In an LRB piece (Vol. 46 No. 17 · 12 September 2024) coming out of the publication earlier this year of a new edition of the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison’sReminiscences of a Student’s Life: A Memoir (first published in 1925 towards the end of her life), Mary Beard ponders the Harrison life stories as told by her, to be retold by others until the varied accounts thereof fused to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or perhaps not. And if not, who cares, for Harrison’s life was remarkable in every way irrespective of questionable veracity, mischievous embellishment or the self-interested spin. Harrison knew that a woman of her time had to control their own narrative or no one else would – or worse, could easily find itself appropriated by a … bloke!
This is not the first time Mary Beard has considered Jane Harrison. She too is of course a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, where Harrison studied, was rejected by, and returned to – to become the archetype for generations of women academics. And, Professor Beard in fact hunted through archival material for her own book, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Harvard University Press) in 2000. (A review from the time at The Guardian can be read here.)
If written words are not enough, the LRB also included a conversation with Mary Beard about her article in their podcast (available on their website or embedded below from Spotify) where Harrison is stylized as ‘the cleverest woman in England’ (of that time).
I too have mentioned Jane Harrison before – here and again here, for instance, in respect to her being one of a particular group of intellectual women who happened to live for a time on Mecklenburgh Square in London, and as written about by Francesca Wade in her book Square Haunting (2020). Another of those was of course Virginia Woolf, and the Woolfs attendance at Harrison’s funeral (on 19th April 1928) is recorded in a 21st April 1928 diary entry that I make note of here. This, an event that does not appear to have moved VW terribly much but, just as she has afforded others who touched upon her world, her memorializing of Harrison is other – for her, a guest appearance in A Room of One’s Own. And what a memorial that is; one that assures a recognition beyond her time into the present.
During the UK leg of her book tour at the end of last year, Emily Wilson accepted the London Review of Books invitation to present her Iliad translation. And they found a wonderful discussion partner for her in Edith Hall. And complimented by a thespian pair conjured from amongst the embarrassment of riches which is the theatrical talent of a nation – Juliet Stevenson and Tobias Menzies. Stellar, I say! Such an evening could only happen in London.
Over a festive season that stretched my resources, I turned to a German translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; translated by Elisabeth Edl (admired by me for her translations of Patrick Modiano) and much lauded at the time of publication in 2012. And, I must say it seems to have left a greater impression upon me than whatever English version I may have read in the past (but not the one by Lydia Davis, also from 2012) did; for I don’t remember previously having been as stimulated … or, as moved … as this reading has left me.
To be said on this particular edition: Beyond the literary work, the notes throughout are extensive, as is Edl’s translation essay; included also in the volume are the proceedings from the law case brought against Flaubert for … what? … obscenity, shall we say … by the French public prosecutors of the day. This latter inclusion was a first in the German language, and whether it has found its way into any of the English translations to date I don’t know. At least, it – the trial, the outcome (‘case dismissed’, so to speak), the repercussions (for society, for literature) – lives, still, in academia. This essay by Christine Haines published in French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp 1-27 and available on JSTOR is just one example.
Of an evening (that is, in bed!) my seriously serious book reading is intermittently interrupted by other forms of Lektüre, sometimes of a more frivolous nature and sometimes not. Definitely belonging to the latter; the latest (or the one before that) issue of the LRB. And, it was there, around about this Christmas time, that I was interested to read a review piece by Julian Barnes (Vol. 45 No. 24 · 14 December 2023) inspired by a new Monet biography by Jackie Wollschläger. With that, I won’t flex my (puny) Impressionist muscles; Julian Barnes may be able to get away with being an amateur art critic/historian/connoisseur, but, I not! It just reminded me that Barnes and Flaubert appear to have taken up firm residence in a similar crevice of my brain. Hardly surprising says she (to herself), recalling a stuffed parrot. But, amongst other things, I also rememberhis essay (also in the LRB) on the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and that it was far from complimentary. And, this I remember because I remember it having coincided with my reading of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in a then new translation and also from Davis, and I further remember having been momentarily concerned that I wasn’t getting the best of Proust. What, if anything, Barnes has had to say about her Swann’s Way, I don’t know. Or, just can’t remember!
Yes, I did say I was done with family ties! But then along came Catherine Macaulay in an LRB piece by Colin Kidd (Vol. 45 No. 17 · 7 September 2023). No, she is not related to Lord Macaulay who is the great-uncle of G. M(acaulay). Trevelyan. What all did have in common, though, were their ambitious writing down of the ‘big’ histories of a (then) ‘big’ England. And this Catharine did so well before those blokes – in a multi-volume affair written over twenty years titled The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution (1763-1783). (Only much later came Lord (Th. Babington) Macaulay also making it to five volumes with his The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848) and Trevelyan, of course writing in the first half of the 20th century, had diverse titles to his credit but could also not resist a History of England in 1928, and in one tome.)
