December Articles about Bronte’s Mistress

It’s 2021, which means it’s no longer my debut year, but I still have one final monthly roundup of articles about my novel, Bronte’s Mistress. Check out the February/March, April/May, June/July, August, September, October and November editions for a trip down memory lane, but today I’m covering coverage from December 2020. 

In celebration of the season, I was the speaker at the Oxford and Cambridge Society of New England’s (virtual) Christmas Party. It was so much fun sharing how I researched and wrote my book with fellow Oxford alumni, and, yes, so Cambridge people too (catch a recording here).

My final podcast appearance of the year, with New Books in Historical Fiction, also aired. I was in conversation with fellow novelist C.P. Lesley, who wrote a great article, “The Corset of Culture” on Lydia Robinson’s dilemma in Bronte’s Mistress.

My book was named one of the best of the year by bloggers The Literate Quilter and Writer Gurl NY, while the Captivated Reader blog listed my Austen vs. the Brontes discussion with The Jane Austen Society author Natalie Jenner one of the best virtual author events of the year (listen to our debate here).

And Bookreporter included Bronte’s Mistress in their annual roundup of Bets On picks. Carol Fitzgerald’s roundup of 40+ of the best books of the year is well worth watching, so make a cup of tea, settle back and enjoy!

Looking back at the year, here are some quick (not very scientifically counted) stats of what went down (mostly since my novel’s release in August):

I wrote 16+ personal essays about the book, many of which are linked in these August and September summaries. 

I appeared on 10+ radio shows and podcasts, all of which are listed on my website. 

I spoke at 30+ virtual events (check out the blog posts tagged "Video" for some that were recorded).

I kept track of 100+ articles about the book and/or interviews with me, but am sure I missed some!

I am so grateful to the journalists, bloggers, Bookstagrammers, YouTubers, reviewers, authors, bookstores and librarians who have supported me on this most unusual of debut years. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU! 

The Bronte’s Mistress paperback comes out in June, and I’ve already started receiving some 2021 coverage, but I’ll be pivoting to bimonthly press summaries again to blog a little more about nineteenth-century literature and culture, and a little less about my book. 

Don’t forget that you can always contact me—on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. I also send a monthly email newsletter (sign up below) and Bronte’s Mistress is available in hardcover, audiobook and e-book now. 

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VIDEO: OxCamNE Christmas Party 2020: Finola Austin on Bronte's Mistress

 

A ‘Modern’ Approach to Prostitution: George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession

You think that people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it's not: it's all only a pretence, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet.

Mrs Warren’s assessment of Victorian society—that commonly-held morality is a pretence, a cover for the ‘way things really are’—is one shared by many 21^st-century commentators on the period. The modern novels I’ve read as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series are obsessed with showing the depravity below the façade—child abuse, racism, pornography and, most frequently, prostitution, the subject of George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 and the eponymous Mrs Warren’s profession.

Felicity Kendal as Mrs Warren

The Victorians of our cultural imagination are table leg covering prudes or sex-crazed bodice rippers (most often, hypocritically, both), but, in our obsession with the lascivious and scandalous, are we missing the point? Shaw’s play, banned at the time for its subject matter, may also ascribe to this narrative of repression and duplicity, but for him the truth about prostitution is more based in economics, than eroticism.

This is what prostitution means to Mrs Warren:

It means a new dress every day; it means theatres and balls every night; it means having the pick of all the gentlemen in Europe at your feet; it means a lovely house and plenty of servants; it means the choicest of eating and drinking; it means everything you like, everything you want, everything you can think of. 

So far this seems like the standard seduction speech, as Mrs Warren lays out the contrast between the opulent way of life provided by sex work and her daughter Vivie’s existence now:

And what are you here? A mere drudge, toiling and moiling early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses a year.

Yet, in the play’s last moments, the argument between the two women becomes something much more interesting than a confrontation between vice and virtue, riches and poverty. Mrs Warren tells Vivie that it isn’t just the money that attracts her (after all, she could have retired from this life long ago but continues to run a network of brothels):

I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there for me to do? The life suits me: I'm fit for it and not for anything else. If I didn't do it somebody else would; so I don't do any real harm by it. And then it brings in money; and I like making money.

Mrs Warren wants to work, and her claim that she is fit for no other profession is more of an assessment of the employment options open to women in the period than a commentary on her own moral character.

Vivie tells her mother that they are more alike than her mother imagines—that there is a point of similarity between the ‘modern’ Cambridge-educated girl and her mother, a bawd:

No: I am my mother's daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must make more money than I spend.

And Vivie does not reject her mother on moral grounds. The decision to cut her off is purely pragmatic:

I don't think I'm more prejudiced or straitlaced than you: I think I'm less. I'm certain I'm less sentimental.

At the end of the play Vivie decides she will never marry, but will instead be an accountant. Her choice mirrors her mother’s almost exactly, except that Vivie’s profession a) will be sanctioned by society and b) won’t subject her to the possibility of motherhood (the cause of Mrs Warren’s sentimentality).

Shaw may share his subject matter with many of today’s neo-Victorian writers, but the difference is he doesn’t explore sex work in order to titillate. He uses prostitution as a lens through which to explore the selfishness of a capitalist system, painting a dark view of society, even as women’s employment options improve within it.

