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Celebutantes of the 19th Century

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I recently went to a fascinating lecture about the Caton sisters.

Who, I hear you ask? Is that like the Kardashian sisters? Well, yes, kind of.

The Caton sisters were beautiful and wealthy, and basically famous for being famous. They were, if you will, the celebutantes of their time. But–given that their time was the early 19th century–they were way more discreet. And their parents–unlike the parents of Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe–weren’t into alliteration. The Caton girls were named, rather boringly, Mary Ann, Elizabeth (or Betsey), and Louisa. (There was also a fourth one–Emily–but she never made it as a celebutante.)

Before I went to the lecture, almost everything I knew about the Caton sisters was filtered through the letters of the two women I’ve been researching for the past few years, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte and Eliza Anderson Godefroy. All five women grew up in the same elite social circle in late 18th- and early 19th-century Baltimore.

I knew enough to discount much of what Betsy Bonaparte said. Not only did she have a phenomenally venomous tongue, but she clearly saw the Caton girls as her rivals for the title of Belle of Baltimore. Beautiful and wealthy herself, Betsy was the first Baltimore girl to snare a royal title–well, sort of. She married Napoleon’s youngest brother in 1803, but her hopes of someday rising to the throne herself (or at least some kind of throne–I imagine a principality would have sufficed) were dashed by Napoleon’s vehement opposition to the marriage, which he had annulled. Imagine Betsy’s anguish when all three of the Caton sisters ended up with titles after marrying into the British aristocracy (including one, Mary Ann, whose first husband had been Betsy’s own brother).

But Betsy’s animosity toward the Catons started even before their famous 1816 trip to England, during which the sisters were feted as “the three Graces.” Shortly before their departure, Betsy was scolded by her friend Eliza Anderson Godefroy for badmouthing Betsey Caton at a New York boarding-house. After swearing Betsy B. to the strictest confidence (for Betsey C. had “charged me not to tell it to you”), Eliza reported the gossip retailed by two gentlemen in New York who were Betsy C.’s “devoted lovers.” According to them, Eliza told Betsy B., “at a public dinner at the Boarding House you abused her in the blackest & most infamous manner, & that they made it a point to tell her to put her on her Guard against you_ I told her I did not believe a word of it & that they must be dirty Fellows indeed who would take such a business upon their hands.”

Eliza pleaded with Betsy B. “not to open her lips” about Betsey C. in the future (so, despite her protestations, she obviously DID believe the report). Perhaps Betsy B. grew more discreet, but her hatred of the sisters continued to burn with a hard, gem-like flame. In her later years, Betsy B. apparently spent many hours going through her voluminous correspondence and annotating it, just for fun. In 1867–fifty years after Eliza wrote her that letter about the New York boarding house–she wrote on the bottom, “From Mrs. Anderson Godefroy about my old Enemies the Catons who hated & injured me in Europe in 1816 & were, out of the Patterson father & sons Robert John Joseph & Edward, the most pernicious foes of my life.” (The Patterson men referred to were Betsy’s own father and brothers, so you get some sense here of what her relationship with her own family was like. But that’s another story.)

I trusted Eliza’s observations a bit more, but she was ambiguous on the subject of the Catons, especially Betsey. In that 1816 letter to Betsy B., Eliza seems to be endorsing her friend’s own dim view of the Caton girl: “No matter what she may be,” she tells Betsy B., “you cannot but injure yourself by speaking of her. .. she will always make herself appear the unresisting victim to your unmerited dislike.”

But maybe Eliza was only saying what she knew Betsy B. would want to hear. Many years later–when Betsey Caton finally snared a titled husband at the age of 45–Eliza reminisced about her with considerably more warmth. “Betsey Caton had more heart and more head than all the rest of the family put together,” she told a correspondent on hearing of the marriage. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the rest of the clan, but still pretty favorable to Betsey.

Right after she says that, though, Eliza goes on to say: “… but nothing so wastes the heart, so deteriorates all elevation of mind, as the system of coquetry she and her sisters were taught to practice almost from their cradles. It has however succeeded perfectly well with them, for the end of life is to obtain the object of our Soul’s ambition, and rank and title was theirs.”

The lecture I went to–which was given by Mary Jeske at the Maryland Historical Society–provided a more complete portrait of these three women. They certainly don’t seem to have been the demons Betsy Bonaparte thought they were. On the other hand, Eliza’s judgment that rank and title were their “Soul’s ambition” may well have been correct (they certainly were Betsy B’s!). Such an objective may seem strange to us, in this day and age, but in the early 19th century an excellent marriage was the highest ambition that most women could aspire to. And on those terms, the Caton sisters succeeded spectacularly.

Before the lecture, I found the Caton sisters’ story reminiscent of all those tales about impoverished British landed gentry marrying American heiresses for their money–the most recent version being the addictive PBS series “Downtown Abbey.” But as I discovered, the Caton girls actually didn’t have any money–not of their own. Their grandfather, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) was indeed fabulously wealthy. But the sisters weren’t able to get a piece of that until Carroll died. And he lived to be 95, which was almost unheard of in those days.

After the first Caton sister married in 1817–not to an aristocrat, yet–it was rumored that her husband was shocked to discover, after the marriage, that she had no fortune. One of Betsy B.’s London correspondents wrote to tell her that no one was going to make THAT mistake again. No one, he said, would be taking Betsey Caton to the altar “unless the money is first paid down, or put into a Train that it will be forthcoming.”

