Dispatches from my bookshelves
Hi all! Conference prep is keeping me busy and will be for a hot minute here, but I wanted to pop in and share a few of the books I’ve finished lately — because to my immense shock and delight, I seem to have recovered my ability to finish books again, after the stress of the last… well, 2020s, sapped a lot of my focus.
These are all biographies of historical women, as you might expect. I’d definitely recommend all of them.
The Mystery of Princess Louise: Queen Victoria’s Rebellious Daughter by Lucinda Hawksley
Curiously, this one appears to have been rereleased in the US as Queen Victoria’s Mysterious Daughter: A Biography of Princess Louise — perhaps because Louise has far less name recognition in the US than her mother? — which explains how I accidentally ended up with two copies of it. Oops.
Of all three books in this list, this one had by far the most moments where I went “oh my god, I know who that is!!” Figures as well-known as John Ruskin popped up (Hawksley seems to take an overall more kindly opinion of him than I do), but I also had to chuckle wryly every time Louise’s dear close friend Lady Sophia Macnamara popped up in the text, because of this postscript on a letter Claribel wrote to her cousin Amy near the end of 1867…
P.S. Her small Ladyship [Victoria, Countess Yarborough] is here so often I think her guests must be so cross. I hear Lady S. Macnamara took to abusing me frightfully only because she ‘hated Lady Y. making such a fuss of Mrs. Barnard.’
So yeah, the occasional sideways glance at Hawksley’s book, though through no fault of its own — and I’m delighted to have learned because of it that Sophia Macnamara was nicknamed “Smack.”
My one genuine complaint is that Hawksley waits until nearly page 300 of my paperback edition, and a bit after 1900 in the chronology, to drop the incredible fact that for some number of years, Princess Louise had been submitting poetry (and art and essays?? the phrasing isn’t super clear) to various publications under the pseudonym of “Myra Fontenoy.” Like, she’d been doing this during her imperi(al/ous) mother’s lifetime, it seems!! And yet we don’t get an appendix with at least the collected citations of Myra Fontenoy. I want a whole critical edition of this stuff, dammit! (Legitimately, I’m filing that away under “possible future projects”…)
Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress’s Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London’s Wild and Wicked Theatrical World by Kathryn Shevelow
(Definitely had to look directly at the book cover as I was typing out that ginormous subtitle.)
Hilariously enough, this is the second biography of a queer actress named Charlotte that I’ve read in (semi-) recent times, the other being Lady Romeo by Tana Wojczuk on Charlotte Cushman. Charlotte Charke nee Cibber, the heroine of this book, really prefigured Cushman in a lot of ways, as a theatrical dynamo and an early queer icon. She played scads of “breeches roles” on stage, and also dressed the part offstage for a number of years, often using the name of Charles Brown. Frankly, who the hell knows how she would have identified given today’s vocabulary for sexual and gender identity, but I’d comfortably borrow a phrase from a dear friend and call her a “category 5 gender and sexuality event.”
One of the other absolute coolest things about Charlotte Charke is that according to Shevelow, she was one of the first women ever to write an autobiography. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, accessible here on the good ol’ Internet Archive. She was an actor, so of course there’s some embellishment (and Shevelow does a good job breaking down what’s likely to be fact versus fiction versus, well, faction), but still, my god, what an incredible window into 18th-century England and the theatrical world.
I will say, this is probably the densest book of the three described here; I stopped and started it the most by a fair margin, though in my defense I also had an inter-state move to deal with in the intervening months. The book is as dense as it is because it’s absolutely rife with detail, though, and I wouldn’t say that level of detail ever truly bogs down the narrative.
The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe by Elaine Showalter
This book is the one I both started and finished most recently. 95% of the book is written in an incredibly engaging style that somehow managed to commandeer my focus to an impressive level. Granted, there are a couple moments when the College Professor really jumps out, like when Showalter takes the better part of a page to introduce and summarize Phyllis Rose’s main arguments from Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages to defuse counterarguments against her point that, in fact, Julia Ward Howe’s husband was a giant asshole.* The more didactic Women’s-and-Gender-Studies-101 tone was a bit immersion-breaking for me personally, but I’ll also readily admit that Victorian-era gender roles is one of my personal “one or two feldspars”:
*My god, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe really was an asshole, though. Reading about crappy Victorian husbands makes me appreciate Charles Cary Barnard so much more. I really need to write more about what a mensch CCB was at some point…
Anyway: Showalter slipped in multiple moments of sly or dry humor that made me laugh out loud on the train, which I enjoyed. On the flip side — and this isn’t a beef with Showalter specifically, this is something I’ve noticed with the biographies I’ve read more generally — sometimes that leads to just dropping the absolute most screamingly hilarious bit of knowledge and then just leaving it there like nothing happened:
In March [1852], Chev [nickname for Julia’s aforementioned asshole husband] refused to accompany Julia to the theatre, considering it a waste of time; she was grateful to join the Longfellows when they attended. While she had been touchy about turning to “Longodingdongo” for judgments of her poetry and resented what she saw as his patronage, she began to be more at ease with him, trust him more, and consult him for advice about publishing her work.
Longodingdongo
???????? oh my god Elaine why do you not have a citation in your endnotes for that!!!!!!!!!
I found a tiny bit more context on Google, via the only other search result for “longodingdongo,” a book chapter from 2012 on Julia’s manuscript novel:
[Julia] remarks in a divergence from her girlhood patterns of literary dissemination, “I have made quite a little romance about [two characters], but have kept it for my own amusement, the cold praise and ardent criticism of the club not being at all to my taste, and the comparison with Longodingdongo utterly insufferable.” “Longo” and “Longodongo” were the Five of Clubs’s favored nicknames for the short-statured Longfellow…
(the “Five of Clubs” here being Dr. Howe’s bro circle; see full citation below)
God, I just. How can you type the word Longodingdongo and not even acknowledge in-text that it’s friggin’ hilarious. Come on.
Anyway, of course I remembered that Claribel set one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems to music early in her career, and once I got home from work I set out to do a very silly thing in Photoshop. Enjoy.
Do I genuinely recommend all three of these books, yes. Did I conceive of this post as an excuse to inflict Longodingdongo on the lot of you?… yeah, maybe.
At any rate: that’s enough out of me for now. I’ve got more conference prep to do, of course, but I also have to pick out the next book to take with me as a commute read. Maybe a biography of Margaret Fuller I picked up recently. For now, though, ta!
~
Today’s citations:
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Indeterminate Sex and Text: The Manuscript Status of The Hermaphrodite.” In Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite, edited by Renee Bergland and Gary Williams, 23–46. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2012. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/oa_monograph/chapter/898699.
And a quick corresponding note: yes, in fact, Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” lady, also wrote a draft of a novel called The Hermaphrodite. Obviously not the vocab we’d be using now, but from what I’ve read about it, it seems frankly remarkable for its time — Orlando before Orlando, almost. If you’re interested, and you’re also into academic monographs, you should definitely check out the book that the above chapter is from.
Thanks for reading! Find out more about my project at the links below.
Past letters (updated archive coming soon!) | Research materials gift registry