What would you like the Secret Victorianist to blog about next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

University Greek Plays, in America

A couple of weeks ago the Secret Victorianist attended a production of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, staged by the students of Barnard College here in New York City. It was my second ‘Greek Play’, as I was also at Oxford’s most recent Greek Play in 2014—a production of Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers. And, during my Masters, I had also spent time investigating the homosocial and publishing culture around the 1900 Cambridge Greek Play—Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—(a subject I’ve blogged about before).

The Harvard Greek Play in 1906

My night at Barnard however made me wonder about the history of the Greek Play in America. Were American universities slower to join in the nineteenth-century renaissance of performances in Ancient Greek than their British counterparts? The programme told me Barnard’s Greek Play was an annual event, but only one dating back to 1977. I wanted to do some more digging to find out.

What I found was a fascinating journal article from the Classical Journal, published October 1910. D.D. Hains’s ‘Greek Plays in America’ is a topline summary of American institutions’ performances of classical plays in ancient languages, and translation, and shows the speed with which these universities took to the tradition being established in Britain.

Oxford’s first Greek Play was an Agamemnon given in 1880, which was later repeated in Eton, Harrow and London. Cambridge’s inaugural Greek Play, Ajax, came two years later in 1882.

But Harvard University in fact nearly pipped Oxbridge to the post. A production of Antigone was originally planned to celebrate the opening of the Sanders’ Theatre in 1876, but was ultimately abandoned. And so Harvard’s first Greek play, Oedipus Tyrannus, was actually performed in May 1881. The venture was an immediate success. The five performances drew audiences totaling 6,000 and a professional company took the production, in translation, to New York and Boston for an additional two weeks.

The University of Toronto's Antigone (1882)

I was also surprised to find that the second university Greek Play on the American continent was Canadian. Toronto University staged Antigone in 1882 and, again, in 1894.

The University of Pennsylvania can lay claim to the first Greek comedy, the Acharnians, in 1886, while Smith College was the first with a female cast, producing Sophocles’ Electra in 1889.

Haines estimates 101 performances based on Ancient Greek drama at 47 American institutions between 1881 and 1910, with around half as many in Latin from a slightly reduced pool of universities. His conclusion that ‘the increasing number of such performances augurs happily for the future of the classics in our schools and colleges’ might have been slightly optimistic, but the tradition does live on at schools like Barnard, even as the popularity of a classical education has waned.

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Sexing up the Cambridge Greek Play

F.H. Lucas as Clytemnestra (Granta souvenir)

In the 1892 novel The Junior Dean by Alan St Aubyn (the pseudonym of Frances Marshall), Cambridge students are described attending the hotly anticipated Greek Play – the institution which began with the 1882 Ajax, and which was to become triennial in the years which followed. The narrator explains:

‘the Newnhamites and the Girtonites had seized upon the most favourable position in the house, and maintained it…there had been great searchings of heart at Newnham for some weeks before the Greek play, and the Cambridge dressmakers had had a bad time of it.’

Clearly here the Greek Play prompts the same attention to dress and display as a social event, while the spectacle of young men performing on stage – some of them as male characters, others as female – is imagined as having erotic appeal for the women in the audience, students of Newnham and Girton Colleges, founded in 1871 and 1869 respectively.

Yet while it is women here who subject the performers to scrutiny (at the same time hoping to be scrutinised themselves), elsewhere in contemporary commentary on the Greek Play it is the homoerotic potential of staging Greek drama which is most frequently stressed. Much of this seems to have been related to the symposiastic relationship between teacher and student suggested by Greek models. Against this backdrop, gender confusion is as much a part of the Greek Play experience as the ‘historically accurate’ sets commissioned by the Greek Play Committee or the texts of the plays themselves. A reviewer of the 1900 Cambridge Greek Play (Aeschylus’s Agamemnon) for the Manchester Guardian (identified as J. B. Atkins by The Spectator) argues that:

‘no one has really been seized by the spirit of the Greek play…who does not see that it is right and natural to speak of every man who plays a woman’s part as “she”.’

He records the actor playing Agamemnon (Humphrey Hastings King) as being disgruntled to see ‘Clytemnestra’ (Francis Herman Lucas) smoking a pipe – spoiling the illusion of his femininity. And lists one of stage manager (and founder of the Greek Play) John Willis Clark’s responsibilities as training actors to have suitably graceful arms. Atkins’s newspaper article (like several others) also concentrates on the overlap between participation in the Greek Play and sporting prowess – recording that members of the play’s chorus spoke Ancient Greek on the hockey pitch to ensure victory. This emphasis on sport on one level reasserts the masculinity of the performers, but on another fetishes the performers’ bodies still further. In a memoir on the origins of the Greek Play (published in the 1898 Amateur Clubs & Actors by W.G. Elliott) Clark has no qualms in describing his casting process for the hero of the 1882 Ajax:

‘his [‘Jim Stephen’s] splendid physique pointed him out as almost an ideal Ajax.'

Cambridge Graphic illustration: 'An Argive
sailor going home'

The early years of the Greek Play in Cambridge are a fascinating and unique study, bringing together ancient Greek culture and that of the late nineteenth century, with the accompanying tensions about the distinctness of the two’s sexual practices, while dealing with the same suspicion of performance I have discussed with relation to female sexuality elsewhere. Sexual scandal had seen amateur dramatics banned for a period in Oxford in 1870, following the arrest of two students for, in the words of The Times ‘personating women at public resort for unlawful purposes’. Keeping women off the stage, here for the historical purity of the Greek Play, could be just as dangerous, just as sexually charged, as when they were allowed on it.

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