It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Betsey Caton, whatever her ambition was in life. And it’s quite a tribute to the Caton sisters that they all managed to marry aristocrats–at least one of them, indeed, impoverished–even AFTER everyone knew they had no money. Can the Kardashians top that accomplishment?

Historical Fiction at the AWP Conference

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I’ve spent a good part of the last three days at the annual AWP Conference. AWP is an organization of writers and teachers of writing (the acronym supposedly stands for “Association of Writers & Writing Programs,” in which case it should really be “AWWP,” but never mind), and I had no idea there were so many writers in the United States. It was completely overwhelming. And exhilarating (look at all these people who care so passionately about writing!). And depressing (look at all these people who so desperately want to get published!).

But what I really want to talk about is, of course, historical fiction. Out of the hundreds of panels on offer, there were only three devoted to historical fiction, all well-attended. (Well, I really only know about two of them, because for some reason two of the three were scheduled to meet at the same time.)Listening to the panelists, I was gratified to hear echoes of many of the thoughts and feelings I’ve had during my own writing process: the need to find a gap or a mystery in the historical record, so that your imagination has room to play; the necessity of, as one panelist put it, gathering so much information about your period that you “drown” in your research (that was from Jane Alison, author of The Love-Artist, a novel about Ovid); the lingering anxiety that nevertheless you’ll get something wrong and be exposed as a fraud.

I certainly know the last feeling well–even though, by the time I started writing A More Obedient Wife, set in the 1790’s, I’d been working as a historian in that period for almost seven years. Maybe you can never really shake that anxiety when you’re writing about the past. (Although there are those rare birds, like Edward P. Jones, who are immune to it. He wrote his novel The Known World, about black slaveowners in the antebellum South, without doing a lick of research. One of the panelists–Robin Oliveira, who wrote My Name Is Mary Sutter–said she heard him respond once to a question about how he could do that. “It’s my book,” she quoted him as saying, “and I can do what I damn well please.”)

But what I wanted to ask the panelists and didn’t get a chance to was this: isn’t there also a sense in which we can know the past BETTER than the present? True, we can never be entirely sure of the details of daily life in the way we are of those that surround us now. But the past is not a moving target. It’s fixed, static–whatever happened there has already happened.

Maybe more important, we have a perspective on the past that we can never have on the present, because we know–in historical terms–what happened next. In that sense we have an advantage over our characters, who have no idea what lies down the road. We know which institutions and ideas will become discredited in the future. And we know which ones will ultimately win acceptance.

Take, for example, a character in the novel I’m working on, a doctor of the early 19th century whose ideas about the cause of disease anticipated germ theory. His contemporaries ridiculed him–disease caused by tiny invisible animals that somehow entered the body?–and he lost a good deal of his practice. Now, in the 21st century, I can simply present his experience, without authorial comment, and both the reader and I will know something that he doesn’t: that he was basically right. Another of my characters is a woman who dared to undertake what was considered a man’s job, and who argued, over sometimes fierce opposition, that women had the potential to be the intellectual equals of men if they were only given the same educational opportunities. Someday, she lamented at one point, her ideas would be recognized as valid. And we–the writer and the reader–will know that they were.

That kind of layering–the layer of what the writer and reader know, as compared to what the characters know–is one of the things I love about historical fiction. The closest thing I heard to it at the AWP panels was from a writer named Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, which is set before Alcott became a successful writer. “I knew what she would go on to,” O’Connor McNees said, “and she didn’t know. I had to admire her audacity.”

I suppose that’s what all of us aspiring writers need: audacity. We need to act like we’re all going to end up like Louisa May Alcott, even though we know that can’t be true.

They’re Just Not That Into It

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“I just didn’t fall in love with it.”

So ran the bottom line of a recent rejection of a novel my agent is shopping around. I cringed: I was suddenly inundated with extremely unpleasant memories of the last time an agent sent out a novel of mine–when, as I recalled, this was the standard rejection line,usually preceded (as this one was) with a few moderately flattering comments about my manuscript.

As it turned out, when I looked back at those rejections (yes, I saved them all–don’t ask my why), only one or two of them actually used the “didn’t fall in love with it” line. But for some reason, that was the line that had stuck in my mind, irritating as a festering splinter.

Why? It would seem that rejections that pick apart the specifics of your characters, your plot, your writing would be much harder to take. But for me, at least, they’re not.

Rejections, of course, are never fun, but anyone who wants to make it as a writer has to get used to them (unless you’re one of the anointed few who have a smooth and rapid ascent to success, in which case all you have to deal with is the jealousy and resentment of the vast majority of your fellow writers). And I think I’ve developed a relatively tough skin over the years. But hearing “I just didn’t fall in love with it” remains pretty devastating.

Maybe it’s because the line is so vague and global that it’s hard to separate the rejection of one’s writing from the rejection of oneself, something all aspiring writers need to learn to do. What it puts me in mind of, really, is high school, when it seemed that any guy who I was in love with “just didn’t fall in love” with me. Meanwhile, of course, the guys who WERE calling me weren’t the ones I had any interest in going out with. They were the equivalent, I guess, of those pop-up ads that seem to magically appear on any email I send or receive that has the word “publish” or “book” in it: “Publish your book now! Low rates!” Yeah, the self-publishing companies are all in love with me. They’re just not the ones I want.

