interesting tucked into the pages of a secondhand book? Sarah Lonsdale has written an essay about doing just that in this month’s Slightly Foxed Magazine. The subtitle of her essay is ‘mini-archives of the past’ (which would make an excellent title for a Substack newsletter, I think).

• And the (almost) last word goes to the recently announced Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025: ‘parasocial’. You can find the definition here. As some of you may remember, I worked as a lexicographer on the very first edition of the Cambridge Dictionary which isn’t quite as old at the Oxford dictionary (see my previous post ‘English as she is murdered’). This week sees the publication of the twelfth Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the first new edition in 22 years, with 5,000 new words and 1,000 new phrases and idioms. In his excellent weekly email (sign up free here), the Washington Post’s Book Editor asks why we would still pay for such a hefty volume. ‘With merriam-webster.com just a click away, you might think a new five-pound hardback would be a hard pass. But editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski tells me the books still fly off the shelves.’

• … one final thing, while we’re on the subject of words, it’s great that Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s classic, The Meaning of Liff (Pan Macmillan) has just been reissued. It includes imaginative definitions based on English place-names, including ‘BERRIWILLOCK (n.) – An unknown workmate who writes ‘All the best’ on your leaving card.’

Thanks for reading. Next time, I’ll be introducing Elizabeth Taylor’s first novel, Mrs Lippincote, published in 1945. In this week’s comments I would love to hear about any book(s) you’ve particularly enjoyed reading in 2025. Also, do you have a favourite word that expresses the era we’re currently living in, or should be revived?

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‘I first visited Hemingford Grey in 1915, when it seemed to my eyes the most forgotten bit of rural England, wonderfully left behind.’ (Lucy M. Boston, Memory in a House)

Hello, and welcome to this week’s post, about the memoir Memory in a House by the author Lucy M. Boston, published in 1973. She was in her eighties at the time, but she wrote the book with an extraordinary recall of the riverside house that inspired her to become a children’s writer at the age of sixty. She first glimpsed the Manor at Hemingford Grey from the river in 1915 (‘I was not to know it was waiting for me’) at the beginning of the First World War, and she became its owner two years before the outbreak of the Second World War. With her son Peter Boston, she set about the huge task of restoring it to its dignified Norman structure, and during the war she hosted ‘gramophone concerts’ for serving military pilots in the great hall there. It’s a wonderful house with a gorgeous garden (the summer roses and rare irises are glorious), well worth visiting if you get the chance. Last year I wrote about how the Manor provided the setting for Boston’s Green Knowe books, and the literary magazine Slightly Foxed has just published a new short essay of mine which I’m pleased to be able to share with you, along with some of my photographs of this magical house and garden.

The essay was first published in Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly, Issue 87, Autumn 2025. It is republished here with the editors’ kind permission.

How sweet the music

Something rather magical happened to me last summer when, walking along the river path by the Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire, I came across an old iron gate set into a stone wall. A small sign said ‘Visitors welcome’ so I pushed the gate open and found myself in a lovely English garden with some curious details. Ahead of me lay a velvety swath of lawn, edged with a row of dark green yews trimmed neatly into coronation orbs and crowns. Walking further, I discovered more topiary in the shape of giant chess pieces, and rare irises standing tall. Old roses carelessly cast their petals at my feet as I looked up to see a mysterious old house.

If the Manor at Hemingford Grey sounds like something out of a storybook, it’s because that’s exactly what it is. A fictionalized version of this ancient house features prominently in all six of Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe novels for children, published between 1954 and 1964 and still in print today. Friends who knew and loved the series had told me about the house’s real-life setting in a village near Cambridge, so it was not exactly a secret. But when I went there for the first time last year, and was invited inside, it really did feel like the beginning of an adventure. Afterwards, to check that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing, I tracked down a copy of Lucy M. Boston’s Memory in a House, first published in 1973, to find out more. The story of how she made this place her home and her life’s work is as strange and beguiling as any of the fiction she wrote.

In 1915, 21-year-old Lucy Maria Wood gave up her Classics degree at Somerville College, Oxford, to train as a nurse. While waiting to be sent out to a military hospital in France, she took lodgings in King’s Parade, Cambridge, where her brothers were studying and her distant cousin Harold Boston was in a training camp. They were a close family, and any free time they had was spent together that summer, messing about on the river and sleeping innocently under the stars. Lucy was a true child of nature and soon fell in love with Hemingford Grey, which she thought of as ‘the most forgotten bit of rural England’, and its shady river where boats could be hired cheaply. In the Prologue to Memory in a House she evokes this peaceful atmosphere beautifully.

As soon as one had pushed off into the river, time was obliterated. These dreamy lethargic meadows and old trees had cast off from the stream of life, as we had in our punt, so that moving over the surface to the lovely sound of the punt pole striking pebbles on the bottom, we were doubly liberated.

She often took a punt out alone and she became intrigued by a sombre old house standing near the riverbank. It looked to her like a semi-derelict Georgian farmhouse, ‘lived in joylessly if at all’, despite its perfect location overlooking a bend in the Great Ouse. ‘I was not to know it was waiting for me,’ she recalled, ‘but as I punted past I gave it a friendly thought. If I lived there I would at least give it sweet briar.’ It would be many years before she saw the house or its tranquil riverside setting again. A few months later she was sent to Normandy to look after injured soldiers, and in 1917 her beloved brother Phil, who had recently become a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, was reported missing in action when his plane was shot down. Soon afterwards Lucy impulsively married Harold before he was sent to the Front.

After the war, Harold, Lucy and their young son Peter moved to Cheshire so that Harold could take charge of his family’s tannery business. Sadly, the marriage broke up in the early 1930s, and Lucy moved to Florence and then Vienna to study drawing and painting and attend the classical musical concerts that she adored. But by 1937 war was threatening (‘Mussolini pushed me out of Italy and Hitler out of Austria’), and she decided to return to England to pursue her career as an artist. Her son Peter was by then studying at Cambridge, so she rented a flat on King’s Parade and made plans to spend her days painting there.

One day she happened to hear someone say that there was a house for sale in Hemingford Grey. As she writes in Memory in a House, ‘such was the force of the latent past, or the magnet of what was to be’, that she did not hesitate, but jumped in a taxi and soon was knocking at the door of the Manor. ‘I hear this house is for sale,’ she announced breathlessly to the surprised owners. Yes, they confirmed, they were thinking of selling, but they had not yet advertised it. The house for sale that she had heard about was a different one. The coincidence simply confirmed what Lucy Boston already knew: that fate had brought her there that day.

She was a divorcée in her late forties, she knew no one in the area, and most of the house was ‒ to put it mildly ‒ unfit for human habitation. There were no adequate drains, all water had to be pumped by hand from a well, and most of the upper rooms were inaccessible. It was ‘ramshackle madness’ from top to bottom, she knew, yet she never had any doubts about taking it on. ‘Looking back now, it is hard to know why I acted with such certainty and passion,’ she writes. ‘It was like falling in love.’

The original Manor had been built in the twelfth century and was possibly the oldest continuously inhabited Norman house in England. Having been assured there was nothing more to find, she and her son Peter finally ‘jettisoned doubt and bought pickaxes’. Over hundreds of years the house had been greatly altered and improved, and it was cluttered with fussy extensions. Lucy decided she would get rid of as much as she could and reinstate the stark simplicity of its Norman structure, ‘a simple rectangle two storeys high with a steeply pitched gable roof’, huge fireplaces, arched arrow-slit windows and three-foot-thick walls of Barnack stone.

While the house was being restored Lucy spent two years camping in a virtual ruin, with roof tiles off, floorboards up and gaping holes for windows. ‘I was absolutely happy,’ she recalls in Memory in a House. ‘There was blackbird song and tumbling water, rising mists over the old riverbed and the call of owls. The smell of old dust and builders was an essential detail with its own invigorating promise.’ Others were more wary: local villagers called it the Poltergeist House and avoided walking past it at night. Lucy was unperturbed by the idea of ghosts and paid little attention to strange rattles, knocks and thumps. But in her early years there she and others who visited often sensed the invisible, sometime terrifying, presence of the house.

War had broken out by the time the restoration work was completed, and Lucy Boston’s artist friend Elisabeth Vellacott came to live at the Manor and work on a farm nearby. Lucy wondered what she could contribute to the war effort and then remembered that while nursing in a French hospital during the First World War, she had often played her gramophone in the evening for the patients. She had gathered a large collection of records during what she describes as ‘my desperate Continental solitude’, and the Manor’s high-ceilinged baronial hall made the perfect music room. So she acquired a second-hand gramophone with an immense horn, and twice a week airmen from the RAF station nearby would climb the wooden stairs and settle down on cushions and borrowed divans to listen to the music. The room was lit with a multitude of candles, and wooden shutters provided complete blackout. ‘In the interval we served coffee (real) and buns (horrible) in the dining-room, using beautiful jugs and china,’ Lucy writes. ‘Elisabeth and I were always in our evening clothes.’ The timeless music and delightful comfort of the room transfixed the young pilots, who were all too aware that their own time might be very short: during each concert they could all hear above the music ‘the droning roar of our bombers flying out overhead’.

Throughout the war Lucy Boston took in evacuees and shared her precious food and lodgings with American and Free French forces. Despite this, her neighbours in Hemingford Grey grew ever more suspicious of her, mainly because she wore an Austrian dirndl skirt (which she found ‘both practical and becoming’ while gardening) and she spoke German. It did not take long before villagers decided she must be a spy who was using the concerts to gather information. The rumours reached the ears of British Intelligence, and the musical evenings were shut down.

But Memory in a House allows us to hear echoes of those gatherings, evoked too in its black-and-white photographs and Vellacott’s delicate paintings. Better yet, Lucy’s daughter-in-law Diana Boston still shows visitors around the Manor by appointment. When I visited last summer, she led a small group of us into the music room. There in the corner was a gramophone, with the biggest horn I have ever seen. When Diana perched on the steps and dropped the needle on to a record, I understood what Lucy Boston meant when she wrote that this extraordinary room ‘contains the sound whole while allowing it to expand and explore’. How intently those airmen must have listened, and how sweet that music must have sounded.

Extract from Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly, Issue 87 ©Ann Kennedy Smith 2025. For more information please visit www.foxedquarterly.com

For more about the artist Elisabeth Vellacott (1905-2002), whose beautiful painting of the airmen is above, see this lovely post by . For more information about the Manor, Hemingford Grey, and to book a visit to the house with Diana Boston (Lucy’s daughter-in-law), see the website here.

This post is free to read. If you are able to support my independent writing and research on Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society with a paid subscription I would be very grateful. Thank you for reading, & all best wishes for 2026.

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Joanna Scutts Hotbed: Bohemian New York and the secret club that sparked modern feminism (Seal Press 2022 in USA; Duckworth paperback in UK, 2023).

For middle-class bohemians in New York before the First World War, Greenwich Village was the place to be. The attraction of this part of Manhattan was the “contagious buzz” of new ideas about how to live and love: the Washington Square Bookshop, which opened in 1913, had a “complete shelf of Psychoanalysis and the Psychology of Sex”, and the new Freudian vocabulary lent spice to conversations in Russian-themed tearooms and basement restaurants. When Vassar-educated poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her younger sister Norma moved into the neighbourhood, they worked hard to learn the local language. “We sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched”, Norma recalled. “Needle in, shit. Needle out, piss. Needle in, fuck”.

Another shocking new word was “feminism”. Newspapers poured scorn on it for implying everything they feared: non-motherhood, free love, easy divorce and economic independence for women. “The implication”, as the journalist Rheta Childe Dorr put it, was that feminism was “something with dynamite in it”.

Childe Dorr was one of the early members of Heterodoxy, a debating society for women founded in Greenwich Village in 1912, and the subject of Joanna Scutts’s Hotbed: Bohemian New York and the secret club that sparked modern feminism. This enlightening book covers the first ten or so years of the club’s existence. It is also the story of the early feminist movement in the US, and highlights the under-acknowledged part that these activist women played in psychology, education, theatre, journalism, anti-lynching legislation and the early-twentieth-century American labour movement.