Kidd’s review of Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings edited by Max Skjönsberg for the Cambridge University Press series of Texts in the History of Political Thought comes for me as a wonderful introduction. Encouraged to look around, I discern some sense of renewed interest in Macaulay, and it is hardly surprising; for, however well-situated, however intelligent, the horizon for a woman in the 18th century was far and her opportunities limited in scope and only those with the most pertinacious of character and originality of thought have left their mark.
For further information, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a lengthy entry, which interestingly mentions the “Blue Stockings” portrait (above r.) in which Catharine Macaulay is seated left beneath Apollo and behind her stands, with goblet in hand, Hannah More whose acquaintanceship and name was to live on (via Zachary) in that other Macaulay/Trevelyan tribe. Further, a first taste of her original voice can be read at the Online Library of Liberty (new to me!) in a text written in 1790 (in response to Edmund Burke) on republicanism and the Revolution in France.
Of lists & threads – of the information they impart & the tale they weave
From my recent post and having been inspired by the newly (by me) discovered Gertrude Trevelyan and, therefore, as ever, by musings on Woolf, as one who had (probably) inspired her (and in more ways than the room and 500 quid), I had thought to write some more on the Pargiters. But, as I am only right now going about, and rather ponderously at that, re-reading and writing up Woolf’s diary that covers that period immediately following her speech to the National Society for Women’s Service on 21 January 1931 from which The Years (as lived by the Pargiter family) would evolve (and not in the way Woolf had at that time envisaged), I realize now this to be a more complex exercise than I thought; it seems there is a lot to be said on literary method and creative choices, and deserving, therefore, of greater attention. Simply said: this, whilst not exactly relegated to the bucket list, a task to be held in abeyance until I have pulled the very many threads together to do it justice.
…as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time […] so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal …
On which, then, this thread must find an end … but just before finishing up on Trevelyan’s book (and the Trevelyans), it has occurred to me that I didn’t previously emphasize one particular characteristic enough. From the very first page, the novel’s narrative is interspersed by the listing of factual events – some short, some long; from close to home and from far shores; some of historical significance such that they are still familiar but very many now lost in the passing years; and which David Trotter in his essay variously refers to as a “database”, “news crawl”, or as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time. But they are so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal, often reflecting out of or into Katherine’s classroom, or Robert’s lab or bed-sit.
An unusual stylistic choice, and one that could easily date a book; and one that may have contributed to Trevelyan’s novel disappearing into obscurity for so long – others perhaps making the (superficially based) decision that later and contemporary readers would be put off by (or ignorant of) the real world goings on during those between the wars years.
Finally, I end with the admission that I can not think of a book quite like Two Thousand Million Man-Power. (Writing about the same time but on a grander scale, Dos Passos – sorry a gap in my education! – is mentioned as one employing a similar methodology.) Coming to my mind is only a song – albeit, a list song – that tracks the post-war years in the second half of the century, and that has special significance to me (another story!). Radically different, yet with something in common, these two listings of the people and events of different generations – strewn realities to be made palpable, and therefore relatable, only with the sensory overload stimulated by the natural phenomena of noise and fire respectively. Take it away … Mr. Billy Joel!
David Trotter’s review in the LRB of the re-discovered and re-published novel, Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan was interesting enough such that I downloaded a copy post-haste. And I read it likewise. Not so the writing up, but then both the novel and the review encouraged some deeper reflections on my part.
Enough that Trotter begins: “Gertrude Trevelyan lived the Virginia Woolf dream: £500 a year and a room of one’s own in which to write experimental novels. […]” And enough that that room has been foremost on my mind (again!) during the last days.
Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan Boiler House Press, 297 pp., November 2022, 978 1 913861 85 8
Whilst now finding herself published as Gertrude T., the times in which the writer lived were such that this and her other works were originally put out in a frenzied world by the androgynous (sounding) ‘G.E.’. Whether this had been her own decision, suggested to or forced upon her, who could say, but it may well have been also a personal swipe at the dynastic overgrowth and the familial predilection to initials. Where exactly she, formerly known as G.E., fits into this constellation is anyone’s guess. To name but a few: there was that distant cousin (so says Trotter): G.M. Trevelyan. But also his elder brothers: C.P, who got the title and the middle brother R.C. – ‘BobTrev’ to his friends, including the Woolfs (this not mentioned by Trotter), and as ‘Bob’ frequently mentioned in Virginia Woolf’s diary and in her letters. It is, though, the first said, George Macaulay T., that gets the treatment in A Room of One’s Own – the preeminent historian of his time was after all just there for the blokes!
History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him […] Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past. […]She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like, had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it.
Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own (Kindle Locations 547-555). Kindle Edition.
This comes after Woolf has unsuccessfully excavated G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England (1926) in search of women through the ages, mused that the contemporary student (of say Newnham) could do such research better than her, and then would be inspired to famously imagine that Shakespeare had a sister called Judith. (The part of the essay that everyone remembers!)