And of course, the objects of MY affection are going all googly-eyed over others whose charms I fail to see. Yeah, maybe they’re more sensational, more provocative. But, I want to cry out, can’t you recognize my substance, my depths? Then the bargaining begins, at least in my head: okay, listen, I can give you what you want. I can goose up my plot. Or is it sex–is that it? Okay, I can put more sex in. I’ll feel cheap, but I’ll do it. I’ll do anything!

Of course, the problem with these rejections is that they never tell you exactly what you need to do to win acceptance. And maybe, in fact, there’s NOTHING you can do. Maybe they’re just not that into you. Oh, yes, they’ll say things like, “It’s probably just me–I’m sure some other editor out there will love this.” But you can tell they’re just saying that to make you feel better.

As with other things one has no control over–like snagging a date with the cool guy who doesn’t know you exist–the best strategy is simply to move on, if you can. And I’ve found the best way, maybe the only way, for me to move on is to focus my attention and energy on another writing project.

Because, really, waiting around for someone to fall in love with you, or with your novel, is simply no way to go through life.

Bachmann and Burr

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I actually had another blog topic in mind, but I just read Gail Collins’ op-ed on Michele Bachmann in today’s New York Times, and I couldn’t resist saying a few words, since–a rare occurrence in the pages of the Times, and the annals of political history–a historical novel figures in it prominently.

It seems that Michele Bachmann’s turn to the right started when she was in college and she read Gore Vidal’s historical novel, Burr–which centers on, as you might have guessed, our third Vice-President, Aaron Burr. “He was kind of mocking the founding fathers, and I just thought ‘what a snot,’ ”Collins quotes Bachmann as saying.

Okay, where to begin? Well, it’s nice to know that a historical novel can wield such power, but Bachmann’s got it all wrong. First of all, as Collins notes, Bachmann’s view that one can say no ill of a founding father “strips the founding fathers of their raw, fallible humanity.” (Not to mention that, as I said in an earlier blog post, there’s nothing less appealing than a novel with an infallible protagonist.)

But beyond that, Burr himself wasn’t even a founding father, at least not in the strict sense of the term. He didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence, he wasn’t present at the Constitutional Convention, and it’s not clear that he subscribed to any particular ideology other than his own self-promotion. More of a founding opportunist, you might say.

That’s not to say there was nothing to admire about Burr. For one thing, he had remarkably advanced views on the role of women (way more advanced than the views of most of the real founding fathers, who, as Collins points out, would have been shocked to find someone of Bachmann’s gender with a seat in Congress). But basically–and as deftly portrayed in Vidal’s wonderful novel–Burr was a lovable rogue, a charming and urbane scoundrel. Not exactly what Bachmann has in mind, presumably, when she utters the phrase “founding father.”

And infallible? Even many Burr’s contemporaries–actual founding fathers among them–held him in the utmost contempt. And with good reason. When, in the election of 1800, he tied for the Presidency with Thomas Jefferson–a result nobody wanted, since Burr was supposed to be running for VICE-President–he allowed the ballotting in the House of Representatives to go on through 35 rounds rather than do the gentlemanly thing and take himself out of the race. Later he was tried for treason for concocting a scheme to separate part of the United States and, apparently, set up his own empire (the details of this scheme were never clear). And let’s not forget that in 1804 he fought a duel with a real founding father–Alexander Hamilton–and killed him. All in all, not exactly a model for our times.

What would Burr himself think of his part in Bachmann’s conversion? I suspect he’d have a good laugh. I wish I could find it that funny myself.

Tiger Mothers in the Eighteenth Century

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There are no dearth of commentators who are taking a crack at the new book by Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. But so far, at least, I haven’t seen any who have really dealt with it from a late-18th-century perspective.

I should say, first, that I’m about a third of the way into the book, and so far, I don’t think Chua is quite the child-abusing witch that others have made her out to be. Much of the time she actually seems to be poking fun at herself and the lengths she goes to in her efforts to ensure that her kids become driven over-achievers. Still, like many 21st-century non-immigrant American parents, I can’t imagine myself doing some of the things that seem to come pretty naturally to her (threatening to throw her toddler daughter into the freezing cold because she won’t follow instructions about how to play the piano, or threatening to burn her kids’ stuffed animals — but her stunts have already been heavily chronicled in the press, so I won’t delve into them in detail here).

But taking a historical perspective, if you look back a couple of hundred years, parents said all sorts of things to their kids that we (by which I mean American parents like myself) would find emotionally abusive today. Of course there were expressions of love and praise by parents, just as there are now, but there were also injunctions to, for example, “be good so that Daddy [or Mommy] will love you.” (I did read something like that in a letter from the 1790s — unfortunately I can’t locate it now. But I do recall leaving it out of the novel I wrote that was set in the 1790s because I thought modern readers would find it repellent.)

Of course, the obverse of that injunction is the threat that if you’re NOT good, Daddy or Mommy WON’T love you. I doubt that 18th-century Mommies and Daddies actually did stop loving their kids when they misbehaved, but of course the kid on the receiving end of that veiled threat didn’t necessarily know that.