The Heterodoxy club was the brainchild of Marie Jenney Howe, a former Unitarian preacher from Des Moines who declared herself a “disciple” of Charlotte Perkins Gilman after reading her Women and Economics (1898). After moving to New York in 1910 Howe became an organizer in the newly revived suffrage movement, and the club she founded two years later included “Democrats, Republicans, Prohibitionists, socialists, anarchists, liberals and radicals of all opinions” as well as Gilman herself. In 1914 the group was the subject of an exposé by the New York Tribune, which described it as “a de facto star chamber council of the prominent women of New York” – but, according to the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, they were simply “women who did things, and did them openly”.

The club itself did not aim to “do” anything apart from meet in a no-frills Village restaurant on alternate Saturday afternoons, with a topic of discussion agreed in advance. To give each other space “to doubt and to disagree”, members kept no records; guest speakers included the poet Amy Lowell and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, while Emma Goldman gave a talk on anarchy. “We thought we covered the whole field,” one member recalled, “but really we discussed ourselves.”

The Heterodoxy women did more than that, of course, and much of the action of the book takes place away from the club itself. When, in 1913, a weavers’ strike began in Paterson, New Jersey, the International Workers of the World union stepped in and club member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn organized street meetings, co-ordinated stop-work protests, called out police brutality and helped to expose the silk industry’s exploitation of teenage girls.

The causes of suffrage and labour rights were allied in 1910s New York, where protests, fundraisers and rallies kept both issues in the news. When the glamorous lawyer and suffragist Inez Milholland was photographed wearing an evening gown alongside textile workers on a picket line, the headline in the New York Times was “Inez Milholland Helping”. She knew the vote-winning value of a photo opportunity. In 1913 she led the National American Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington DC on a white horse, while wearing a crown and flowing cape.

There were other, less visible campaigns. In 1914 a high-school teacher, Henrietta Rodman, challenged the New York school board on its “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy requiring women teachers to hide the fact that they were married. And in the late 1910s campaigning for access to birth control, especially for working-class mothers, became an important focus of Heterodoxy’s activism.

The concerns of the mostly middle-class and well-educated Heterodites resonated differently among the less privileged. Rose Pastor Stokes was born into a poor Jewish family in the Russian empire and brought up in the East End of London. When her family moved to Ohio she worked in a cigar factory for eleven years before becoming a journalist. Her move to New York and marriage to a Madison Avenue millionaire did not stop her activism, and in 1912 she led a strike by the city’s hotel and restaurant workers. But when she asked one strike-breaker why she hadn’t joined the union, the woman looked straight at her and pointedly replied: “I’m in hopes that some rich man will come along and marry me”.

Socialists and feminists were equally guilty of overlooking racial injustice, Scutts notes, as can be seen in the distance between Heterodoxy’s white bohemians and their Black counterparts. Club member Ida Rauh, who helped found the Provincetown Players in 1915, took a stand when she refused to cast white actors in “blackface” for Eugene O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid (1919), but Grace Nail Johnson, who promoted anti-lynching legislation and later became prominent in the Harlem Renaissance movement, was the club’s only African-American member. The group’s acceptance of her had undertones of unconscious prejudice. “You were today elected to the Heterodoxy with real enthusiasm”, Howe told her, “so do be a good girl and come regularly and be responsive.”

The First World War demanded that Heterodites take sides. Those who were for “a woman’s war against war”, as Dodge Luhan put it, found themselves pitted against pro-war patriots like Gilman, who resigned from the club in protest at her pacifist sisters’ views. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and America’s entry into the war severely tested Heterodoxy’s founding principle – the right to speak one’s mind. “One could talk about anything, anything!”, Scutts says. “One could be convicted of anything (anything!) too.”

There was an attack on another front after the war, as Greenwich Village became a tourist attraction. A series of postcard photographs taken by Jessie Tarbox Beals promoted the quaintness of Village life, the drinking dens, antique shops and colourful characters. Nonconformist and transgressive elements associated with the area were scrubbed from the record.

Hotbed is a vibrant and engaging account of female autonomy in the early twentieth century. As Joanna Scutts admits, the history of a long-running club can be an unwieldy subject. But the stories come vividly to life nonetheless, and their continuing relevance is not in doubt: the anti-lynching legislation that Grace Nail Johnson called for a hundred years ago was signed into law in March 2022 as the long-delayed Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, and the courage of Heterodoxy’s Mary Ware Dennett is even more impressive in the light of the overturning of Roe vs Wade. Under continual threat of imprisonment, she refused to stop distributing her sex-positive educational pamphlet “The Sex Side of Life” through the US Postal Service. The struggle to enlighten is far from over.

Thanks for reading this, a longer version of my review first published in the Times Literary Supplement here. I would love to hear your thoughts about this club, or other friendships and alliances from history that have inspired you, and what books you would recommend about them (I loved Daisy Hay’s group biography about Joseph Johnson’s dining club, see my post below). There was a fantastic response to my post on Dorothy L. Sayers at Oxford last week, with some truly excellent comments. But if you just want to sit and quietly ruminate, like these gentle creatures, that’s fine too.

(Abridged extract from Wildly Different Chapter Two)

The island was full of noises. And snakes. The sawing and whining of unseen insects and tree frogs, a symphony of tiny drills, counterpointed the constant drip of water permeating through layers of leaves. All was mossy fringe, tendril, spike, pod, scale. And beneath it all the shuddering boom of the Pacific waves coming to rest against the shore. Gorgona, just off the coast of Colombia is an island rainforest: the mahogany, balsa and banyan figs as well as the orchids, epiphytes and tropical ferns in trees eight storeys tall, harbour more than 400 species of reptile, many deadly. The snakes inspired Spanish explorer Diego de Almagro in 1524 to name the uninhabited island Gorgona after the serpent-haired women of Greek myth, who could turn men to stone with one murderous look.

Evelyn Cheesman had no time to consider cartographical etymology nor the monstrous-feminine of ancient poets’ imaginings. She was trapped in the bonds of a giant spider’s web from which no amount of chewing or tearing with her teeth and fingers could release her. The more she tugged, the more the silk, stronger in tensile strength than steel, cut into her hands. While she was too large to be considered a meal for the spider that had woven this web, the sight of a shrivelled and decidedly post-mortem gecko hanging from the skein in front of her was not encouraging. She had been trapped like this for over an hour, having momentarily lost concentration as she wandered through this strange country that thrilled her with its tintinnabulating life.

She had joined a scientific expedition to the South Pacific in order to gather exotic species for the Zoological Society of London, where she was curator of the Insect House. When she had started work as a lowly keeper at the Zoo in 1917, wartime visitors seeking escape from the food shortages and relentlessly grim news were satisfied with the paltry collection of native mayflies and aquatic beetles. Now, six years after the end of the First World War, the public was demanding more to see than the bugs she had scooped out of Home Counties ponds and hedgerows.

She was currently trapped and in danger of being collected herself, by a giant Nephila spider, and her expedition, on a tight schedule and next bound for the Galapagos, wouldn’t wait more than a few hours for her. The party had left Dartmouth three months earlier, in April 1924, aboard the three-masted steam yacht the St George. Its departure was a minor news sensation, dubbed by the Daily Mail as a ‘Second Voyage of the Beagle’ after Charles Darwin’s famous expedition to the Galapagos nearly one hundred years earlier. It had been difficult enough to persuade the Scientific Expeditionary Research Association’s all-male committee that a woman entomologist should be one of the eight scientists on board, their free passage covered by the tickets of the other passengers. It would never do, so early on in the two-year journey for the expedition’s only woman scientist to have got herself trapped inside a spider’s web.

Lucy Evelyn Cheesman was born at Court Lodge, Westwell, on the 8^th of October, 1881, the middle of five imaginative and precocious siblings, daughter of affectionate if distracted parents who allowed their offspring to roam the little river valley behind the house alone. Very often the children’s sole guardian on these forays into deep banks of mud or forests of stinging nettles, was their devoted Collie dog, Shep.

The children’s Bible was the three volumes of the Reverend John George Woods’ Illustrated Natural History for Children. Robert, the eldest son, got Volume I, ‘Mammals’, Edith, ‘Birds’ and Evelyn ‘Fishes, Insects etc’. Sitting in the nursery, or lying in bed recovering from one of the severe attacks of bronchial asthma that she would endure throughout her life, reading and looking at the illustrations, Evelyn was transported. She read of the glow-worm: ‘In a dark night these diminutive creatures shine with such brightness as to bear some resemblance to stars.’ Woods continued, ‘It is commonly met with under hedges and, if taken up with care, may be kept alive for many days, upon fresh tufts of grass.’

That June, Evelyn explored the lanes around Court Lodge with Shep and brought back 32 glow-worms, which she kept in jars in the nursery. Lying in bed at night, she watched the bright stellate lights adorn the shelves of the room, a complete and private universe of living stars. After the glow worms came toads, cockchafer beetles that flew around the nursery like miniature bi-planes, and then the pale and stately Roman snails which, let loose inside the house, left ‘wonderful silver filigree-work over carpet and furniture’. The children marvelled but the snails were thrown out.

Evelyn, naturally, wanted to be a vet but the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons would not admit women until 1927. Evelyn had applied twice, once using her full name and a second time using a male pseudonym but foolishly the same surname and address so the admissions officers saw through her ‘ruse’ and she was rejected again. Evelyn’s difficulties in pursuing a career in the sciences mirrored the experience of many other women of this time. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, women had begun to study at university, although, initially, they were not admitted to degrees. Bedford College, based in central London, and founded in 1849, was the first institution to provide higher education for women, from the start offering classes, a guinea a time, in natural philosophy, plant biology and chemistry although initially there were no laboratories. The women students, as at other universities, initially had to beg or borrow laboratory space and the use of microscopes, or study, secretly, in the long summer vacation when the eminent male professors, many of whom refused to teach women science, were away.

On her return from that first collecting expedition, Evelyn left London Zoo and started work as a volunteer entomologist in the British Museum’s natural history department (now the Natural History Museum) where she would work, on and off, for the next three decades in between lengthy collecting expeditions to other parts of the Pacific. Ultimately more than 200 new species of insect would be named after her and in 2010 bio-geographers proposed a ‘Cheesman Line’ in Vanuatu, similar to the famous Wallace Line in Australasia, in recognition of her work in linking variations in insect distribution and the great tectonic movements of the earth.

©Sarah Lonsdale, 2025

‘Wildly different is an urgent, timely and original study of five pioneering women who fought for the right to explore and protect the wild. Sarah Lonsdale writes from the heart, and nothing has brought home to me with more force the relationship between gender and the natural world.’
Frances Wilson, author of The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

‘It’s a deeply felt, splendidly told, long overdue celebration of five wild, witty and wise voices who make a compelling case, now as then, for conservation, compassion and community.’
Dan Richards, author of Climbing Days

Do you have a favourite travel memoir? I got some intriguing answers when I asked this question yesterday via Substack Notes, including Roughing It by Mark Twain; ‘Anything by Eric Newby. I love his humour’; William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain and Greek To Me by the ‘Comma Queen’, Mary Norris; Dervla Murphy and Freya Stark among others. I wrote about some contemporary travel memoirs by women writers here, and would love to hear what else you would recommend, and why.

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Speaking of travelling, I had a trip to the Barbican theatre in east London last week, and also visited ‘St Giles’ Cripplegate’, which among other things is where Oliver Cromwell got married and the burial place of John Milton in 1674. There’s been a church on this spot for over 1,000 years and the name ‘Cripplegate’ refers to one of the gates through the old City wall which in Roman times served as a fortification to protect the city from attackers: ‘it is likely that the word comes from the Anglo-Saxon “cruplegate”, which means a covered way or tunnel.’ But Saint Giles is also the patron saint of people with physical disabilities, so perhaps the two meanings have merged over time. There’s a good secondhand bookshop in this peaceful, light-filled London church.

If you enjoyed this post, you might like reading about other intrepid women travellers (most with Cambridge University connections) in some of my previous posts below, all without a paywall this week.

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Below is my essay about a difficult time in the early married life of the Tennysons, and his painful writer’s block, and how Emily’s strength and character helped to get them through it (Virginia Woolf really did underestimate her.) An earlier version of this essay was part of my submission to the University of East Anglia’s Master’s in Creative Writing (biography and creative nonfiction), and I am grateful to them for giving me a scholarship.

