The Blurb (from Goodreads):
In 2014, Gabrielle Stroud was a very dedicated teacher with over a decade of experience. Months later, she resigned in frustration and despair when she realised that the Naplan-test education model was stopping her from doing the very thing she was best at: teaching individual children according to their needs and talents. Her ground-breaking essay 'Teaching Australia' in the Feb 2016 Griffith Review outlined her experiences and provoked a huge response from former and current teachers around the world. That essay lifted the lid on a scandal that is yet to properly break - that our education system is unfair to our children and destroying their teachers.
In a powerful memoir inspired by her original essay, Gabrielle tells the full story: how she came to teaching, what makes a great teacher, what our kids need from their teachers, and what it was that finally broke her. A brilliant and heart-breaking memoir that cuts to the heart of a vital matter of national importance.
My Thoughts:
I first met Gabbie Stroud when we were on tour together with the Byron Writers Festival. She had written a personal essay for Griffith Review about her decision to quit teaching, which had always been her life vocation. Her essay stirred up a lot of controversy, as more and more teachers began to criticise Australia’s education system. Allen & Unwin asked her if she’d be interested in extending her essay into a book-length memoir, and Teacher is the poignant and powerful result.
All Gabbie Stroud ever wanted to do was teach our children, and inspire them with her own big-hearted warmth, generosity and love of learning.
Instead she found herself broken by a system that cares more for data and demographies than young minds and spirits.
Interweaving her own personal journey towards being a teacher with anecdotes from the classroom, Teacher illuminates the enormous difficulties our teachers face today. Sometimes their students are hungry, bruised, or afraid. Sometimes they are sick, angry, or struggling. Their teacher needs to keep them and their classmates safe and calm, while still trying to instil learning. Teachers are burdened by administrative tasks, curriculum demands, difficult parents, and large numbers of students. They end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and stressed, and often completely burned-out.
Gabbie Stroud shines a penetrating light on all that is wrong with the Australian education system and how it fails both our children and our teachers. Impossible to read without choking up, this is an eloquent rallying cry for change and should be mandatory reading for all politicians and policy-makers. Luminous and heart-rending.
You might also like to read my review of An Odyssey: A Father, A son and An Epic by Daniel Medelsohn:
BOOK REVIEW: An Odyssey: A Father, A Son & An Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
From the New York Times bestselling author, Lauren Willig, comes this scandalous New York Gilded Age novel full of family secrets, affairs, and even murder.
Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life: he’s the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, she grew up in a Tudor manor in England, they had a whirlwind romance in London, they have three year old twins on whom they dote, and he’s recreated her family home on the banks of the Hudson and renamed it Illyria. Yes, there are rumors that she’s having an affair with the architect, but rumors are rumors and people will gossip. But then Bayard is found dead with a knife in his chest on the night of their Twelfth Night Ball, Annabelle goes missing, presumed drowned, and the papers go mad. Bay’s sister, Janie, forms an unlikely alliance with a reporter to uncover the truth, convinced that Bay would never have killed his wife, that it must be a third party, but the more she learns about her brother and his wife, the more everything she thought she knew about them starts to unravel. Who were her brother and his wife, really? And why did her brother die with the name George on his lips?
My Thoughts:
A very clever historical murder mystery, The English Wife begins with the point of view of Janie, a subdued young woman from a very wealthy American family. She is at a Twelfth Night ball at her brother Bayard’s immense mock-Tudor mansion in winter 1899, doing her best to keep out of the way of the glittering socialite guests. Then her brother is found dying, a jewelled dagger thrust into his heart. He dies with a name on his lips: George …
To make matters even worse, his beautiful wife Annabelle is gone. Janie is sure she saw a drowned woman in the river, but no-one believes her. The case is a scandal, and Janie does not know what to believe. She is determined to uncover the truth, and so makes an unlikely alliance with a journalist.