Nowadays we take great pains (unless we’re Amy Chua, who called one of her daughters “garbage”) to make sure our kids know we’ll love them no matter WHAT they do. We may be saddened, we may be angry, we may be disappointed — but we’ll still love them. In fact, our kids may need to hear that message even more when they do misbehave. (I’m reminded of an extremely touching story one of Sargent Shriver‘s sons told at his funeral this weekend: back in the sixties, when he was 14, Bobby Shriver was arrested for smoking marijuana. Given the Kennedy connection, this was a huge deal, with the police coming to the house, “a thousand” reporters hovering outside, the story running on the front page — above the fold — in the Washington Post. Bobby felt indescribably awful for letting down his entire family. Sarge, who was ambassador to France at the time, came home and called Bobby into his room for a talk. With great trepidation, Bobby entered the room. And Sarge leaned forward and just said, “You’re a good kid, and I love you.” Bobby says that hearing that from his father “saved his life.” I shudder to think what Amy Chua might have said.)

But I digress. My point is, in previous eras parents did all sorts of things we wouldn’t approve of today — worse things, probably, than Amy Chua. And nevertheless, the human race has managed to survive. Through the centuries there have been over-achievers, under-achievers, people who were depressed, and people who were constantly sunny and cheerful — probably in about the same numbers there are today, although I don’t have those statistics handy. Kids are pretty resilient. And, by the same token, they can be pretty impervious to parental influence. In this context, I highly recommend a book called The Nurture Assumption, by Judith Rich Harris, which essentially argues that aside from contributing their genes, parents have very little effect on how their kids turn out.

So it’s really impossible to know how Amy Chua’s kids would have turned out without all the Sturm und Drang. Maybe they would have been pretty much the same — and maybe the atmosphere in the Chua household would have been a lot more peaceful.

Of course, that’s what I want to believe, since I wasn’t exactly a Tiger Mother with my own kids. I didn’t stand over them and make them do practice tests when they came home with an A minus, and when they didn’t want to practice their musical instruments I made only token efforts to convince them otherwise. But now that they’re young adults, I have to say, they seem to be turning out just great. I’m not sure I can claim much credit for that. But then again, if they’d turned out to be axe murderers, or just slackers, I’m not sure I’d want to be the one held responsible.

On Sympathy and Literature

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Do the protagonists of novels always have to be sympathetic?

Certainly there are examples in literature of protagonists who are hard to like, sometimes even repellent. Just look at Lolita: Humbert Humbert isn’t anyone’s idea of warm and fuzzy. And while Olive Kitteredge–the central figure in the eponymous Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection of stories–is no child molester, she’s pretty off-putting.

The artistry of those books is that their authors–Vladimir Nabokov and Elizabeth Strout, respectively–make us care about the protagonists despite their unsympathetic character traits. Humbert Humbert draws us in with his scathing wit; Olive Kitteridge eventually becomes irresistibly poignant in her clueless self-sabotage.

But let’s face it: it’s a lot easier to engage readers if they like your main character from the get-go. (This is something my agent has been drumming into me vis-a-vis the manuscript of mine that is currently in her hands.) And it’s not at all clear to me that I have the talents of a Nabokov or a Strout. So, while I’m not saying my protagonists have to come on like Shirley Temple, I think it behooves me to make sure my readers will basically be in their camp.

That’s not to say that a main character can’t be flawed. In fact, there may be nothing more unsympathetic than a character who is perfect in every way. Plus, your character needs room to develop and learn a few things–that’s what allows for a plot. So, generally speaking, you need to strike a balance with your main character: not too perfect, not too imperfect … just right.

The main problem I’ve identified with the historical figure I have in mind for my next novel, Eliza Anderson, is that she was, by our 21st-century lights, a raging cultural elitist who had little use for democracy. As I mentioned in my last blog post, her position may appear somewhat more understandable when you know what early 19th-century American society was like. Still, it’s a problem.

So that’s her flaw, or at least the main one (she had others too). It seems to me that I need to do at least three things to deal with it. First, I need to make other aspects of Eliza’s personality sufficiently sympathetic that readers will be willing to more or less overlook her elitism, at least for a while. Second, I need to establish the circumstances that led her to feel the way she did. And third, I need to make that aspect of her personality change over the course of the novel. She won’t become a raging democrat–that would be unrealistic–but she needs to at least begin to challenge her own assumptions.

Unfortunately, there’s no evidence of that happening in reality (in fact, there’s some evidence to the contrary). But that’s okay: this is fiction. True, I try to write historical fiction with a healthy respect for the historical record, but to me this is one area where it’s okay to turn my imagination loose a bit. I wouldn’t be contravening any known historical facts–something that William Styron once suggested to me as a guide in writing historical fiction, because you don’t want the reader pausing and saying, essentially, “Huh?” Beyond that, I think having Eliza change, or begin to change, in this way would allow me not only to create a more sympathetic protagonist but also to say something about what was going on in the United States in the days of the early Republic–that is, that the country was gradually moving to an acceptance of democracy as we know it.

So what will spark this change in Eliza? Since this is a novel, and novels hinge on relationships between individuals, it will have to be another individual. My ideas are still pretty inchoate, but I’m leaning towards giving her a female servant with artistic ambitions that mirror Eliza’s own literary ambitions. That would feed into a story-line that is rooted in the historical record: Eliza became embroiled in controversy for her dismissive remarks about mere “workmen” who attempt to present themselves as artists.

The idea of having large historical ideas–like the the tension between elitism and democracy–play out between individuals reminds me of a terrific play I saw last night. It’s called Return to Haifa, and it’s based on a novella written by a Palestinian author who was assassinated–possibly by the Israelis–in 1972. The play was adapted by an Israeli playwright and performed here in DC by an Israeli theater troupe, in Hebrew. The story is essentially this: A Palestinian couple is forced to leave their house in Haifa when the state of Israel is created in 1948 and, in the chaos, end up leaving their baby behind. A Jewish couple–Holocaust survivors who have lost their own child in the war–move into the house and adopt the baby. Twenty years later the Palestinian parents, having been prevented all this time from returning, show up to claim their child.