French invasions and other battles

January, 1852: England’s Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, sits alone in the library of his mother’s house in Cheltenham. It is late at night and the rest of the family are asleep. He is a tall, broad-shouldered man with loose dark hair and dishevelled appearance, once strikingly handsome, but who now – with his hollow cheeks, ghostly pallor and spectacles – looks much older than his forty-one years. He is tired, but too worried to sleep. For the past eighteen months he has been battling with a clutch of personal demons. His sudden success as a poet after so many years, the pressures of the laureateship and fame, his late marriage to Emily and the death of their infant son, all have made him unsettled and unable to write.

In the winter of 1851-52 the English newspapers were full of reports of Louis Napoleon’s seizing of power in France, and rumours that he might be planning to invade England next. Tennyson knew that a hundred miles away, at their home in Twickenham, his newly pregnant wife Emily would be lying awake, worrying. On that January night, he decided that – as the poet of England, and for Emily’s sake – he had to act. He took out a sheet of paper, and stooping over the page, started to write in ‘a white heat of emotion’, tears streaming down his face. The poems that emerged were so provocative and shocking that many admirers of his work wish they had never been written. But without them, Tennyson might not have gone on to write Maud (1855) his vast and subtle poem of war and peace.

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1850 was a remarkable year for Tennyson. On 1 June In Memoriam A.H.H., his collection of lyrics mourning the death of his great friend, the poet Arthur Henry Hallam (1811 – 1833), was published and became an immediate bestseller. Less than two weeks later, Alfred Tennyson and Emily Sellwood, 35, got married. Although they had known each other for over twenty years (and been engaged before), the marriage came as a surprise to most of his friends, who did not see the forty-year-old poet as ever likely to settle down. Thomas Carlyle was not impressed by Emily’s appearance when he first met her, describing her as a rather ordinary-looking, shapeless woman with a round, freckly face. But when he started talking to her, he was immediately struck by how her ‘bright glittering blue eyes’ lit up, and how her conversation revealed her good sense and intelligence.

A few months later, in November 1850, another redoubtable lady, Queen Victoria, made Tennyson an offer he felt he could not ‘gracefully’ refuse: the official position of Poet Laureate. He was aware that it would mean certain expectations of him as a poet, as well as a fair amount of ribbing from his friends. Poet Laureates were no longer expected to write things like birthday odes for the Queen, he reasoned, but what sort of poems should a royally approved poet write?

After being awarded the laureateship Tennyson went through a bad case of writer’s block. There was little time to write, in any case; following their marriage, he and Emily travelled about the country for months, staying with family and friends. In mid-January 1851, with Emily expecting their first baby, they moved into their first home in rural Sussex, but impulsively left it two weeks later, unable to stand the house’s remoteness, susceptibility to storms and superstitious associations any longer.

In March 1851 they moved to Twickenham, then a sleepy rural village eleven miles from London. Chapel House was at the end of Montpelier Row, a beautiful early eighteenth-century terrace near the river. Tennyson had been delighted with the house on first sight, describing it in a letter to Emily as full of light and views of gracious parkland from every room at the top, adding that ‘the only objection I have to it is its nearness to London: which is rather a horror to me’.

He was right to worry, as it turned out; the railway had arrived in Twickenham three years earlier and it was all too easy for friends from London to call on them, so their peace was frequently invaded. Also, despite the spacious park nearby, it was not long before the confined nature of suburban life began to affect Tennyson, a man who since his youth had never stayed in one place for long. Emily noted anxiously in her journal: ‘Alfred walks before breakfast… Duty walks and alas! without pleasure.’

Then, on Easter Sunday 1851, tragedy struck. Their first child, a boy, died at birth. Rather than announce it in The Times, Tennyson wrote over sixty letters to friends in the following days, movingly describing how his infant son’s hands were clenched as if in fierce determination to be born: ‘he looked, I thought, as if he had had a battle for his life’. A few months later, as soon as Emily was well enough, she and Tennyson travelled to the Continent, hoping to spend the winter in southern Italy. Their longed-for escape was cut short, much to her disappointment, when bad weather made it too stormy to take the boat to Rome or Naples and worrying rumours reached them of civil unrest brewing in the Italian countryside.

They returned to Twickenham and ‘rather a melancholy house’, as Emily put it. Tennyson could not settle. Franklin Lushington astutely observed that ‘Alfred Tennyson is naturally in a restless state of mind which impels him to quit Twickenham and get a house in some remote part of the country, from which of course he would be equally anxious to return again into the neighbourhood of London’. Before finding Farringford on the Isle of Wight, both Tennysons must have privately wondered if they would ever find a home they loved.

Then on December 3 1851 everything changed. Reports started coming in from France that the government had been overthrown in a coup d’état by Louis Napoleon, the ambitious nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. The London Times gloomily reported the news as if it was only to be expected, announcing: ‘The French Revolution has once more resumed its eccentric and irresistible course.’ This was not the beginning of another republic, however, but the first days of France’s twenty-year long Second Empire. Louis Napoleon, soon to crown himself Emperor Napoleon III, made no secret of his militaristic ambitions, and when he referred to ‘repairing the damage to national self-esteem’ inflicted by the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, many English people took this literally as a sign that he was planning another war with them.

Throughout January and February 1852 English newspapers stoked these fears, publishing ever more pessimistic reports from France and frightening predictions of an imminent invasion. The letters pages bristled with criticisms of the British government’s political manouverings that had favoured fat-cat business interests over national security, risking the safety of its own people:

We also take no care for the fortification of our country or the equipment of our troops. We arm them with weapons that are all but harmless… We view without apprehension an enormous military Power beside us, assuming a position that renders foreign war almost a necessity of existence.

With an ill-equipped British army too busy fighting overseas to defend their own country from the threat of imminent French invasion, the idea of self-defence quickly gained hold among many newspaper readers. There were calls for rifles to be distributed so that every man could defend his home and family, and volunteer rifle clubs began to spring up around the country. Even poets were not immune from the general fervour. The poet Coventry Patmore organized his own rifle club at the British Museum, where he worked, and Emily and Alfred Tennyson were both happy to hand over £5 each to help their friend to buy rifles.

This was not the first invasion scare to grip the nation. Only three years before, the 1848 upheavals on the Continent and another revolution in France had sent a collective shudder through England. In 1849, in an effort to counter the prevailing English distrust and dislike of foreigners, Prince Albert threw his weight behind plans for a ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’, to be held in Hyde Park, London. The Great International Exhibition of 1851 was opened by Queen Victoria on May 1st 1851, and Joseph Paxton’s vast purpose-built structure was dubbed ‘the Crystal Palace’ by Punch magazine. It was the first large-scale show of its kind, showcasing the latest technical innovations and aimed at promoting peace and foreign trade among nations. With over six million people from Britain and overseas pouring through its doors for the six months it lasted, the Great Exhibition was hailed as a triumph for pacifist internationalism.

However, there were some unintended consequences. The exhibition inadvertently caused a notable surge in English nationalism by highlighting the differences between Britain and the rest of the world. One Punch cartoon of the time shows three dishevelled Frenchmen standing outside the Crystal Palace, gazing at a display of washbasins and bars of soap and wondering aloud what they could be used for. The contrast with the neatly top-hatted Victorian English gentleman next to them underlined the message that there was an unbreachable gulf between the two nations.

More seriously, in his great poem ‘Dover Beach’ written this year, Matthew Arnold expressed the uneasy sense that the mid-century’s peace was only a brief lull in the more usual state of international conflict, and England and France might easily be drawn back to a darker time ‘where ignorant armies clash by night’. Peace among nations in 1851 seemed, like the glass Crystal Palace itself, fragile and temporary.

Tennyson, who was old enough to remember the first Napoleon and the 1830 revolution in France, had always had his suspicions about the French. But exactly how fearful was he in January 1852 ? It’s worth remembering that at the height of the crisis, he went to visit his family in Cheltenham, leaving Emily, newly pregnant again and too unwell to travel, at home. His mother, sister and brothers lived in an elegant three-storey townhouse in St James’ Square, and Tennyson’s sister Mary and her lawyer husband would soon be emigrating to the West Indies. There were dutiful calls to be made and dinners to be eaten.

But one night, alone, Tennyson’s fears and dissatisfaction with English life surfaced and he began to write the first of an extraordinary series of seven patriotic poems which were published anonymously or pseudonymously in The Examiner and other newspapers in January and early February 1852.

‘The Penny-Wise’ or ‘Arm!’, begins with a stark warning:

O where is he, the simple fool,/ Who says that wars are over?/ What bloody portent flashes there/ Across the straits of Dover?

It urges ‘Britons all’ to arm themselves and prepare to fight the ‘barbarians better-armed’ in the approaching ‘battle of the world’. It is not hard to imagine an insomniac Tennyson writing this in the middle of the night, as ‘sleepy Lords of Admiralty’ and ‘many a dreamer’ alike are urged to ‘wake, arise’ and be ‘up, now, and be doing’.

Another poem written in Cheltenham, ‘Riflemen Form!’, features the anti-French lines ‘Bearded monkeys of lust and blood/ Coming to violate woman and child!’ Tennyson sent it to his friend Coventry Patmore to arrange publication on strictly anonymous terms, scribbling (with sounds like childish glee) at the end, ‘Very wild but I think too savage! Written in about 2 minutes! My wife thinks it too insulting to the F[rench] and too inflaming to the English.’

It is not difficult to see why Emily might have urged a little restraint. The poems are jingoistic, xenophobic and anti-Catholic, a far cry from both Tennyson’s sensitive, lyrical In Memoriam and the dutiful ‘To the Queen’, the only new poem he had written since becoming Poet Laureate.

The excitable titles and liberally scattered exclamation marks of these 1852 poems give a good indication of their fiercely nationalistic contents: ‘Britons, Guard your Own’, ‘Arm, arm, arm!’ and ‘Hands All Round!’. Tennyson knew that their coarse language and bloodthirsty sentiments made them not at all appropriate for a Poet Laureate, but he did not care. In fact, he seemed to rather enjoy it. It is almost as if, in his mind, the hordes of invading Frenchmen were surrogates for all the emotions that had tormented him since fame, the laureateship and marriage had come along to disturb him. These were poems written as much to vanquish his own demons as to provoke his fellow countrymen to arms.

It’s the first time that we get an indication of how closely Emily was involved in Tennyson’s work. In her letters to friends and editors at this time she starts to use ‘we’ and ‘our’ unselfconsciously about her husband’s poetry and it is evident from what she wrote that they worked closely together from then on. The caricature of Emily as a frail, sofa-bound invalid wife has persisted. The famous perpetrator of this myth was Virginia Woolf, who in her farce Freshwater wrote:

It is true that Emily’s health was poor; she suffered from a painful back and twenty years later became permanently disabled, but even then she never stopped working and discussing everything with Tennyson.

In 1852, despite being in the early stages of pregnancy, her mental and physical energy is striking. As well as donating her own money to Patmore to buy rifles, while Tennyson was away she became actively involved in the cause of English self-defence, writing persuasive letters to their friends to galvanize support, distributing leaflets and issuing invitations to fundraising dinners. She was also dealing with her husband’s publishers, in her charmingly no-nonsense way, aware that their well-connected friends were likely to read the same newspapers and gossip about the authorship of these contentious poems.

She and Tennyson discussed the rather thrilling risk of Tennyson’s name reaching the ears of Louis Napoleon himself, or that Queen Victoria might be forced to have a word with her trouble-making Poet Laureate. It was Emily who wrote to John Forster, the Examiner’s editor, to ensure that Tennyson’s name was kept secret, and to Coventry Patmore asking him never to refer to Tennyson as an ‘agitator’ because, as she put it, ‘the word has come to have so evil a meaning, a sort of hysterical lady meaning if nothing worse’.

Although pragmatic and protective of her husband’s reputation, Emily was certainly no hysterical lady herself, but passionately concerned with contemporary events. There is a tiny but telling detail in a letter Tennyson wrote to her at this time, in which he mentions his irritation with The Times and asks rather plaintively ‘Must thou read it every day?’1 Was he asking her to stop reading the newspaper because she was lying awake at night worrying about it all?

