Category Archives: Love and Marriage
History Remembered
Chloe Schama has written for the New Republic, the New York Sun, and the Guardian. She lives in Washington, D.C. Her first book, Wild Romance: A Victorian Story of a Marriage, a Trial, and a Self-Made Woman
, is the biography of Theresa Yelverton. (released March 2010).
Death of a Starlet
By Deborah Blum
In the year of her death, starlet Olive Thomas, was a favorite of Hollywood gossip magazines. Married to Jack Pickford – younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford, she and her husband had a reputation for intense partying and intense quarreling, usually over his numerous side affairs – he’d developed syphilis as a result of one of them.
In early September 1920, the couple flew to Paris, reportedly on a reconciliation holiday. They checked into the Hotel Ritz and whirled off to enjoy themselves in a Prohibition-free city. After one particularly drunken spree, Pickford and Thomas staggered into their hotel room at nearly 3 in the morning.
As Pickford told the police, he was dozing when Olive began screaming “Oh my God, my God.” He stumbled into the dimly lit bathroom, where she was leaning against the counter. Mistaking it for her sleeping medicine, she had picked up a bottle of the bichloride of mercury potion that he rubbed on sores caused by syphilis, and swallowed a large dose. He carried her to the bed and called for an ambulance. “I’m poisoned,” she whispered.
As the story broke, newspapers spread the rumors: his infidelities had driven her to suicide; he’d tricked her into taking poison. By the time she died three days later, he was a murder suspect.
But the police investigation concluded that it was, as Pickford had said, just a terrible accident. They happened frequently. In New York City, the medical examiner calculated that mercury bichloride caused about 20 deaths a year. Still Thomas had definitely given the poison a fleeting star status.
Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
.
IMAGE: Olive Thomas and Jack Pickford
The Dangers of a Mycenaean Childhood
By Katharine Beutner
My novel narrates the life of a Mycenaean queen named Alcestis, who is famed for choosing to die in her husband’s place. Most versions of her story say nothing about her time in the underworld. When I began my novel, I knew that Alcestis needed something to drive her exploration of the underworld—something, or someone, to search for. Callous as it sounds, I had to kill someone she loved.
As a young princess of Iolcus, Alcestis spends nearly all of her time in the women’s quarters with her two older sisters. The middle sister, Hippothoe, cares for Alcestis after their mother dies giving birth to her. I needed to find an illness to inflict upon poor gentle Hippothoe, and I wanted that illness to be familiar enough to modern readers that they would instantly recognize its dangers.
The first usage of the word “asthma” (άσδμά) occurs in the Iliad, where it refers to a short inhalation—the word derives from the Greek infinitive “aazein.” Classical-era Greek physicians describe the symptoms we now know as asthma, and there’s some evidence that the Egyptians also recognized it as a distinct disease.
I researched contemporary homeopathic remedies for asthma to find methods that might have been available to the Mycenaeans and settled on two liquid remedies: diluted honey and garlic tea. As an adult, Alcestis remembers Hippothoe’s garlic-and-honey smell and recalls going to the kitchens in the middle of the night to prop her sister up over a steaming kettle. Modern readers who have suffered from asthma or watched a family member or friend struggle to breathe will understand the helpless frustration Alcestis feels as she watches her sister endure an asthmatic attack. Even now, with our remarkable advances in medical treatment, the human experience of illness connects us to the Bronze Age.
Katharine Beutner’s debut novel, Alcestis
, has just been published by Soho Press. She holds an MA in fiction from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is now a doctoral candidate in English literature.
IMAGE: Hercules Fighting Death to Save Alcestis, By Frederic Lord Leighton, c 1869-71
Fifteen-year-old Françoise meets her first husband
By Veronica Buckley
From the humblest of births in a provincial prison cell, Françoise d’Aubigné made her perilous way out of desperate poverty to a brilliant salon life in Paris, and finally, as Madame de Maintenon, secret wife of the Sun King Louis XIV, to the centre of power at Versailles.
In the winter of 1651, wearing old-fashioned shoes and a dress much too short for her, the fifteen-year-old Françoise stepped into the salon of Paul Scarron, infamous poet of the burlesque. Though she had heard others talk of his dreadful disfigurement, the first sight of him in person proved too much for her.
Overcome by horror or pity, she broke down at once in tears. ‘My body, it’s true, is most irregular,’ Scarron himself admitted. The celebrated scandalmonger, toast of the Paris salons, was seated in the middle of the room, his twisted body propped up and strapped into a large wheelchair, with a wooden tablet affixed on which he rested one claw-like hand. ‘I used to be a well built man,’ he wrote, though it’s true I was never very tall. But now my legs are at an acute angle to my body, and my head is permanently bent down to my stomach – I’m a sort of human Z.
My legs and arms and fingers have all shrivelled up. In short, I’m a shrivility of human misery.’ Françoise, wiping the tears from her eyes, stepped forward to be introduced. ‘To look him in the face,’ recorded a witness of their meeting, ‘she had to lean over so far she was almost on her knees’.