All the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis play out between the five main characters of the play. There’s plenty of anger, guilt, and recrimination. And yet, the play ends on a hopeful note. Why? Because the characters finally manage to relate to each other as individuals, each one expanding his or her imagination to encompass the experience of the other.

That’s what President Obama urged after the recent shootings in Tucson–that we “expand our moral imaginations,” that we “sharpen our instincts for empathy.” And that’s what literature–fiction or drama or poetry–does, at its best: it enables us to be “the other,” to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Arguably, that’s especially valuable when the character whose eyes we find ourselves looking through is someone we couldn’t have imagined finding sympathetic. Like Humbert Humbert, or (in my case) a member of the Tea Party. Or, in the case of some Israelis, a Palestinian. And vice-versa.

I’m not saying that if Benjamin Netanyahu sat down and watched this play with Mahmoud Abbas, we’d suddenly have a solution to the problems of the Middle East. But I do think it might be a start.

Democracy and Its Discontents

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One of the problems with writing fiction based on real historical figures is that you have to deal with reality–their reality, which often doesn’t come neatly packaged to correspond to our own. In other words, real people, especially real people who lived a long time ago, don’t always come equipped with opinions and sentiments that we in the 21st century can easily relate to.

With my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, one of the problems I had to grapple with was slavery. It was clear from the historical record that one of my two main characters owned slaves. I felt it was important that readers be able to identify with this character, Hannah Iredell. They didn’t have to love her (although that would be nice), but at the same time, they couldn’t recoil from her in disgust. They had to be able to see the world–her world–through her eyes. Would they be able to do that if they knew she owned slaves, and if that master-slave relationship was portrayed in the book?

I think I managed to deal with that issue by stretching my imagination to encompass a world where slavery was viewed by most Americans as a regrettable fact of life, and those who owned slaves were able to see themselves as decent, even kind and generous, people. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I came to see slavery as acceptable myself. I was simply able to understand how Hannah Iredell might have seen it, and how she might have justified it to herself. And it seems, from what I’ve been told, that readers were able to understand that too. While a few readers have told me that they couldn’t warm up to Hannah Iredell, no one has cited her ownership of slaves as the reason.

Now that I’m contemplating another historical novel, I have a different problem. I had thought, when I first started researching the life of Eliza Anderson, that I had found a protagonist that 21st-century readers would be more likely to find sympathetic. Unlike the two main characters in A More Obedient Wife–both of whom, as the title suggests, essentially accepted the prevailing 18th-century assumption that wives should be subservient to their husbands–Eliza was spunky and feisty, challenging the limits placed on her by early 19th-century society. Abandoned by a feckless husband at the age of 20, she picked herself up and got to work, first as a teacher and shortly afterwards as the first woman in America to edit a magazine (at the age of 26). When she found the man who proved to be her true love, she managed to secure a divorce from her first husband in order to marry him. (This was no easy feat at the time: she had to travel alone from Baltimore to Albany on a new-fangled steamship to track him down, then secure proof of adultery–“not an affair,” as she drily remarked, “to which Men usually call witnesses”–and then get the legislature to pass a private bill.)

Alas, I soon discovered that Eliza wasn’t a complete paragon of progressive proto-feminism. Yes, in her magazine (the Baltimore Observer), she staunchly advocated a woman’s right to education and to express her opinions on any subject she chose. But she also criticized an exhibition of student accomplishments at a local girls’ school, warning that “a public acknowledgment of [girls’] merits” might lead them to become “insolent, forward, and presuming.” Would she have leveled the same criticism at an exhibition at a boy’s school? Not to mention that people in Baltimore were leveling exactly these same charges at her for presuming, as a female, to edit a magazine.

Worse, Eliza was something of an elitist. Her columns for the Observer and her letters to friends are peppered with disparaging remarks about democracy and the state of culture in America. She was dismissive of the artistic endeavors of amateurs and self-taught painters, and opined that “the Muses are rather saucy, and do not admit workmen to their levees.”

Great, I thought: an anti-democratic snob. Readers are really going to respond to that. Not to mention that, for all my admiration of Eliza, this aspect of her personality didn’t even sound particularly appealing to me. Yes, I’d managed to make a slave-holder palatable to readers, but I didn’t actually have documentary evidence of how Hannah Iredell had felt about slavery: I was able to make that up. Here I had to deal with Eliza’s own words.

But I’ve tried, as I did before, to cast myself back to the era my characters lived in–an era when “democracy” was still an uncertain experiment, not the sacrosanct ideal it’s become today. And as I’ve learned more about the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of early 19th-century America–largely through reading Gordon Wood’s terrific book, Empire of Liberty–I’ve begun to see things through Eliza’s eyes. I’ve learned, for example, that eye-gouging matches were common in the South, with the combatants becoming local heroes, and that throughout the country political disputes often devolved into violence. Consider that public education was virtually non-existent, and that whiskey was being consumed at mind-boggling rates–men, women, children, and sometimes even babies “drank whiskey all day long,” according to Wood. Under these circumstances, doubts about democracy don’t seem quite so reactionary.