Unfortunately, most of Emily’s letters have been lost or destroyed, and her published journal is incomplete. But if we look at the entries that she wrote two years later at the height of the Crimean War, when England allied with France and Turkey to fight Russia, we can see how fascinated she was by the reports she read in The Times. In November 1854 it was Emily who carefully noted down the vivid descriptions of the soldiers’ sufferings filed by William Howard Russell, the first great war correspondent:

We read that touching account of the Scotts Grays &… how they devoted themselves at Balaclava. The writer says that their “ears are frenzied by the monotonous, incessant cannonade going on for days altogether”. Some Captain compares the appearance of the troops to the turning of a shoal of mackerel. We are almost afraid to open the newspapers now.

Both Emily and Tennyson were ‘afraid’ to open the newspapers, as she put it, because the details of the fighting consumed them and they could talk of little else. It was after reading Howard Russell’s words that Tennyson wrote ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, with the famous line ‘Someone had blundered’. It is one of his best known poems, and expresses a compassion for the dignity and courage of the soldiers on their doomed mission that millions of readers still find moving today.

The patriotic poems of 1852 are comically clumsy by comparison, but they were, effectively, Alfred and Emily Tennyson’s first joint production They were written when they were physically apart but communicating daily by letter. It was a time of uncertainty in their marriage, in a home they did not love, grieving the death of their first baby and not knowing if the next one would survive, besieged by well-meaning friends and visitors. Writing and publishing the poems in secret together cemented their private bond.

Reviewing the 1969 edition of Tennyson’s collected poetry, Philip Larkin wrote that reading the complete works was like entering a delightfully picturesque Victorian landscape until suddenly ‘we are brought up sharp… by the assertive trumpets of imperial patriotism’. This strident political poetry sits uneasily with what we know, or think we know, about Tennyson and it seems a far cry from the famous words from ‘Ulysses’ chosen to inspire international athletes at the 2012 London Olympics: ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield’.

Tennyson’s biographers, from his son Hallam onwards (whose Memoir of his father was co-written with Emily), have been embarrassed by what he produced in early 1852, dismissing these poems as ‘the hollow belligerence of the unmartial man caught up in blind chauvinism’. Hallam implies that his mild-mannered mother was temporarily, and rather helplessly, caught up in her husband’s hysteria. In fact, Emily was as enthusiastic as Alfred was was about defending England, and despite the risks she encouraged him to write the poems as a matter of national importance.

Exaggerated and belligerent as they might seem to us now, the patriotic poems represent an important aspect of Tennyson’s work, when he managed with the help of Emily to break through his writer’s block and rediscover his poetic voice. Philip Larkin would not have stumbled across them today, because these troublesome poems have now been dropped from the latest edition of Tennyson’s collected poetry. It is perhaps not surprising that modern editors have suppressed such fierce, politically incorrect verse (even though like the line from ‘Ulysses’ they are essentially about finding the courage to fight real or imaginary demons).

If we choose to overlook the war poems in the future it will be easy to do, and it might make Alfred Lord Tennyson more appealing as a poet. But how and why these poems were written tells us something important about Tennyson’s development as a poet and Emily Sellwood Tennyson’s own, much less documented story. She was a composer in her own right, and later removed much of the anti-French invective of the patriotic poems when she set the poems to music. “Hands All Round’ was used to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, and it was Emily’s version of Tennyson’s Patriotic Poems that was published in a pocket-sized version in 1914 for British soldiers to take with them into battle, where they fought alongside their French allies.

Postscript: Emily gave birth to two healthy sons: Hallam, born in Twickenham in August 1852 and Lionel, who was born in March 1854 in Farringford on the Isle of Wight, which became the Tennysons’ much-loved permanent home.

Notes

My thanks to U.E.A. for awarding me the 2014-15 biography and creative nonfiction Master’s scholarship based on this essay, and to Ann Thwaite for her wonderful Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (Faber, 1996) which inspired me to do this research. A new, updated version of this is forthcoming from Baylor University Press. I am also very grateful to the Tennyson Society for their support, and to Andrew Hewitt for his generous writing advice. Any remaining errors are my own.

‘tall, broad-shouldered…’ from William Allingham’s Diaries in Bevis, pp. 251–2; ‘in a white heat of emotion…tears streaming’: Charles Tennyson, p. 266

‘bright glittering blue eyes’ Thomas Carlyle to Jane Welsh Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson (AT) Letters I, p. 339; ‘the most lovely house…’

AT Letters II, p. 3; ‘the only objection’ AT Letters II, p. 1; ‘Alfred walks…’ Lady Tennyson’s Journal, p. 26; ‘as if he had had a battle for his life’, AT, Letters II, p. 14

‘rather a melancholy house’, letter from Emily quoted in Thwaite, p. 239

‘Alfred Tennyson is naturally in a restless state of mind’ Franklin Lushington to William Henry Brookfield, Letters II, p. 26

‘The French Revolution has once more resumed…’ The Times, 3 December 1851

‘We also take no care…’ The Times, 8 January 1852

Punch cartoon, see Auerbach, p. 184

Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, see Victorian Web

‘Very wild…’, AT Letters, II, 21

‘Emily jump?’, quoted in Thwaite, p. xv

Page 4: ‘agitator … hysterical lady meaning’, Emily Sellwood to Coventry Patmore, Letters, II, p. 25

‘We read that touching account’ Lady Tennyson’s Journal, p. 26

‘we are brought up sharp’, Philip Larkin, ‘The Most Victorian Laureate’, New Statesman, vol. 77, 14 March 1969, pp. 363–4

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/emily-tennyson-18131896-wife-of-alfred-tennyson-82131

Works consulted

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Letters: The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 3 vols, edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–90)

Auerbach, Jeffrey A., The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999)

Bernard Martin, Robert, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)

Bevis, Matthew, Lives of Victorian Literary Figures 1: Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003)

, Emily, Lady Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (article on Substack, December 1st 2023)

– Literature for the People: How The Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse (Pan Macmillan, 2024)

Kennedy Smith, Ann, 'Tennyson’s French Reception' in The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe, edited by Leonee Ormond (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

– ‘Tennyson seen from there: Enoch Arden’s French reception’ in The Tennyson Research Bulletin,10.3, pp. 251–265 , 2014

Alfred Tennyson, Poems, 3 vols, edited by Christopher Ricks

– The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 3 vols, edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–90)

– Tennyson, A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Pearson, 2007)

Tennyson, Charles, Alfred Tennyson, by his grandson Charles Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1968)

Tennyson, Hallam, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, by his son, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1897)

Tennyson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson, edited by James O. Hoge (1974)

– Lady Tennyson’s Journal, edited by James O. Hoge (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1981)

Thwaite, Ann, Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (London: Faber and Faber, 1996; currently only available secondhand, or via Faber print-on-demand)

This week’s TLS features two newly discovered poems by Virginia Woolf. Perhaps it’s generous to call them poems. Sophie Oliver, the UK academic who found them in a folder of letters to Woolf’s niece, Angelica Garnett (née Bell) describes them as ‘doggerel’. It’s probably fair to say that they are not likely to be included in any poetry anthologies, that doesn’t mean that these scribbled verses are not significant. Oliver argues that the point of such verse for Woolf was ‘to play, poke and charm, and to help with what Angelica thought was one of her aunt’s greatest gifts, creating intimacy with people.’1

It’s evidence that Woolf wanted to enchant her niece and nephews by using her special powers: words and humour. As I wrote in my previous post on Julian Bell, shared jokes provided a way of lessening the tensions that emerged from their rivalry for Vanessa Bell’s love. ‘It was a relationship she worked at, but one riven by ambivalence,’ Oliver writes of Woolf’s relationship with her sister’s children. ‘The wordplay of “Hiccoughs” and the kissing viper in “Angelica”, the jaunty rhythm and rhymes in both poems, echo the worlds of nonsense and fairy tales that she constructed around her niece and nephews to draw them into something that was theirs alone.’

I’m fascinated by the fact that the poems might have been written in August 1932, when the family gathered at Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s farmhouse, ‘Charleston’ in East Sussex. Among the guests were Julian Bell and his girlfriend Lettice Ramsey, a widow and keen amateur photographer who was getting to know the family. On 18 March 1932 Woolf mentions in her diary that she took ‘tea with Nessa, Julian, & Mrs Ramsey’, then Vanessa invited Ramsey to Charleston, where she took a series of informal photographs, and also photographed Woolf with Angelica Bell at Monk’s House.

The playfulness of those summer days is beautifully captured in these informal snaps of Woolf and Angelica by Lettice Ramsey, who seems to have been trying out her new Leica camera (see ’s Snapshots of Bloomsbury). The intimate tone of these photographs is echoed in Woolf’s unfinished poems, which are dedicated to Angelica and Quentin (perhaps to celebrate his birthday on 19th August). In Julian Bell’s archive at King’s College there is a bundle of papers called ‘poetry games’ based on a parlour game enjoyed by the Woolfs and the Bells.

But in 1932 there may have been a hint of rivalry in Virginia Woolf’s light-hearted attempts at poetry; notably, she did not dedicate a poem to her nephew Julian Bell, who was starting to gain fame in his own right as a serious poet. Later she regretted ‘the damned literary question’ and her own jealousy of his poetic talent.

‘Are they good poems? It’s the wrong question,’ writes Sophie Oliver in her excellent TLS essay. Rather, this was poetry as ‘a weapon, a game, a kiss’.

There’s more about Virginia Woolf and Julian Bell below. I’ve also written about Lettice Ramsey’s 1932 visit to Charleston, and her 1956 photographs of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes here. Coming soon, my post on the 1930s photographic partnership, Ramsey & Muspratt, and how Lettice Ramsey continued her professional work until the 1970s.

The Enchanted April on film

The death of Dame Joan Plowright was announced this week. A great stage actor, she played the indomitable Mrs Fisher in the 1991 BBC adaptation of Enchanted April. Plowright was Oscar-nominated for her role in this British film, directed by Mike Newell, about four Englishwomen who venture on holiday to Italy (‘I'm a perfect sharer of your holiday, Mrs. Arbuthnot. All I wish to do is sit in the shade and remember better days and better men.’)

It was an adaptation of Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel The Enchanted April (1922) and, as Isobel Maddison writes in her introduction to the 2022 Oxford World’s Classics edition, it was filmed in Castello Brown, Portofino: ‘And even if the production team needed to furnish the rooms and re-create the wonderful garden, particularly with the wisteria demanded by the original book, von Arnim’s novel provided a clear guide for the set.’2

The film did big business in the USA, probably because it was associated with Merchant-Ivory’s much loved 1985 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908). Critical approval in the UK was less enthusiastic, strangely, though The Times reviewer noted that the best lines in the screenplay were taken from ‘a novel of 1922 by the intriguing Elizabeth von Arnim.’

Next week I’ll be writing more about why the literary reputation of von Arnim, whose novels were once world-famous, has faded since the 1930s, while that of her protégé E.M. Forster, who was once a tutor for von Arnim’s children at Nassenheide, has grown. As has, of course, the world fame of Virginia Woolf.

Meanwhile, I’m off to enjoy this wonderful BBC film – despite the puzzling DVD content warning from Miramax below – and Joan Plowright’s acting, once again.

Do you have a favourite novel that has been translated successfully to screen or stage? Or do you think it’s better to enjoy the classics as they were intended? Please let me know in the comments or by replying to this email. And do please click on the heart sign if you enjoyed this, as it helps non-subscribers to find my work. Thank you so much for reading.

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Welcome to Part 2 of my Books of the Year 2024. Firstly, a correction… thank you to one eagle-eyed reader for pointing out the mistake in my last email newsletter (now corrected on my website). The poet John Clare’s beloved River Gwash near Helpston was submerged beneath England’s largest reservoir, Rutland Water, while Thirlmere in the Lake District is the reservoir that serves the people of Manchester (it also covered the Wordsworths’ favourite walking territory, but that’s another story). Today, the second part of my 2024 books round-up features biographies of intellectual women and bookish men, deeply moving memoirs and reissued classics about leading Bloomsbury figures. Read on for links to some of my most popular posts this year.

I’ll start with an outstanding biography: Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life (Penguin paperback, 2024). Out in paperback this year, (and I’m pleased to see it featured as one of ’s favourites too) it focuses on George Eliot’s life with George Henry Lewes from 1854 until her death in 1878. Although they never married — Lewes did not divorce his first wife — it was a marriage in all but name. As Carlisle writes, like our modern experience of marriage, George Eliot was involved with several men before settling down with a long-term partner in her thirties; she soon earned more than her husband and, though she decided not to have children of her own, had to navigate relationships with her partner’s sons. ‘Living at once inside marriage and outside its conventions, she would experience this form of life — so familiar yet also so perplexing — from both sides.’