David Trotter claims in his review of Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel that the unusual – obscure, even – title of the book, divulging scant hint of the narrative to follow, derives from a chapter written by Ian Colvin in the final volume of a certain – also, obscure – Universal History of the World in 1927. There is little reason to doubt this. Only in the reading does the title make sense.
Having said that, I admit to some uncertainty as to the sense in which the novel was conceived and intended to be received. Does Trevelyan want to instruct, convert, persuade? Is she calling upon the reader’s good sense of being a citizen of the world – a common sense to navigate a society undergoing radical change? Or is it more personal than that – a work of introspection? An attempt to reconcile the sensory from within with the reality from without? This latter I find plausible – also imaginative and daring. Any wonder that I am undecided when the author may well have been herself, and is studiously tracing her changing perspective in this her chosen narrative.
It may be (as Trotter suggests) that Gertrude Trevelyan was thinking about something that could be broadly described as a novel of ideas – a philosophical tract on the social (dis)order arising out of the inherent (but surely not irreconcilable?) tensions between labor and commerce and, within that context, man and machine. And, then, found in the writing, her own positions were anything but fixed; shifting with the same tempo as the society about her; Trevelyan calling upon her own sensory attributes and experience to navigate through her own journey of rational discovery – in a literary sense – and illustrated well by her characters’ growing sensitivity to the pulsation of progress about them, the growing ‘noise’ of modernity.
[…]He goes home and has supper and lights a pipe while he waits for the wireless stations to close down at ten. He sits and smokes, feet on fender, and waits for the noise to stop. Twenty thousand new houses erected in one year, two hundred and seven persons killed in London streets in three months, wireless station, one of the world’s greatest, completed at Rugby, motor firm turns out forty-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve cars in 1925 against three hundred and thirty-seven in 1919, it is found necessary to install soundproof floors in a mammoth block of flats in Park Lane, the B.B.C. institutes a transmission of dance music until midnight — “dance music the backbone of British broadcasting” — every day with the exception of Sundays. Robert clenches his teeth and tries to concentrate: he thinks if he had Katherine there to keep him to it he might be able to get more done.
Trevelyan, Gertrude. Two Thousand Million Man-Power (p. 64). Boiler House Press. Kindle Edition.
Christopher Clark has a new book. As I have read and enjoyed two of his previous works ( Iron Kingdom on the rise and fall of the Prussians, and The Sleepwalkers which offers a new perspective of how World War One was sought of stumbled into), I will certainly be reading Clark’s newest tome, Revolutionary Spring. The things that were going down in 1848! And at 876 pages, a tome it is! Not alone for that reason, also owing to an extreme backlog of reading material, I fear I will not be getting to it for a while. But Clark’s stuff, however wonderfully written, is dense in subject matter so it is best to be prepared. To this end, here are a pair of links that will encourage.
Firstly, the best primer is probably Christopher Clark’s LRB Winter Lecture in February 2019 – embedded below; and transcribed in the magazine a couple of weeks later as “Why should we think about the Revolutions of 1848 now?” perhaps not verbatim but close to in Vol. 41 No. 5 · 7 March 2019. (I certainly am going to have another look at this!)
LRB Winter Lecture: Prof. Christopher Clark asks why we should think about the Revolutions of 1848 now. Recorded at the British Museum on 15 February 2019.
Then, a couple of excellent reviews: Neal Ascherson’s piece in the LRB (Vol. 45 No. 11 · 1 June 2023) and that from Harold James in Project Syndicate which is titled “The First Polycrisis”; taking up Clark’s terminology and argument of the parallels between that year of crises and our own time.
I was a big fan of David Runciman’s previous podcast Talking Politics that wound down last year (here still on Spotify), and was delighted to discover that he was making a new start. Past Present Future is a weekly podcast (in conjunction with the LRB) discussing the triangulation of those three spaces of time – in culture, society, politics, philosophy, science.
Already a diverse range of subjects and guests has been offered; with episodes as varied as Ian McEwan talking about Italo Calvino’s “The Watchman”, on “Dallas” (the TV soap, that is) and the economics of oil, about the history and threats of space and that of population trajectories – and all the accompanying noise and propaganda. And gladly a return to his History of Ideas series that was previously embedded in Talking Politics. For this latter, it is only David Runciman who speaks to us – an audio essay if you will, and about a significant essay and it’s author.
Fittingly, the first episode can not help but be about Montaigne – he who all but invented the essay form. And then there was one on Hume and on Thoreau, and next week George Orwell (“The Lion and the Unicorn” – this I know!). And just now: Virginia Woolf’s 1929 legendary work “A Room of One’s Own”!
5 March 2024 ….Oh! The from Spotify embedded pod has disappeared. Here it is at LRB.
This episode an excellent companion to the Melvyn Bragg offering I mentioned not long ago. Oh! And Runciman says: the greatest essay of the 20th century. Neither imagined, nor exaggerated by me. He says that. I can say no more. But then there is always more to be said …
So, much more than rules of grammar or the world according to Disney, Past Present Future a welcome addition to my podcast library.