And frankly, I confess to occasionally having doubts about democracy myself, even in this relatively enlightened day and age–especially in recent days, as I’ve shed tears over the victims of the shooting in Tucson and contemplated the sad fact that gun control is politically impossible in this country. (Some will argue that the Supreme Court has elevated gun rights to the level of a constitutional rather than a political issue, but the fact is that the Court has left the legislative branch with quite a few options, and the legislators are simply too scared of the NRA to exercise them. And although the Court doesn’t always break down on political lines, I suspect that if there were nine Democratic appointees to the Court, the decision on the Second Amendment would have come out quite differently.) So I can draw on those feelings when I’m looking for common ground with Eliza.

In the final analysis, though, I have to agree with Winston Churchill’s oft-quoted line about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others. And somehow, if I’m going to write a successful novel about Eliza Anderson, I know I’m going to have to lead her to at least the beginnings of that realization as well.

As for how I might do that … well, I’ll save that for another blog post.

On the Mutability of Texts

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It used to be that when a book was published, the text was more or less set in stone. Authors might fiddle with their words or punctuation to their hearts’ content (or perhaps their editors’ content) before publication; but once the book came out, it was a fixed text. So when we talk about Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations–name your classic–we’re all talking about the same thing. Sure, some authors have tinkered with a second edition, and texts that have been used for performances have always been more variable than novels. There are multiple variants of some Shakespeare plays, and composers and librettists of earlier eras had no compunction about making significant changes to operas between performances. Giuseppe Verdi wrote so many versions of his opera Ballo in Maschera–largely to satisfy the censors of the era–that it’s almost ridiculous. But for the most part, as Gertrude Stein might have said, a text was a text was a text.

That’s still true today, with books, but I wonder if it will always be so. With the advent of the internet (I shudder to think how many times THAT phrase has been used in recent years to introduce some portentous thought), texts in general are becoming infinitely protean. Just look at Wikipedia, where encyclopedia entries are never-ending works-in-progress. Or, for that matter, the New York Times. Just today the Public Editor wrote a column that touched on the fact that stories posted online often undergo frequent updates and headline changes, to the point that an alert reader may feel he or she is being gaslighted (and if you’re too young to get that reference, see this Wikipedia entry). As one Times reader said, referring to different variations on an obituary of Arthur Penn posted on the paper’s website, “I read something, and now poof, it’s gone without a trace.”

I can’t help but think of two recent controversies involving rewriting that have been in the news of late: the reading of a bowdlerized version of the Constitution on the floor of the House (edited to take out all the parts that proved to be mistakes and were later changed by Amendments); and the new edition of Huckleberry Finn that takes out all instances of the word “nigger,” of which there are many, and replaces them with the word “slave.” I have, of course, no evidence that either of these moves were influenced by the … (drumroll please) Advent of the Internet, but you have to wonder (or at least, I do). I see meaningful differences between the two situations–one seems designed to portray as infallible a document that was acknowledged to be flawed from its beginning, and the other seeks to make an American classic acceptable as part of a high school curriculum–but they both seem to reflect an attitude that it’s okay to tinker with texts that an earlier generation might have been more likely to accept, or condemn, as simply a given.

Another change that computers, if not the internet, has effected is the demise of drafts. That’s not to say that writers don’t make changes to their works-in-progress anymore. If anything, those changes have probably increased many times over, given how much easier it is to make changes on a computer than on a typewriter or a handwritten document (believe me, I remember those days). But the changes no longer leave a paper trail. Unless you turn on the “track changes” feature, every new draft looks as clean as a newborn babe, as though it had sprung full-grown from the brain of its creator. No more messy cross-outs, strike-throughs, carets, or boxes of handwritten text at the top or bottom of a page. And no more scholarly tracking of the minute-by-minute thought processes of a long-dead scribe (see my immediately preceding post on the Jeremy Bentham papers project for some thoughts on that). It seems to me that perhaps something has been lost to posterity here.

But back to published books: With the advent of the e-book (we’re seeing a lot of advents lately), I wonder if we’ll see authors reaching back into their books to make a few changes here or there, or even make wholesale alterations to plot and character. After all, it would only take a few clicks, and voila–a newly revised work. Will authors someday respond to criticism in this way, the way the producers of a Broadway show might respond to feedback during previews?

If this seems absurd and futuristic, I have to point out that the future is indeed here, at least for self-published books, which are printed one at a time, as they are ordered. Every time I order more copies of my self-published book, A More Obedient Wife, I’m offered the option to “Revise” it. All I have to do is click on an icon, and boom, the text is up for grabs again. And actually, I did use this feature, once, to correct a few omissions in the acknowledgments and typos.

On the other hand, I suspect that for most writers, by the time a book is published they’re ready to move on. Having just sent off Draft 9 of a second novel to my agent, with prayers that this time she’ll think it doesn’t need any further changes, I’m at the point where I’d be quite happy never to read it again. (And “Draft 9” actually vastly underestimates the number of changes I’ve made and the number of times I’ve gone through it, since–thanks to my computer–I can reread each chapter the day after I’ve tinkered with it and simply tinker with it some more.) A writer friend of mine once compared the work of revising a manuscript to “a dog returning to its vomit.” Some days the metaphor seems quite apt.

So maybe we don’t need to worry about a wave of authors indulging in massive overhauls of their already published books, because they’ll be thoroughly sick of them. Let’s just hope, though, that the “edit” function doesn’t fall into other–and perhaps the wrong–hands.