’s Literature for the People: How The Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse (Pan Macmillan, 2024) has to feature on my list. One of my favourite sections is, of course, about the bookshop they began running on Trinity Street in Cambridge in 1845: ‘Their customers became their guests, then their friends, and finally their authors.’ As Joe Moran writes in the TLS, it was ‘a sort of alternative college for clueless undergraduates who were only there because they were taking holy orders and who received little help from their tutors.’ The Macmillan brothers built up their first publishing imprint in Cambridge, and they were ‘as determined as their missionary friends to spread knowledge to all classes of men and women,’ Harkness writes.

Macmillan would later move the publishing business to London and become the leading publishers of the Victorian period, bringing authors and poets like Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Charles Kingsley and Christina Rossetti to a mass audience. But the academic books they chose to publish also reflected the marked shift at Cambridge University during this period, with the arrival of women students who often chose to pursue new subjects such as political economy (which Margaret Macmillan, Alexander’s daughter, studied via Cambridge University Extension Lectures in London). Macmillan published Millicent Fawcett’s Political Economy for Beginners (1869) and in 1879, The Economics of Industry, co-authored by Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley Marshall.1 Mary had begun her own studies at Newnham College Cambridge in 1871, was taught by the economist Alfred Marshall and she would later became the UK’s first woman lecturer in Political Economy at Cambridge, Oxford and Bristol. Economics of Industry became a set textbook for first year university students and sold well, but Alfred never liked their jointly authored ‘little book’. Perhaps, as Rachel Reeves points out in her book The Women Who Made Modern Economics, because it was ‘largely based on ideas developed in Mary’s Newnham College lectures.’

Other favourite biographies from this year: I wrote about Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath, in my ‘Summer Reading’ round up earlier this year. It’s a fresh appreciation of ‘the blaze of Sylvia Plath’s life and art.’ I loved Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement by Susannah Gibson, illuminating the lives of a group of eighteenth-century women intellectuals and Lady Anne Bacon: A woman of learning at the Tudor court by Deborah Spring. I plan to write more about both books soon.

Classic biographies reissued this year include Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy by Jane Dunn (reissued by Virago, July 2024), which I re-read to prepare for my summer talk on Julian Bell for Literature Cambridge. When her nephew was born in 1908 Virginia resented this baby who ‘distracted her sister’s attention, exhausted her emotional reserves and snatched time and attention from Woolf’s own childlike self’ Jane Dunn writes. I’m currently enjoying the 2024 reissue of Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale by Miranda Seymour. In her new introduction Seymour writes that although Woolf once described Morrell as ‘as garish as a strumpet’ she also praised her fundamental integrity: ‘this was high commendation from Bloomsbury’.

In October I discussed Griffin Dunne’s funny and moving Hollywood memoir with Abra McAndrew in ‘Book talk: A memoir of grief and glamour’. The most powerful part of the book for me was the third part, following the murder of the author’s sister Dominique Dunne, and the family’s ensuing fight for justice on her behalf. Intervals by Marianne Brooker, from the excellent Fitzcarraldo Editions, is a sad but necessary book, putting the author’s personal loss within the larger social context of how our lives are valued. I’m currently working my way through (in a good way) Frances Partridge’s remarkable seven volumes of diaries which she started writing in 1939, and continued to publish until her death at the age of 100 in 2004. You can’t beat a good diary, and Partridge’s insights into ‘old Bloomsbury’, who continued their Memoir Club as a way of shutting out the modern world, are fascinating.

Magical short writing

Sometimes, even in a so-called holiday, we only have time to read short things, so here are a few personal recommendations. I loved the first post of ’s new Substack, ‘The Cupoard Where We Keep the World’, describing the small flat she once lived in above G.David’s bookshop in Cambridge, complete with ‘oddly, a full bathroom containing a wonderfully long, deep bathtub able to accommodate the tall, lanky frame of John Maynard Keynes, the economist, who had lived there for years with his wife, the Russian prima ballerina Lydia Lopokova’. Highly recommended. Other pieces I’ve enjoyed this week include on Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield; a moving article by Rachel Johnson on her artist mother ‘A mother’s work: Charlotte Johnson Wahl and us’; and on ‘Winters in Bolinas’: ‘To live in California then was to live in a world that did not match the world of English-language books. Our seasons were different, our weather was different, our plants were different from the ones taken for granted in most of what I read.’ This post by is so sad, yet so beautiful, and has an important message for us all.

Beyond Pathological

What Will Really Matter on Your Deathbed

I’ve never been around someone who was dying. I’ve never really been around death. Now, I’ve experienced both…

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a year ago · 409 likes · 171 comments · Sarah Fay

Coming soon: new books and reissues in 2025

• In January 2025 The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick will be published by Daunt Books for the first time in the UK. This launch event on 6th February 2025 with Amy Key, who has written the book’s new foreword, promises to be very enjoyable — especially as it takes place in the beautiful Daunt Books bookshop in Marylebone.

  

• Calling Una Marson: The Extraordinary Life of a Forgotten Icon by June Sarpong and Jennifer Obidike will be published by Akan on 27 February 2025. In 1938 Una Marson made history by becoming the first Black female broadcaster at the BBC, yet her life story and political activism has been all but forgotten. I first discovered Marson in Sarah Lonsdale’s Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers, so I’m thrilled that this new biography­ promises to illuminate her legacy.

• I’ve previously written about Dorothy Pilley’s remarkable mountaineering career and her long association with Magdalene College, Cambridge, so I’m delighted that Pilley’s nature writing also features in Sarah Lonsdale’s forthcoming Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Man’s World (Manchester University Press, 4 March 2025).

  

• Hidden Portraits: The untold stories of six women who loved Picasso by Sue Roe (Faber, 27 March 2025) promises to shine a spotlight on the lives of Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. ‘These six women were instrumental in Picasso’s life and career’ the publisher says, ‘yet have often been dismissed as mere models or passive muses… all six were severely tested, both by Picasso’s subterfuges and betrayals, and the wider social turbulence they lived through.’ Roe is the

• Persephone will reissue Sally Carson’s ‘forgotten masterpiece’ Crooked Cross with a new preface by the Times’ chief art critic Laura Freeman, on 17th April 2025.

• Finally (for now!) I’m looking forward to reading ’s beautifully illustrated The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (reissued in paperback, 2024) and ’s new book, Another Song at Sunset (paperback and Kindle, 2024). It’s about Jean Baxter, Scots poet and friend of Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

You can read Part One of my Books of the Year here, and below that there’s a link to some of my most popular ‘bookish’ posts from earlier this year, with no paywall this week. There’s a special offer until 31 December 2024 (20% off the current annual paid subscription) if you’d like to upgrade before prices go up in 2025.

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Thank you to every one of you for your tremendous support and encouragement this year in reading, commenting, sharing and subscribing to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Season’s greetings to you all! I’d love to know what books you’ve most enjoyed in 2024, and what you’re most looking forward to reading over the festive period (if you ever get the chance to put your feet up). May you have a peaceful festive season and a good New Year.

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Hello, and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society - about books, literature and Cambridge women’s history. At around this time of year it’s hard to resist, or indeed avoid, the annual ‘best of’ round-ups, and as a book reviewer I’m always pleased when my own favourites make an appearance. Last year I wrote about three travel memoirs by women writers that I’d particularly enjoyed. This year my focus is on a wonderful selection of new literary biographies, along with some reissued classics (a welcome recent tendency in the publishing world) and a handful of recent memoirs that will surely become future classics. Hope you enjoy Part One of my 2024 Books of the Year: Writing about place.

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The poet John Clare famously lamented the destruction of the countryside in the name of industrial progress, but found peace on the shady riverbanks of the River Gwash near Helpston. Unfortunately that too has now been washed away by England’s largest reservoir, Rutland Water. Fiona Stafford’s new book, Time and Tide: The Long, Long Life of Landscape (Hachette, 2024) is a personal response to gradual change and transformation in a variety of British and Irish landscapes, estuaries and forests, arranged in twenty chapters with evocative titles including ‘Drained’, ‘Drowned’ and ‘Otters and Cockles’. It’s a beautifully written book that pays attention to the unexpected things that re-emerge in different forms at the edge of the familiar. Water is a connecting theme, from the ‘lost and last great mere at Whittlesey’ in the Fens to the healing springs of Harrogate. ‘Familiar places may be drained or drowned, dried or dammed,’ Stafford writes, ‘yet still the old places speak to later generations through storied fragments.’

Another author searching for stories in lost and discarded historical fragments is Lara Maiklem (see her gorgeous website here.) She has written about her twelve months exploring the banks of the River Thames in London at low tide in A Mudlarking Year: Finding treasure in every season (Bloomsbury, 2024). ‘Mudlarking’ as a practice is not new; for hundreds of years, impoverished Londoners have scavenged the river’s foreshore for anything they could sell. In London Labour and the London Poor (1851) Henry Mayhew described seeing women, children and old people who ‘waded in the mud barefoot throughout the winter’ searching for washed-up lumps of coal and pieces of iron or string. Nowadays it is mostly determined metal detectorists who plunder the river’s trinket box; for Maiklem, by contrast, mudlarking means being respectful of this fragile environment, ‘a unique wilderness amid urban chaos.’

I love the subtitle that the TLS editors gave my review of Hilary Bradt’s travel memoir, Taking the Risk (Bradt Guides, 2024) ‘a lifetime of hiking without prejudice.’ It’s the perfect description for a book that entertainingly describes how Bradt became a leading travel writer with over sixty years’ worth of adventures in hitchhiking and backpacking. Despite the advice given in every guidebook she publishes, Bradt is aware that damage done to fragile environments is irreversible, as is the impact of tourism on local people. But she is passionate about no-frills ‘green’ travel. When she first went to South America in 1973 with her new husband George, their trip was funded by an ingenious wedding gift list. “Things like ‘Hot shower - $5; bribe to get out of jail - $10; a day in the Galápagos – up to $100’”. Bradt’s account of how she built up her women-led publishing business in the 1970s, at a time when most publishing houses were run by men, is also fascinating (see my post about another women-led publisher, Virago, here).

Another book with a strong sense of place is Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann (Allen Lane, 2024). When Anne Olivier Bell was editing Virginia Woolf’s diaries for publication in the 1970s, she decided not to include a notebook which Woolf began writing in 1917, when she and Leonard were living in a rented cottage at Asham in Sussex. The ‘Asheham Diary’ has now been published in the five-volume The Diary of Virginia Woolf, published by Granta in 2023 and it plays a central role in the first chapter of Baker’s book, ‘Beetles and the price of eggs’.

‘Like the chrysalis, Virginia was emerging into her identity as a nature writer,’ Baker writes. ‘She used her Asheham notebook as a storehouse, filling it with images and incidents to be drawn upon later in her novels.’ The years spent living in the countryside were also of great importance creatively for novelists Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, even when nothing much seemed to be happening. ‘They are episodes not of high drama, but quiet domestic goings-on’ as Baker puts it. ‘They require a different kind of attention, a different sense of scale and orientation.’

‘I am a little girl, and it will take me forty years to understand that surviving is not living; to survive is an addition to life,’ writes Susanna Crossman in her extraordinary memoir, Home Is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream (Penguin, 2024). Crossman is an Anglo-French writer, clinical arts therapist and lecturer. In the summer of 1978, when she was six, she moved with her divorced mother and two siblings from a suburban terrace to a commune in the English countryside. Their ‘chosen family’ for the next fifteen years would be a shifting international group of about fifty people, who together worked out a radically different way of life. Home Is Where We Start is part memoir, part critical analysis, a searing personal account and an in-depth study of utopian projects through history. It’s also about the sense of home as a place to feel safe in, and what it means to grow up in a crowd.