The story then switches to the point of view of a young woman named Georgie, struggling to make a living as an actress in London in 1894. She meets a rich and handsome American gentleman named Bayard van Duyvil, who seems to promise her an escape from her precarious existence. Georgie has secrets in her past, however, secrets she dare not confess …
This book was so good, I devoured it in just a few readings. A fabulously Gothic romantic mystery with lots of clever banter and surprising plot twists.
You might also like to read my review of The Lady's Slipper by Deborah Swift:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-ladys-slipper-by-deborah-swift
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Husband, father, drag queen, sex worker, wife. Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner is a love letter to an extraordinary ordinary life. In Sandra Pankhurst she discovered a woman capable of taking a lifetime of hostility and transphobic abuse and using it to care for some of society's most in-need people.
Sandra Pankhurst founded her trauma cleaning business to help people whose emotional scars are written on their houses. From the forgotten flat of a drug addict to the infested home of a hoarder, Sandra enters properties and lives at the same time. But few of the people she looks after know anything of the complexity of Sandra's own life. Raised in an uncaring home, Sandra's miraculous gift for warmth and humour in the face of unspeakable personal tragedy mark her out as a one-off.
My Thoughts:
I had some time free at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and so slipped in to hear Sarah Krasnostein talk about her debut work of biography, The Trauma Cleaner. I had seen people talking about it and recommending it on social media, and I knew it had won the $100,000 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, but otherwise I knew very little about it.
Sarah Krasnostein spoke so intelligently about her transformative journey in writing this book that I bought it at once, and asked her to sign it.
Basically, Sarah was at an academic conference one day when she saw a tall blonde woman sitting at a table with an oxygen mask and a fanned-out pile of brochures about her company. ‘Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services’. Sarah was intrigued, picked up a copy and read it through several times.
“People do not understand about body fluids,” the brochure read. “Bodily fluids are like acids. They have all the same enzymes that break down our food. When these powerful enzymes come into contact with furnishing and the like, deterioration is rapid. I have known enzymes to soak through a sofa and to eat at the springs, mould growing throughout a piece of furniture and I have witnessed the rapid deterioration of a contaminated mattress.”
Wanting to know more, Sarah rang the tall blonde woman – whose name was Sandra Pankhurst – and asked if she could interview her.
I find this action of hers intriguing as well. Sarah Krasnostein was not a journalist or a writer by trade. She was a law lecturer and researcher with a doctorate in criminal law. What deep psychological need in Sarah drove her to want to meet a trauma cleaner, and then spend the next four years following her around?
Whatever her own motivations, Sarah Krasnostein has an infallible instinct for a good story. Sandra Pankhurst’s life was shocking, heartbreaking, and powerful. Born a boy, adopted at birth, abused and neglected, he became a husband and father, then a drag-queen and sex-worker, and then undertook gender reassignment surgery and became a woman. Totally reinventing herself, Sandra began to work at a funeral parlour and then married a man she met at his wife’s cremation. Energetic and ambitious, she runs a business with him and stands for local council. When the business fails, she begins a cleaning company to support them both, and soon realises that the real money is in trauma cleaning.
So what does a trauma cleaner do? Her business card says:
* Hoarding and Pet Hoarding Clean up * Squalor/ Trashed Properties * Preparing the Home, for Home Help Agencies to Attend * Odor Control * Homicide, Suicide and Death Scenes * Deceased Estates * Mold, Flood and Fire Remediation * Methamphetamine Lab Clean Up * Industrial Accidents * Cell Cleaning
For three and a half years, Sarah Krasnostein followed Sandra Pankhurst in and out of filthy, stinking houses and watched as she returned them to sparkling, sweet-smelling order. The first job Sarah attended was the apartment of a 35-year-old heroin junkie who had overdosed and her body had not been found for two weeks. Sarah was 35 at the time herself, a confronting parallel.
A chapter about one of Sandra’s clients is followed by a chapter about Sandra herself, the two timelines weaving in and out of each other until we reach the end of the tale.