Bend It Like Bentham

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Well, once more into the fray, after a rather lengthy absence. My explanation is that I’ve been paralyzed in a continuing limbo, hovering between two writing projects, one of which is historical and the other not. But I’ve decided that’s no excuse not to continue posting, if I can think of something to say that’s relevant to the ostensible themes of this blog — history, fiction, and the interplay between the two.

I’ve thought of something that’s relevant to one of them, anyway: history. Last week the New York Times ran a piece about a documentary editing project–an edition of the papers of the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham–that I found intriguing. I used to work on a documentary editing project myself–the Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800, where I came across the letters that inspired my novel, A More Obedient Wife. Generally speaking, documentary editing is a slow, painstaking task that requires a keen eye for detail and a detective-like ability to make sense of illegible scrawls and fragmentary documents. At my project, it took us 30 years to get through the Court’s first decade, and that’s a mere blink of an eye compared to some projects: the Papers of Thomas Jefferson project published its first volume in 1950 and they’re still working at it. And the Bentham Project itself began more than 50 years ago and is less than halfway through.

So the folks at the Bentham Project, based at University College London, had the idea of throwing open the transcription process to the general public. Some 40,000 original, handwritten Bentham documents have been put online, and anyone with an interest–or perhaps a masochistic streak–is free to take a crack at them. Given my 10 years of documentary editing experience, I thought it would only be a public service for me to give it a try. And, having viewed Bentham’s clothed corpse some 35 years ago–it’s kept on display at UCL in a glass case–I felt I had a personal connection to the man. Not to mention that he held unusually progressive views, for the early 19th century, on subjects like religion and women’s rights.

I started with an “easy” document, figuring I’d breeze through it. I did manage to puzzle out a few words that had stumped whoever else had attempted to transcribe the document before me–the transcription project operates on a “wiki” model, with one person correcting the errors of those who have gone before, or perhaps adding to them. But, even though my last stint as a documentary editor ended only four years ago, I discovered that it’s a whole new world out there in documentary-editing land–and in some respects, I suppose, a brave one.

Back in my day, we had all sorts of complex computer codes we had to enter to denote different typographical idiosyncrasies we wanted reproduced: strike-outs, superscripts, underlining and the like. We had a sheet of codes, most of which I managed to memorize after a few years. But nowadays there are convenient little icons at the top of the page–click on the question mark, for example, and your guess at whatever the hell Bentham was trying to say automatically gets the computer code for “questionable.”

There’s also the wonder of the “zoom” feature: click on a part of the document you want to get a closer look at, and all of a sudden it gets bigger. In my day we bent our face to the manuscript like some scribe of old, squinting and turning it in the light (okay, sometimes we used a magnifying glass).

On the other hand, it’s harder to see the document as a whole and get a feel for the gist of it: it takes up only one part of the screen, with the other part reserved for your attempt at transcription. There are navigation controls that allow you to move around the document, but I’ve found them a little cumbersome. I’m getting better, but sometimes, for no apparent reason, the controls go careening away from me and I find myself involuntarily skittering over to the very edge of the document.

But the real question–raised in the Times article–is whether mere amateurs can make enough sense of the documents for their efforts to be valuable. (And the Times article itself seems to have opened the floodgates: it reported that there were 350 people registered to be transcription volunteers, and since then the number has zoomed to over a thousand.) I’m not exactly an amateur, and even I had trouble deciphering much of the “easy” document (although I imagine it will get easier as I get more familiar with Bentham’s handwriting). Frankly, I think I’m better than the average bear at reading archaic handwriting, and I have to wonder how accurate other people’s transcriptions will be. As I mentioned, in the three brief transcription sessions I’ve done so far, I discovered a number of errors.

Of course, members of the Bentham Project staff will go over all the volunteer transcriptions before any of them get published–and they’re surely in a better position than I am to decide if the volunteers are a help or a hindrance. It may well be better to start with a flawed transcription than to start with nothing.

And why not let whoever is interested see the raw documents themselves, rather than waiting decades for a published edition? There may be people out there who discover–as I did, over 20 years ago now–that there’s nothing more absorbing than puzzling over a document written 200 years ago, tracing the author’s mental processes through his or her deletions and additions, becoming familiar with individual quirks of handwriting, enjoying the satisfaction of making a coherent sentence out of something that at first glance appears to be random marks on a piece of paper.

If it turns out I’m actually furthering the progress of the Bentham Papers, I’ll be delighted to hear it. But honestly, I’ll probably keep going back to the project website just for the sheer fun of doing it.

A Not So Fond Farewell

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I realize there’s been something of a gap between my last post and this, and that I may have left my readers (if any there be) hanging. Plus, anyone who has gone looking for my article about Eliza Anderson in the summer issue of Maryland Historical Magazine will have been disappointed: despite the fact that it is no longer summer, the summer issue is still not out. (Of course, given that the temperature in DC today hit 96 degrees, I believe we can consider summer to have been given a de facto extension — that’s good news for Maryland Historical Magazine, bad news for the rest of us.)

Anyway, with all this unfinished business in the air, I feel it incumbent on me to wrap up, at last, the story of Eliza Anderson and the Observer. Those who have been following this tale know that as the year 1807 wore on, Anderson began to feel more and more embattled. How embattled she really was — and how much of the embattlement was due to her unusual status as a woman editor — is difficult to determine at this point. But it is clear that Anderson attracted quite a bit of negative attention, and that the animus against her was at least intensified by the fact that she was a woman.