{More 2024 biographies and memoirs coming soon in Part Two}

Other books with a focus on place that I’ve enjoyed this year: Better Broken Than New (Amaurea Press, 2024) by the Anglo-Guyanese writer Lisa St Aubin de Terán. To be honest, at first I didn't like it, and goodness knows it needs a good editor. But I was won over by the author’s courage and imaginative zest for life. The Place of Tides (Allen Lane, 2024) by James Rebanks is a lyrical evocation about a life-changing encounter on a remote island off the coast of Norway: On that island I felt I had met someone who had made a life on her own terms.’ It’s a treat currently to be listening to the audiobook of Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe (Hachette, 2024) by Ian Collins (I’d recommend the book as a last-minute gift for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey). As a nature writer Ronald Blythe was inspired by John Clare’s poetry and wrote about him in At Helpston: Meetings with John Clare (2011).

Seasonal recommendations and bookish round-ups

• Ten favourite novels from

• Books about books for Christmas, from

• ‘Hot’ books to gift (or keep) from

• i'm asking: what books have directly led to an interest in other books/art?, from

• A useful guide to books as gifts from

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Thanks so much for reading this post and I would love to hear about new/old books you’ve particularly enjoyed this year (fiction too!). Do please leave a comment and let me know what you’re looking forward to reading in 2025. I took this snap of the River Cam below on 13 December, St Lucy’s Day, when John Donne’s words seemed particularly apt for foggy East Anglia: ‘The sun is spent, and now his flasks/Send forth light squibs, no constant rays’

*All my TLS reviews can be found on their website here. With thanks to my editors.

In a black-and-white 1958 BBC Monitor documentary, the camera pans over a murky King’s College. ‘Cambridge’, says the voice of E. M. Forster, ‘is a place for the very young and the very old.’ And, he might have added, for tourists of all ages, all year round. There were not many of them about on a recent wet Wednesday afternoon, however. On King’s Parade, a young man in a red anorak stands in the rain, optimistically twirling a board. ‘Fancy a punt trip today? Half-price?’ At the entrance to King’s, a morose porter was checking the tickets of the handful of visitors to the Chapel. I had an appointment to see E. M. Forster’s former ­college rooms, which are not on the tourist trail. They are now the postgraduate students’ common room (known as the ‘Grad Suite’) and a student had agreed to show me round.

Forster was sixty-seven when he returned to Cambridge in the autumn of 1946, having being made an honorary fellow by King’s ­College. He was grateful for the offer of a large study ‘in’, with lodgings nearby – after his mother’s death he had nowhere else to live – but unenthusiastic about moving. There were some small comforts to be drawn from the prospect of having his former classics tutor Nathaniel Wedd’s room in ‘A’ staircase, where he had first been encouraged to write.

He was also pleased to have his more important belongings about him. ‘The mantelpiece which my father designed in 1876 is already there’, he told his friend, the Belfast writer Forrest Reid in 1947, ‘and when it is up I shall sit down in front of it, as I have done ever since babyhood, and shall think, “What next?”’

From the moment that he moved back to King’s, Forster was treated as a cherished guest and something of a tourist attraction ­himself. Students and fellows dropped into his room for a chat; lectures and dinners were held in his honour. He moved permanently into college in 1953, and was the first subject for the celebrated series ‘The Art of Fiction’ in the Paris Review. Its editor George Plimpton was a former King’s student, as was P. N. Furbank, the interviewer, who described Forster’s room as ‘furnished in the Edwardian taste’, with a profusion of books and letters, faded armchairs draped with knitted shawls, portraits on the walls and - curiously - a pair of slippers in the waste-basket.

Furbank noted the ‘massive carved wooden mantelpiece of elaborate ­structure’, but didn’t ask about it. Instead he wondered if any real people had inspired Forster’s fictional characters, even though he had not published a novel since A Passage to India in 1924. Forster obligingly listed a few family members and acquaintances, then added (was he pulling his interviewer’s leg?) ‘I have used several tourists’.

Towards the end of his two-volume biography E.M. Forster: A Life (1977-78), Furbank described his 1953 visit again. ‘The first thing that caught one’s eye’, he recalled, ‘was the mantelpiece, designed by his father, an elaborate oaken structure with blue china in its niches and, on the topmost shelf, some vases and three beaten copper platters’.

‘The “Rooksnest mantelpiece”’ Forster wrote from King’s in 1947, ‘has followed us to Tonbridge, to Tunbridge Wells, has been stored, followed us to Weybridge and West Hackhurst, and now stands, more effective than ever, in its last home.’ It was built by his father, Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, known as Eddie, a vicar’s son from Essex who in the early 1870s trained under the leading Victorian church architect Sir Arthur Blomfield in London. Thomas Hardy had been a trainee there a few years previously, and later he and E.M. Forster became friends.

‘It is one of Life’s Little ­Ironies’, EM Forster wrote in 1956, ‘that I should have got to know Mr Hardy and stayed with him at Max Gate, and should never have known my father, seven years his junior.’ Although the architectural historian Nikolas Pevsner was dismissive of Blomfield’s tendency to add ‘a wished-for look of the Middle Ages’ to Victorian buildings that were nothing of the kind, Blomfield’s interpretation of Gothic style rubbed off on his pupil Eddie Forster.

Eddie’s tastes were also influenced by his frequent trips to Italy, where he sketched churches and other buildings in between stints of working for Blomfield. In May 1876 he was appointed a member of the R.I.B.A. and was hoping to get his first independent commission. While waiting, he built a mantelpiece as a gift for his cousin’s widow, Maimie Synnot, who had recently moved to Clapham. It was a chance for Eddie to practise his skills and add some Tuscan medieval gravitas to a modern suburban house.

In September of that year he was commissioned to build a house for his sister Laura Forster at Abinger in Surrey, and in November he became engaged to Lily Whichelo (his aunt Marianne Thornton’s protégée) who was then working as a governess in London. Eddie and Lily married in January 1877, and their son Edward Morgan, always known as Morgan, was born in 1879.

But Eddie was often ill, and on 31st October 1880 he died of tuberculosis, aged just thirty-two. Grief, and the relentless attention of kindly but interfering aunts, made Lily take her small son and flee to ‘Rooksnest’, a pretty cottage in rural Hertfordshire. The mantelpiece that Eddie built (he called it a fireplace) was Maimie Synnot’s house-warming gift to her friend Lily, who had it installed there.

Aged four, E.M. Forster fell instantly in love with Rooksnest, and his sadness at having to leave it when he was fourteen would inspire him, years later, to write Howards End (1910). His father’s mantelpiece moved with him and Lily to each of their subsequent, less-loved homes, and in 1925 it was installed in the dining room of West Hackhurst, the house his father built, when Forster inherited the lease from his father’s sister Laura. It would be, he assumed, his final home.

Forster lived there with Lily until her death in 1945. Living with his mother - who seems to have suffered from severe, undiagnosed depression - made him bitterly resentful at times. On November 1st 1911 he recorded his feelings of frustration in the ‘locked diary’ he had inherited from his father. ‘Last night, alone, I had a Satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault finding,’ he wrote, ‘and figured a scene in which I swept the mantlepiece with my arm and then rushed out of doors or cut my throat.’ On the back of the page he noted: ‘Discover, some months later, that Oct 31st is the anniversary of my father's death’. Only connect, as Forster himself might have said: the imposing, ever-present mantelpiece was a constant reminder of the absent father who had abandoned him to a lifetime with an unhappy mother.

When Lily died aged ninety in 1945, Forster was desolate, all the more so when the landlord refused to renew the lease of West Hackhurst. At the age of 67 he was homeless, until his former college offered him a fellowship and a room of his own. The death of his mother and loss of his father’s house had, in fact, set him free, and after moving back to Cambridge he gave up his idea of having a home like Rooksnest and ancestral ‘roots in the land’, as he put it in the closing pages of his domestic biography, Marianne Thornton (1956).

Seventy years later, I walked through a rainy Front Court with a sense of trepidation. From the outside, King’s College looks much the same as it did in Forster’s time, but I knew that extensive renovations had gone on inside the building where he lived. There is a student bar on the ground floor now, and a new staircase. Was Forster’s mantelpiece still there? No one seemed to know.

My friendly guide, Maria, admitted me to a large, high-ceilinged room upstairs. Though empty, signs of student life were everywhere: battered sofas, posters on the walls, a fussball table, a large television and a shelf of DVDs. And there, taking up most of the far wall, was the mantelpiece. It looked very tall and austere in this setting, and its panelled oak had been painted a glutinous dark brown. Maria helpfully removed a Harry Potter pennant so that I could see the 1930s green tiled hearth, which Lily must have added. Propped on the top shelf, beside a vase of dried flowers, was a framed copy of Eddie’s original drawing of his mantelpiece. It was still a solid and dignified presence in this room, despite the Playstation padlocked to one of its delicately carved columns.

In the 1958 BBC documentary, E.M. Forster comes into his sitting-room, walks over to a little table, sits down and takes out his pen. His writing desk is not by the window, as it is in the photograph above, overlooking the courtyard of King’s. Instead, perhaps to show its importance for the film, the table has been placed directly opposite his father’s mantelpiece, where a fire glows in the tiled grate. The camera pans over the china plates displayed in the Tuscan niches, and Forster looks up from the letter he is writing and smiles. This was his room with a view.

Thank you for reading this, a lightly edited version of an essay first published in the TLS, July 28, 2017. I am grateful to my editors there and to the college archivists at King’s College Cambridge for their assistance. Here’s my photograph of Forster’s mantelpiece, below, with a copy of his father’s original architectural sketch on the top right. Long may it remain in the college that he loved.

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• I would love to hear what you think about finding a home that you love, or other major changes you’ve made in later life. Below is another snap I took last week, with the spires of King’s College Chapel outlined against a bright blue sky. Autumn sunshine at last reached this cloudy corner of the UK, and it was cheering to see these candy-striped stall covers that morning.

• Forster’s relationship with his mother is beautifully described in ‘E.M. Forster: Life Before Bloomsbury’ by , and I’m grateful to for alerting me to the ‘feminism, literature, and rock’n’roll’ of St Pancras Gardens, including the much-missed Hardy Tree. I was also delighted to feature in his lovely post, 100 more reasons to be cheerful.

• It was very touching to get so many lovely messages and new subscribers following my ‘First Year on Substack’ post last week. Thank you all very much, and a warm welcome to the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society community.

• I loved taking part in ’s podcast below. I hope you’ll tune in, and subscribe to her excellent Substack too.

  Born of Wonder

  Finding our Creative Niche, the Joy of Research, and Celebrating Women's Lives

  “I was very encouraged by one thing that people often said - lean into your niche. It was kind of like being given permission to write about the things that really interested me. […] Sometimes you just have to stop researching and think, well what is the story here…

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  a year ago · 6 likes · 8 comments · Katie Marquette and Ann Kennedy Smith

‘London itself’, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1928, ‘perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble save that of moving my legs through the streets.’ Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars (Faber/ Penguin Random House paperback, 2021) begins and ends with Woolf, whose last home in the city, 37 Mecklenburgh Square, was destroyed in the London Blitz of September 1940. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were at Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex at the time, and motored up a few days later to inspect the damage. There was not much to be salvaged, but Virginia managed to dig through the debris and retrieve twenty-four volumes of her diaries, ‘a great mass for my memoirs’, she declared.

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Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. October 27th marks Sylvia Plath’s birthday; if she had lived, she would be 92. Last month Faber published The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg, a great scholarly achievement that took over 30 years to complete and demonstrates Plath’s remarkable range as a writer and impressive work ethic. Virginia Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee wrote that: ‘Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second.’ This new collection of Plath’s complete prose shows that as well as being a poet, she was publishing fiction, journalism, essays and reviews since early childhood. My essay this week is about her life as a professional writer.

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On February 10 1960 Sylvia Plath strode into a pub in Dean Street in London looking, she wrote, “resplendent” in her black wool maternity suit, cashmere coat and new calfskin gloves from Paris. She was meeting the Heinemann publisher James Michie, who presented her with a contract for her first book, The Colossus and Other Poems. (“She signed it on the glass-crowded bar-top,” her husband Ted Hughes boasted to his sister Olwyn.) In a letter to her mother in America, Plath described every detail of her outfit, the “notorious” Soho pub, and her signature on the contract of the distinguished publishers of D.H. Lawrence. It was her supreme moment of triumph. She had married a brilliant poet, she was soon to be a mother and had just signed a prestigious publishing contract . She had become the “triple-threat woman” she had always intended to be.