Veronica Buckley, author of The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: FranCoise d’Aubigne, Madame de Maintenon
, was born and educated in New Zealand, and later studied at the Universities of London and Oxford. Christina, Queen of Sweden, was the subject of her much-praised first biography. She lived in Paris while researching The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, and now lives in Vienna.
IMAGE: Portrait dit autrefois de Paul Scarron (1610-60). French school, seventeenth century. Le Mans, Musee de Tesse.
Telling Time by Flowers
By Mary Novik
Recently, when I was reading from my novel Conceit
, an experienced gardener asked whether the flower clock, used by Ann More to tell time, would actually work. In Conceit, it’s summer 1599, Ann is living in York House on the bank of the Thames in London, and she is having an erotic conversation with the poet John Donne.
I was inspired to write the scene by reading two of Donne’s poems. In Elegy 7, the poet says, “I had not taught thee then the alphabet of flowers.” In “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” the lovers take a long walk, discussing “love’s philosophy,” in which “our infant loves did grow.” Investigating further, I discovered that some flowers are aequinoctales that wake up and go to bed at the same time each day. I assumed that Ann, a well-bred girl of fifteen, had time to observe the opening and closing times of flowers, as well as the visiting times of bees, whereas the 27-year-old Donne, a secretary to the Lord Keeper of England, was too busy with affairs of state.
Before I named any plants, I had to be sure that they actually existed in England in 1599, so I paid a visit to the chronological bed in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden to check. I also researched the common names and habits of English flowers in John Gerard’s Historie of Plants, published in 1597. Some of the plants have charming names, such as Lady’s Nightcap and Jack-Go-to-Bed-at-Noon. From these and other sources, I chose several flowers that suited Ann and John’s love talk and the scene in chapter 8 of Conceit was born.
Not long after Ann and John took that walk in the York House garden, they eloped. Her father was incensed and she forfeited her dowry. Donne lost his job and was thrown in Fleet jail. It was then he was rumored to say, “Ann Donne. John Donne. Undone.”
(1) John Donne. The Complete English Poems. Ed. A.J. Smith. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971.
(2) John Gerard. The Herball or General Historie of Plants. London, 1597.
Mary’s previous guest post was An Extraordinary Love Story.
Mary Novik’s novel Conceit was nominated for the Giller Prize and was chosen by AbeBooks as one of the “top ten hottest new Canadian books of 2008″. She is now writing a novel set in 14th-century Avignon. Her website is www.marynovik.com
IMAGE: Flower Clock 1751, by the celebrated 18th-century botanist, Carolus Linnaeus, 1707-1778.
East of the Sun
By Julia Clegson
My research for East of the Sun began when I was five years old and met a remarkable woman called Mrs. Smith Pearse. She was in her sixties and had just returned from twenty years of living in India.
Superficially, she was a classic Memsahib- the literal translation means wife of the Sahib, the master. She’d gone to India, aged eighteen, as a member of the Fishing Fleet, the slightly derogatory name given to the English girls who went to India for the social season in search of husbands.
I loved everything about her: the battered tweeds, the honking laugh, the wonderful stories about India: the snakes under the bath, the tiger hunts with Maharajahs, the three day treks on ponies up to Simla. I dressed up in tiny silk saris, spice-scented tunics and salwar kameeze, produced from her mother of pearl trunk.
Four years ago, I met her nephew. He had a box of tape recordings made by her. Listening to these tapes as an adult made me realize that the India that had given her pleasure had taken in equal measure. My childhood heroine spoke on the tapes of the agony of missing children sent home to be educated.
“It was the biggest decision we all had to make: husband or child.” Passionately fond of nursing- she’d served with distinction in France in 1917- in India, she was only allowed to run a few village clinics- working Memsahib were frowned on.
Other women of the Raj spoke to me of botched births in remote areas, of burying young children, of flies and heat and snakes, of runaway or workaholic husbands, of terrible homesickness.
Because the British suffer from post- colonial guilt the Memsahib is often portrayed in literature or films as a gin swilling, narrow-minded snob. Some, of course, deserve our contempt; many didn’t. It’s easy to forget how young and ill prepared and uneducated many of these women were.
East of the Sun is my raised glass to these women: to their friendships, their naiveté, to the men they loved, to the work they did, and for the price they paid in loving India.
Julia Clegson is author of East of the Sun: A Novel.
The Good Wife’s Guide
Macy Halford posted a great review of The Good Wife’s Guide on the New Yorker’s Book Bench website. Translated by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, The Good Wife’s Guide is a fourteenth-century instruction book for a young bride, written by her husband. It’s a primer on the fine art of male dominence.
The dinner menu the husband offers up goes to prove that real men did not eat quiche in the Middle Ages. Green eel soup or black hare stew, anyone?
As the 17th century specialist that I am, the book reminded me–of course–of Moliere’s Arnolphe in The School for Wives. The wiley Arnolphe offers up a list of “maxims” for his young bride, whom he plucked from a convent. Of course, in the great Moliere tradition, the canny Agnes ends up showing what a nut job her husband really is.