By December of 1807 — after the public dispute with Mr. Webster in the pages of the Federal Gazette, the outrage that greeted the publication of Anderson’s translation of Claire d’Albe, and the vendetta allegedly carried on against her by her former star columnist Benjamin Bickerstaff — it appears that Anderson was reaching the end of her rope. In the December 19 issue of the Observer there appeared a lengthy installment of “Beatrice Ironside’s Budget,” beginning with a couple of quotations from La Fontaine (in the original French) indicating, basically, that no matter what you do, some people will be displeased. This was followed by a long anecdote about a miller, his son, and their ass, tending to the same moral: “who shall flatter themselves with the hope of having their conduct invariably approved by the multitude,” Beatrice/Eliza concluded, “when the multitude is composed of such heterogeneous particles[?]”

She then embarks on a sort of eulogy for the Observer. It was, she says, founded as a “literary and political,and consequently as a critical, paper.” Who would expect such a publication, therefore, to publish nothing but unqualified praise? Indeed, it was not until “some strokes of satire and criticism had given zest and interest to its pages” that the Observer attracted enough subscribers to support it.

So far Anderson’s tone is fairly measured, and her claim is essentially that people have criticized the Observer because it criticized them. But now, turning to her nemesis Mr. Bickerstaff, she begins to spiral into the flights of savage rhetoric he unfailingly inspired in her. After quitting the Observer early in its existence, Anderson says, Bickerstaff was seized with the whim “to set his veto upon the Observer, and in quality of Grand Inquisitor of Baltimore to mark his prohibition of every idea which should not have originated in his own most sapient brain.”

Anderson also now points to her gender, not the Observer‘s biting satire, as the real problem: “From this moment War was declared against the Observer, and every means, however underhand or contemptible, were resorted to in the hope of destroying it. It was a Woman who was its Editor, this was all that was necessary to render its enemies BRAVE, and this was enough to embolden the most pusillanimous Wight to assume the garb of the Lion.”

Although Anderson refers to “enemies” in the plural, it’s fairly clear that she’s really zeroing in on Bickerstaff; this dispute is personal. It seems to be Bickerstaff she’s referring to when she says, “Could a scholar, so profound as to know the whole Greek Alphabet by heart, allow that a Woman should know her own language? could he endure that she should venture to think and judge for herself, and what is much more sacrilegious, that she should presume to enter those lists of which he deemed himself in the whole Western Hemisphere the only able and redoubtable champion!!!”

Obviously, there’s a history here, one that we in the 21st century will never know in its entirety. But, while Anderson reserved her most venomous prose for Bickerstaff, it’s clear — both from the Observer itself and the feuding that spilled over into the Federal Gazette — that others were attacking the Observer as well. In this same column of December 19, Anderson complained (undoubtedly with some hyperbole) that “many literary works” had been undertaken in the previous six months “with the express view of sinking the Observer.

Whether that was literally true or not (and Anderson claimed that at least she had the satisfaction of seeing all these publications “fall dead born from the press”), Anderson had had enough. Since, she writes, “to continue in such a pursuit is in every sense of the word to act the part of a DUPE, Mistress Ironside is resolved to abandon a task as laborious as she finds it thankless and painful, & which she undertook only in the hope of being useful.”

There is, however, a hint of another reason Anderson is choosing to cease publication of the Observer: in a final paragraph that appears in small print, Anderson chastises the “vast proportion of her Subscribers” who have not paid for their subscriptions–“those pitiful Beings who have sought in mean subterfuge to evade compliance with their small and just engagements.” Even allowing for Anderson’s characteristic exaggeration, the Observer was probably losing money at a rapid clip.

In the next and final issue, there is a hint that it was really Anderson’s father, Dr. John Crawford, who pulled the plug. (There is also a final installment of “Beatrice Ironside’s Budget,” containing a few more vicious swipes at Bickerstaff.) Dr. Crawford had been writing a series of articles about his medical theories (including one that anticipated germ theory and was, of course, ridiculed), but he announces that unfortunately he won’t be able to continue it as he had planned: “After having pursued this plan as far as number 22, I clearly ascertained the impossibility of carrying on the Observer farther than the engagement with the subscribers rendered indispensable, and therefore was obliged to relinquish my design.” Given that Anderson was, as a married woman, prohibited from entering into any contracts in her own name, it’s quite possible that Dr. Crawford was the financially responsible party.

So it seems that the demise of the Observer was due to a confluence of factors: reaction against its biting satire, reaction against its editor being a woman, that editor’s exhaustion and disillusionment, and the failure of many subscribers to pay up. But for a year at least, it no doubt amused a good part of the literate population of Baltimore, and it led its detractors a merry chase. Not to mention that it appears to have been the first American magazine edited by a woman.

In her penultimate column, Anderson at one point predicted that the “reflections and observations” printed in the Observer would “one day be more fairly appreciated.” Well, yes and no; some of them, like Anderson’s criticism of the self-taught artist Francis Guy, now celebrated as a true American original, sound elitist and repellent to the modern ear. But what has stood the test of time is Anderson’s own vigorous and witty writing style and her feisty spirit. One thing that has come to be “fairly appreciated,” as it was not in 1807, is the right of a woman to enter the intellectual fray on equal terms with any man. It’s too bad Anderson isn’t around to take advantage of that. She’d have a field day.