Yet it is with a much bleaker February day, almost exactly three years later, that most of us associate the name of Sylvia Plath. Her death on 11 February 1963 did not merit any headlines at the time; gas poisoning was a common way for women to kill themselves in mid-century London. There was just one brief report, in the Saint Pancras Chronicle, of the “tragic” suicide of the “30-year-old authoress Mrs. Sylvia Plath Hughes, wife of one of Britain’s best known modern poets, Ted Hughes.”

Just a few days later, the terms of Plath’s posthumous fame were set when the Observer published an anguished essay by the influential literary critic Al Alvarez, with loaded phrases like “peculiar genius” and “possessed”. And so the Plath myth began, and for well over half a century she has been more famous for her death than for her life and work.

Now, at last, there is Red Comet, a major new biography that recognizes Sylvia Plath as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets writing in the English language. It’s a superbly researched, fluent and assured book tracing Plath’s development as a writer in America and England in meticulous detail, and Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy and understanding of her subject.

This is the first biography to draw fully on Plath’s surviving correspondence published in the The Letters of Sylvia Plath (published in two volumes in 2017 and 2018 edited by Peter K.  Steinberg and Karen Kukil). Clark examines the information that has come to light in fourteen newly discovered letters that Plath sent to her American psychiatrist and confidante, Dr Ruth Beuscher from 1960 to 1963. Red Comet also incorporates material from the Harriet Rosenstein archive at Emory University, which opened in 2020, and considers Plath’s creative artwork and collages in the context of her writing. At over 1,000 pages it’s a big book, but not a sentence feels too much.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) James Joyce famously wrote, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” Plath, too, wanted to fly, and previous biographers including Ronald Hayman and Andrew Wilson have implied that from childhood she followed the trajectory of her tragic fate by daring to fly too close to the sun. “Sylvia was trapped in her own story,” Anne Stevenson writes in her hostile biography Bitter Fame (1989), “she was indeed cursed.” Even the endearing fact that Sylvia began, aged eight, to send out her work for publication in the children’s section of newspapers has been portrayed as evidence of her “pathological” obsession with fame. “Male ambition is rarely described in this way”, as Clark drily notes.

From an early age, Sylvia Plath’s remarkable writing and artistic talents went hand in hand with her pragmatism. Money was short in the Plath household after her father Otto died, and growing up, Plath sold her poems to supplement the pocket money she earned from cleaning and babysitting jobs. She spent much of her high school years breaking into the women’s magazine market with her short stories, but her unpublished poetry came from a deeper source. “I write only because/There is a voice within me/That will not be still”, the lines from a poem that she wrote as a teenager, are printed on a plaque at Wellesley High School.

While a scholarship student at Smith College, Plath strove for academic brilliance and became intensely affected by world politics. When Eisenhower defeated the liberal democrat Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election she told her mother that it was “the funeral day of all my hopes and ideals.” It was at college that she began to wonder if, as her male creative writing tutor suggested, only men could be great writers. Her 1953 summer internship at the magazine Mademoiselle in New York confirmed her worst fears about how women were merely decorative objects in a man’s world. “My world falls apart, crumbles, ‘The center does not hold,’” Plath wrote in her journal, quoting Yeats, before her breakdown that August.

The Bell Jar (1961) the great novel Plath would later write about her traumatic experiences that year, “exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the ‘best minds’ of a generation crazy,” Clark writes. She emphasizes Plath’s essential toughness and resiliency, and how she “struggled always toward the light rather than the darkness.”  Even after the bungled electroshock treatments, her attempted suicide and several months’ stay in McLean mental hospital in 1953, Plath managed to graduate from Smith summa cum laude in 1955.

At her commencement ceremony, her idol Adlai Stevenson told Plath and her classmates that it was their civic duty, given the Cold War crisis, to embrace “the humble role of housewife” and find patriotic fulfilment in writing laundry lists rather than poetry. Plath would have none of it. Two years previously, when she read Joyce’s Portrait in her literature class, she had underlined in red ink Stephen Dedalus’s famous non serviam: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.” As she prepared to leave America for a new life in England, she told her brother “my wings need to be tried. o icarus.”

In Cambridge, where she travelled on a prestigious Fulbright scholarship, men outnumbered women ten to one. Plath’s American college girl good looks and glamour meant that boyfriends were easy to find, but unlike at Smith, she found it difficult to make friends at her women’s college  (she “just seemed silly” A.S. Byatt recalled). The literary cliques and their magazines were exclusively male, and no one took Plath’s poetry seriously until she met Ted Hughes at the launch of the short-lived Saint Botolph’s Review in February 1956. It was an immediate, electric physical attraction and an extraordinary meeting of two poetic minds. When Plath wrote soon afterwards that she would give herself “crashing, fighting” to Hughes, she anticipated the Lawrentian role that violence and competition would play in both their marriage and their ongoing poetic dialogue. There were “no precocious hushed literary circles for us,” she told her mother two months later, “we write, read, talk plain and straight and produce from the fiber of our hearts and bones.” Together, they would “fly close to the sun” as Clark puts it.

Clark blames the sexist literary institutions and rigid gendered conventions of 1950s and 1960s England and America for the disparity in their success as poets during Plath’s lifetime. The literary culture that propelled Ted Hughes towards fame, prizes and publication with Faber and Faber was the same one that cruelly held Plath back, and gave her the condescending title of “lady poet”. As Clark points out, the poetry scene had improved little by 1971, when the American poet Robert Lowell told the British critic Ian Hamilton, “Few women write major poetry. Can I make this generalization? Only four stand with our best men: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath.” Elizabeth Bishop rejected Lowell’s back-handed compliment, telling him angrily, “I’d rather be called ‘the 16th poet’ with no reference to my sex, than one of 4 women— even if the other three are pretty good.” Plath would have said the same.

As her marriage crumbled in the autumn of 1962, and there was nothing left for her to lose, Plath produced some of her greatest poems, most of which were published in her posthumously published second collection Ariel (1965). In what Clark describes as her “grand non serviam” Plath wrote almost a poem a day during the month of October. It was, as Clark writes, “one of the most extraordinary literary outpourings of the twentieth century.”

These were the poems that would, as she predicted, make her name. Plath lifted the veil to reveal ugly realities about her own life, and her society. She filled these poems with images of torture, murder, genocide, war, suicide, illness, revenge, and fury— but also spring, rebirth, and triumph.

In November the New Yorker refused to publish any of these “pulsing, blood-red lyrics” and in December Knopf turned down The Bell Jar. This was a crushing blow, but Plath still hoped to find an American publisher. Depression, which she had tried to understand intellectually through the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Virginia Woolf, was Plath’s greatest adversary. But it did not define who she was.

Red Comet reveals Sylvia Plath as she ought to be seen: as an ambitious, resilient and supremely talented artist, at a time when women were not supposed to be any of these things. Three days after her appendix was removed in 1961, Plath wrote in her journal, “I am myself again: the tough, gossipy curious enchanting entity I have not been for so long.” She was making notes for her poem “Tulips”, which she wrote ten days after leaving hospital, with its famous concluding lines: “The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, / And comes from a country far away as health.”

Plath saw herself as a fighter, punching her way through the darkness towards the light, and Ariel was never meant to be her final word. “If she must be a myth,” Clark writes towards the end of this outstanding book, “let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth.”

This is an abridged version of my review first published in the TLS: ‘Let her be Ariadne: the brilliant, resilient Sylvia Plath behind the myth’ (13 Nov 2020). I am very grateful to the editors for their kind assistance. The author of Red Comet, Heather Clark, writes in the TLS this week that ‘to see so much of [Plath’s] surviving fiction and journalism, so many of her essays and reviews, finally published under one cover is to be surprised all over again by the breadth of her vision, ambition and talent.’ (Good vile words: Sylvia Plath’s unpublished short stories reveal her passionate dedication to her craft’, TLS, 18 Oct 2024)

An unusual lexicographer

In the early 1980s, my summer job was helping out at the local newsagent’s in my home town, a small seaside resort in Northern Ireland. Apart from dusty tourist guides and Old Moore’s Almanack, there weren’t many books for sale. Tidying the shelves one day, how­ever, I came across a slim volume with an important-sounding title. Something told me that The Spoken Word: A BBC Guide was the book I had been wanting for a long time, without realizing it. I handed over £2 of my hard-earned wages, and took it with me when I went back to university that autumn.

Ever since then, books about words have piled up on my desk, including Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a Roget’s Thesaurus and the 1987 ‘Compact Edition’ (still huge) of the Oxford English Dictionary which came with its own magnifying-glass. But over the years Robert Burchfield’s little book – you might even call it a booklet – is the one that I have turned to most often. It helped me to learn how to write.

The Spoken Word, published in 1981, was produced in response to a wave of complaints to the British Broadcasting Corporation about falling standards in spoken English. A new era of broadcasting had begun in the 1970s, as the BBC changed from being the Reithian home of ‘received pronunciation’ to something broader, permitting more regional accents and informal language. Many people felt that the move towards linguistic diversity had gone too far, resulting in what the critic Anne Karpf so eloquently described in 1980 as ‘English as she is murdered on radio’.

The BBC felt that its broadcasters needed help in deciding what was acceptable and what was not, and commissioned a brief, no-nonsense guide from Dr Robert Burchfield. There was probably no one who knew the English language better, or how it had changed in recent times. Burchfield was the editor of the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, the great twelve-volume dictionary that had been published between 1879 and 1933. When he first took charge in 1957, Oxford University Press estimated that the work would produce a single volume within seven years. Instead the Supplement comprised 60,000 new entries, took up four large volumes and was not completed until 1986.

Robert Burchfield was, on the face of it, an unlikely lexicographer. Born in Waganui, New Zealand, in 1923, he later claimed that his parents had just one book in the house, a socialist tract. In 1944, while on wartime service in Italy, he stumbled across Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language: A Guide to Foreign Languages for the Home Student. It was a book that changed his life, sparking off a fascination with words and their origins. After the war, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship and moved to Oxford, where he was taught by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Burchfield might easily have opted for a quiet, scholarly life working on Old Norse poetry, but instead he accepted the challenge of bringing the Oxford English Dictionary into the twentieth century.

Updating the OED was a monumental task, requiring dogged patience and a team of dedicated workers, one of them the young Julian Barnes. The first two volumes of the Supplement (A–G and H–N) appeared in 1972 and 1976 respectively and, to his surprise and delight, Burchfield became something of a celebrity. He was a genial figure who featured on Desert Island Discs and regularly appeared on radio and television to give his views on current trends in spoken English. ‘I can’t understand what the young are saying any more,’ the former Prime Minister Edward Heath grumbled to him on the BBC’s Nationwide in the summer of 1979.

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Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was a poet who was ‘very good and interesting and unlike anyone else’, as Virginia Woolf put it. She wrote some of the best English poems of the early twentieth century, and yet her poetry is less well known than her difficult life. ‘Mew wrote many beautiful and devastating poems’ writes Joanna Kavenna. ‘She has her admirers, but remains obscure.’ A fascinating new biography by Julia Copus shifts the focus back to Mew’s poetry, and describes how, despite many difficulties, she carved out a name for herself as a poet who was greatly respected by her peers.

When she was on form, the poet Charlotte Mew was electrifying company, it seems. In March 1914 she was invited to read her poetry aloud to a select gathering of women at Catherine Dawson Scott’s house in London. Although Mew was at first deeply reluctant to do it (‘how I hate it – the performing monkey!’) her friend’s influence in literary circles meant that there might be a chance of some of her poems being published as a result. But because she was the sole breadwinner in her female household (which included her ailing mother, artist younger sister and rambunctious parrot, Wek) she needed the exposure and influential contacts she could get.

So, one stormy afternoon, Charlotte Mew walked from Bloomsbury to Southall carrying her bag stuffed full of handwritten sheafs of paper on which her poems were handwritten. When she got to her friend’s house, she took out her papers, laid out a few of her freshly rolled cigarettes on the table in front of her, and began to read.

Afterwards, the three women who comprised her small audience in Mrs Scott’s front parlour were left stunned, speechless, and intoxicated (not just due to the after-effects of cigarette smoke). As Evelyn Underhill wrote to her friend the following day,

‘My dear Mrs. Scott, I feel as if I departed yesterday without thanking you, but really an hour with Miss Mew is like having whiskey with one's tea – my feet were clean off the floor! Heavens, what a tempest she produced - the most truly creative person I have ever come near.’