Maxim 1. The woman who intends to be married ought to remember, that the man who takes her, takes her only for himself, notwithstanding the vast numbers of admirers which other women have in these our days.
Maxim 2. She ought to consult her husband about her dress; it being for him along should she take care of her beauty, and regardless whether other people think her handsome or not.
Maxim 3. She must lay aside the practice of ogling, and must use no paints, pomatums, beauty washes, nor the numberless ingredients that are made use of to set off the complexion. These are always mortal poisons to honour, and the pains bestowed to appear beautiful are seldom for the husband’s sake.
Maxim 4. When she goes abroad, she ought, as honour requires, to prevent the wounds her eyes might give, by concealing them under her hood: for she should study to please her husband, and no one else.
Maxim 5. Decency prohibits her from receiving any friends whatever, except such as come to see her husband: those people of gallantry that have no business but with the wife, are very disagreeable to the husband.
There are five more maxims. But you get the point…oh, the things history has done to quiet women.
You might want to head over to a post on Silence and the Scold’s Bridle. Miranda Garno Nesler offers some details about the muzzles that were used to restrain women’s speech in the Renaissance.
Wendy Moore also explores 18th Century Domestic Violence.
More things change, the more they stay the same. Regrettably.
18th Century Domestic Violence
By Wendy Moore
Wife-beating was both widely tolerated and sanctioned by law in 18th-century England. Yet the ordeal suffered by Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, at the hands of her husband so shocked Georgian sensibilities that she not only won landmark legal battles but her husband was banished to prison.
Marital violence is as old as marriage itself. In Georgian England, husbands were legally entitled to strike their wives in order to ‘correct’ their conduct so long as moderation was the watchword. One judge, Francis Buller, even went so far as to specify that a husband could beat his wife with a stick so long as it was no thicker than his thumb, earning himself the nickname ‘Judge Thumb’ in satirical prints for his wisdom.
But even when domestic abuse far exceeded such nice distinctions, wives enjoyed little recourse to the law. The torment endured by Mary Eleanor Bowes was among the most extreme.
A wealthy young widow, Mary was tricked in 1777 into marrying an Irish fortune-hunter, Andrew Robinson Stoney, who faked a duel to win her hand. Squandering her wealth, Stoney – who changed his name to Bowes – beat Mary with sticks, whips and candlesticks, tore out her hair, burned her face and threatened her with knives.
Terrified for her life, after eight years of torture Mary fled the marital home and embarked on audacious legal suits to win a divorce, reclaim her fortune and obtain custody of her children. Her divorce case in the church courts on grounds of adultery and cruelty, backed by courageous eye-witness accounts from servants, was one of only a handful of successful cases initiated by women when first resolved in 1786.
But her ordeal was far from over. Horrified that he might lose his fortune, her husband kidnapped Mary from a London street in a desperate bid to force her to rescind her case. Dragging her across snow-covered moors, Bowes threatened Mary with a pistol and with rape. Eventually rescued after eight days, Mary went on to win her divorce through two appeal stages as well as reclaiming her property and her children, while Bowes spent the rest of his life in jail for what The Times described as ‘a detail of barbarity that shocks humanity and outrages civilisation’.
When Mary died, in 1800, she asked for the blindfolded figure of Justice to stand guard at her tomb. But it would be nearly another century before women earned even minimal protection against abusive husbands.
Wendy Moore is author of Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore and The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery.
Further reading
Wendy Moore, Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore (Crown, 2009).
Jennifer Ramkalawon, Love and Marriage (British Museum Press, 2009).
Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Image: “Judge Thumb or, Patent Sticks for Family Correction: Warranted Lawful!” (1782) Courtesy of the British Museum.
Book of the Week: Wedlock
This week’s Book of the Week is Wendy Moore’s WEDLOCK: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.
I have to concur with the praise it received in a recent UK review: “This splendid book, well researched and richly detailed, is as gripping as a novel.” Review in the Telegraph
Writing is a challenge, no doubt about it. But writing smart nonfiction and crafting it in ways that make it a page turner is incredibly difficult. WEDLOCK rises to the challenge marvelously. Wendy’s work does not disappoint.
On top of it, Mary Eleanor Bowes is such a fascinating character. She was a target for strong opinion during her day. In the illustration above, she is shown suckling kittens on the grounds that she was allegedly more fond of her cats than her sons. The cartoon was almost certainly commissioned by her estranged husband, Andrew Robinson Bowes. Now that’s a complicated marriage alright!
I also highly recommend Wendy’s first book: The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery.
Book of the Week: City of God
Up this week: Beverly Swerling’s City of God: A Novel of Passion and Wonder in Old New York.
Beverly’s novels are spell-binding journeys into an era rich in history and intrigue. For a flavor of her work, take a peek at her latest book trailer. (Yes, there are such things as book trailers now!) This novel, in particular, caught my eye because of its many references to medical life in the 19th century. My guess that many Marvels & Tales readers will enjoy it!
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