It's a delightfully vivid image of this diminutive figure whipping up a storm with the power of her words.

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This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew, is a beautifully written and lucid biography by Julia Copus, herself a prize-winning poet and children’s writer. In Penelope Fitzgerald’s Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), Mew is portrayed as an unhappy spinster whose life was scarred by tragedy, shame and unfulfilled lesbian longings.

Julia Copus’s book shifts the focus back to Mew’s distinctive poetry and what she achieved despite all the odds stacked against her. It’s a gripping, beautifully written biography that questions everything we might think we know about this remarkable poet.  

The difficulties of Mew’s personal life were legion: an architect father who died young, a brother and a sister who were committed to mental asylums, the family’s shame and persistent financial strains, the prevarications of her publishers and even the demands of her parrot. These are sympathetically portrayed by Copus but the overall effect is that her life was not about tragedy any more than Virginia Woolf’s was, despite her struggle with mental illness. Mew’s determination to be independent, write in her own way and make a living from her poetry is all the more more impressive given her circumstances.

Mew gained her first real attention with the publication of a poem, "The Farmer's Bride," in the Nation in 1912. ‘Having previously only published seven pieces of poetry in various journals, this work established her literary reputation’, as The Poetry Foundation website writes.

The narrative poem tells the story of a farmer and his young wife. The farmer is determined to win the love and affection of his hesitant bride, but instead, they become even more isolated from each other. The poem ends with none of the farmer's desires fulfilled, and he is left lonely, yearning for his wife.’

Charlotte Mew was deeply proud of her work. Convinced that her poems were powerful enough to speak for itself, she kept herself apart from literary cliques (including Woolf’s Bloomsbury set) and avoided most social gatherings.

She was a small, short-haired woman who wore tailored men's suits and always carried a black umbrella. But rather than being a hermit, in her letters she is revealed as a spiky and determined with a select circle of loyal friends.

As Julia Copus writes, Mew ‘loved nothing better than to make people laugh, valued loyalty and stood loyally by her friends, spoke her mind, had an aversion to authoritarianism and peppered her letters with cartoonish drawings.’

One of her closest friends was Sydney Cockerell, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from 1908 to 1937. He and his wife Florence helped to ensure that Charlotte Mew was awarded a Civil List Pension in December 1923 in recognition of the merit of her work; many writers signed the letter of support.

Although the Civil List pension helped to ease Charlotte Mew’s financial situation, there some difficulties that were simply too great for her to bear alone. She was badly affected by her sister Anne’s illness from cancer and her death in 1927. In her despair Mew began to suffer from delusions, was admitted into a nursing home and took her own life in 1928.

As a poet, Charlotte Mew’s literary output was modest, with only a dozen stories and essays and one poetry collection, The Farmer’s Bride (1916) published in her lifetime. Despite this, her friend and admirer Thomas Hardy described her as ‘the greatest poetess’ he knew, and Siegfried Sassoon said she was ‘the only poet who can give me a lump in my throat.’ In more recent times, the Irish poet Eavan Boland has described Mew’s 1916 collection as ‘one of the most remarkable poetry publications of the early twentieth century’.

‘Mew’s poems are much more than a fever chart of a harsh existence. They are also a powerful and dissenting conversation with English poetry. She was a rhetorical maverick, with little loyalty to narrative or lyric. Her tone owes almost nothing to the Victorians. It unfolds through big, willful lines that are always on the verge of a prescient, pre-Modernist fragmentation.’1

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to hear This Rare Spirit’s author Julia Copus reading some of Mew’s poetry to a small audience in one of the oldest houses in Bloomsbury, near Great Ormond Street Hospital. Listening to  ‘The Trees Are Down’ and ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ being read aloud in this Victorian front parlour was thrilling, especially when candles were briefly lit, and an indistinct, ghostly image of Mew’s face shimmered on a red velvet curtain behind the author (see below). As I listened to her poetry come alive in that setting, Charlotte Mew herself seemed to emerge from the shadows as a very modern and distinctive presence.

Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This week’s essay is about the writer Virginia Woolf’s relationship with sister Vanessa Bell’s oldest son, the poet Julian Bell. In 1929, when Julian was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, Virginia wrote to Vanessa: ‘I daresay he’ll give you a lot of trouble before he’s done… he’s too charming and violent and gifted altogether.’ Woolf was right in that Vanessa’s much-loved firstborn child would cause her great pain and difficulty, but not in ways anyone could have predicted.

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Welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. In this week’s post I look back at the part played by the English author and lecturer Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899) in the unprecedented presidential campaign of 1864 in which President Abraham Lincoln stood for a second term while the Civil War was still raging. This is the first in my series of historical biographies of international women. Incidentally, have you ever heard of anything being ‘precedented’? You have to go back 225 years to see it used, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: ‘In its initial use, in the beginning of the 17th century, the word was spelled presidented’ the editors write. ‘Happily, we didn't stick with that.’

The spiritualist craze crosses the Atlantic

In her recent book Out of the Shadows Emily Midorikawa traces the origins of the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement to a small hamlet called Hydesville in New York County in 1848, where two young sisters appeared to be contact with unseen presences. The ‘Rochester rappings’ made Kate and Maggie Fox famous, and soon, together with their older sister Leah Fox, they were giving public demonstrations to large crowds in concert halls throughout North America.

By the 1850s the interest in spiritualism had crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and reached all social classes in Britain. ‘Table turning particularly caught on among working people in the Yorkshire town of Keighley, with its history of social and political radicalism’, Midorikawa notes, ‘as well as with the leisured classes residing in the nation’s capital.’ Charles Dickens was sceptical about what he described as a ‘miserable delusion.’ (Mesmerism, which he practised, was considered to be a more ‘masculine’ pursuit and therefore assumed to be more scientific.)

But his words had little effect. Well-educated people were attending séances in elegant drawing-rooms all over the country, while academic circles in Cambridge soon became a centre for ‘scientific investigations’ into spiritualist phenomena. Queen Victoria recorded in her diary how, during their spring holiday at Osborne House in 1853, she and Prince Albert engaged in a table-turning session with their ladies-in-waiting. Victoria refused to believe that ‘so many hundreds, if not thousands, high & low’ could simply have ‘performed a trick!’ Caroline Jebb was more sceptical. In 1874 she moved from Philadephia to marry a Cambridge don, and the craze for spiritualism among academics seemed to her ‘the most arrant nonsense and imposture in my mind, but it amuses these great geniuses who think they can see some distance into a mill stone… These men consider this to be the great discovery of the age, by whose development they will render themselves forever famous.’1

A romantic adventure

In the early 1850s an actress known as Miss Emma Harding was struggling to make a living in London. She had hoped to become an opera singer, and composed music under the pseudonym Ernest Reinhold. But her earnings as a composer were not enough to support herself and her widowed mother, and she took parts as a dancer, appearing in humorous Romantic ballets such as The Phantom Dancers at the Adelphi Theatre. ‘The career of struggle, romantic adventure, and fearful effort I led in England, is too much of the wild and wonderful for print’, she later wrote in her autobiography.2

It’s likely that Hardinge’s light-hearted tone here, in keeping with the fancy footwork she was adept in as a professional dancer, disguises a much more painful truth about her earlier professional life. It seems that a group of wealthy individuals and aristocrats she later referred to as ‘the Orphic Circle’ involved her and other young women in secret experiments in which they were put in a trance-like state, and possibly drugged. It was a dangerous period in her life.

To escape from this group’s influence, and in a last-ditch effort to revive her acting career, Hardinge took up the offer of nine months’ work in a Broadway production and sailed to New York with her mother. There, the theatre part she was promised failed to materialise, and for a time it looked as if she and her mother would have no choice but to return to England. But then Emma met the medium Mrs Ada Foye who introduced her to others involved in the American séance scene. Spotting Emma’s talent for public speaking, Ada encouraged her young protégée to give up her stage career and take up ‘trance lecturing’ instead. To sound more respectable for her new public-facing role, Emma became Mrs Hardinge.

Mrs Hardinge’s career

Her first public performance was a musical one, with a group of fifty singers performing a ‘spiritualist’ cantata of Emma’s own composition, though she stayed on-brand by claiming it was composed by ‘a power that worked through my organism’. The New York Herald was cynical about the spiritualism aspect, but seriously impressed by her talents, reporting that ‘whoever the Spirits that controlled Emma Hardinge might be, they could at least make good music’. Given time, she could be one of the leading musicians and composers of the age, they said, but only if she chose to ‘give up the shadow’ of spiritualism.

But perhaps Hardinge could see well enough into the future to predict that her gifts as a public speaker, combined with her stage presence, would take her even further.

Before long she was travelling around Canada and North America, treading the boards and ‘trance lecturing’ before distinguished male audiences including priests, lawyers, doctors and reporters, and answering their questions. ‘To a woman in her thirties with little formal education, this must have been daunting indeed,’ Midorikawa writes.3

Emma Hardinge claimed to have no awareness beforehand of what the spirits would tell her to say, which included outspoken (and therefore unladylike) views on controversial topics of female emancipation and the need to have sympathy for the plight of so-called fallen women.

In 1859 she gave a lecture called ‘The Place and Mission of Women’, which was later reproduced in pamphlet form and argued that women ‘should have the right to enter schools, and the associations of commerce and trade’ and even ‘hold positions in the government.’ This was years before women had the right to vote. Later, her support for the abolition of slavery caused anger in the South, and in January 1860 she arrived in Alabama to find spiritualist lecturers were banned there.

When it came to speaking up on behalf of other women and enslaved people, it was more acceptable for Emma Hardinge to tell herself and her audience ‘that she was merely a mouthpiece for dead – usually male – spirits.’4

The Coming Man

During the Civil War Hardinge continued to tour and give lectures in the North, and as her fame and audiences grew, she became more confident in her oratorial skills. In 1864 she gave a lecture in San Francisco in support of the National Union Party, entitled ‘The Coming Man; or the Next President of the United States’. The election to be held on 8 November 1864 was unprecedented, because no American election had ever taken place during a war before. Abraham Lincoln had been President since 1860 and seemed unlikely to be elected for a second term.

But his campaign team was so impressed by Hardinge’s power of oration that they asked her if she would ‘stump the State for Lincoln’. Because it was unheard of to employ a woman for this role, the understanding was that it would be an unofficial arrangement.

Hardinge was scathing about the wealthy, powerful men who ‘could not for a moment condescend to the indignity of employing a professional speaker, and that speaker a woman’ but she agreed. The Union Committee agreed to pay her expenses and she gave a thirty-two lecture tour and drew huge crowds everywhere she went. As Midorikawa writes, Hardinge’s unusual status as “Female Campaign Orator” proved even more novel than that of someone who channeled the thoughts of dead men’5 and helped to ensure Lincoln’s resounding victory in California in November 1864.

Tragically, Lincoln was assassinated just two months into his second term, on 15 April 1865. The next day, Hardinge was asked to deliver the funeral oration for the President in New York City, the first time a eulogy on this scale had been given in the city.

Standing before an audience of over three thousand people, just thirty-six hours after the president’s death, she gave her ‘Great Funeral Oration on Abraham Lincoln’. ‘Mourn for Abraham Lincoln with your hearts, but prove your love to him by taking up the burdens he’s laid down and finishing the noble purposes of his great life so untimely quenched,’ she told the thousands who came to hear her speak. It was a powerful rallying call, and a plea for peace between North and South.

The Lincolns and spiritualism

There was no mention of the spirits in Emma Hardinge’s most famous speech, but privately she had no doubt that Lincoln was interested in ‘the cause of Spiritualism.’ It was well known that the president’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had held séances at the White House to try to contact their young son Willie, who died during Lincoln's first term in office. Later Mrs Lincoln was photographed by the ‘spirit photographer’ William H. Mumler, with the ghostly presence of her husband behind her, his hands resting protectively on her shoulders.

Emma Hardinge would surely have approved.

Emma Hardinge Britten is one of six extraordinary woman who feature in Emily Midorikawa’s group biography, Out of the Shadows: six visionary Victorian women in search of a public voice (Counterpoint paperback, 2022).

Now over to you! What historical woman has made an impression on you, and you think should be better known?

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