Sandra is an unreliable narrator, and so not an easy subject for a biography:
‘Many of the facts of Sandra’s past are either entirely forgotten, endlessly interchangeable, neurotically ordered, conflicting or loosely tethered to reality. She is open about the fact that drugs may have impacted her memory … It is also my belief that her memory loss is trauma-induced,’ Sarah Krasnostein writes. So The Trauma Cleaner is also a meditation on memory and forgetting, trust and lies, and this philosophical element of the book adds an extra depth and interest.
But the real star of the book is Sandra Pankhurst herself – her warmth, humour, compassion and grit. This is truly an astonishing life story, discovered by accident and told with real grace and thoughtfulness.
You might also like to read my review of Butterfly On A Pin by Alannah Hill:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-butterfly-on-a-pin-by-alannah-hill
This week Vasilisa the Wise & Other Tales of Brave Young Women is finally launched into the world.
To celebrate I thought I would explore the history of the titular tale, which is one of the best-known and best-loved Russian fairy-tales. An old oral tale, it was transcribed by Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev between 1855-67 and first published in his collection, Russian Fairy Tales.
There are many different versions of the story, many of which are called ‘Vasilisa (or Vassilisa) the Beautiful’. I deliberately chose the title which did not focus on the heroine’s beauty but rather on her wit and wisdom.
In nearly all of the tales, a young woman is sent by her cruel step-mother to fetch fire from Baba-Yaga, a terrifying witch who lives in the midst of a dark forest and rides about in a giant iron mortar (a bowl for grinding food), which she steers with a pestle (the grinding tool).
Baba-Yaga lives in a house with chicken legs and is known to eat children. The hut has a life of its own. It walks about, spins in circles, and emits bloodcurdling screeches. A fence made of human bones surrounds the hut, topped with skulls whose blazing eye sockets light up the forest.
There are many stories about Baba-Yaga in Slavic myths. The very earliest ones refer to her as ‘Snake-Baba’. In pre-Christian mythology, snakes were not seen as evil. They were instead powerful emblems of rebirth and transformation, since they shed their old skins for new. Snakes was therefore seen as wise and powerful beings that had much to teach about the natural cycles of time and the seasons.
It is thought that the term ‘yaga’ is a corruption of the Russian words ‘uzkii’ which means ‘narrow’ or ‘snakelike’, and ‘uzh’ which means ‘grass-snake’, both developing from the Old Slavic word ‘ужь’.
The same old Slavic word led to the Latin words ‘anguis’ (snake), ‘anguinus’ (pertaining to a snake), and ‘angustus’ (meaning to squeeze or tighten like a snake), which interestingly enough also led eventually to the English word ‘anguish’.
The word ‘baba’ is linked to ‘babushka’, which means grandmother, but in its shorter form means simply any woman, young or old.
So in the earliest tales, Baba-Yaga is not a figure of evil, but rather a wild, dark, wise figure whose role is to help the heroine change and grow.
Once upon a time, older women were seen as ‘crones’, the keepers of wisdom and tradition for the family or clan. These wise women were thought to understood the mysteries of birth, life and death. Often they were healers and midwives, who brought babies into the world and cared for those who were dying.
Baba-Yaga contains within her these wise old women, as well as later ideas of witches as ugly and evil.
Her links to nature and the cycle of time are emphasised by her servants, the White Horseman, the Red Horseman and the Black Horseman, who she calls, 'My Bright Dawn, my Red Sun and my Dark Midnight' because they control daybreak, sunrise, and nightfall.
Vasilisa comes to her hut searching for fire, which symbolically means the light of wisdom. She has to endure a series of trials and tribulations, but is helped in her quest by the little wooden doll given to her by her dead mother. The doll symbolises the ancient maternal wisdom of the crone, but is also Vasilia’s own intuition, helping her find her way.
Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés interprets the story of Baba-Yaga in her seminal work on fairy-tales, Women who Run with the Wolves. She wrote:
To my mind, the old Russian tale “Vasalisa” is a woman’s initiation story with few essential bones astray. It is about the realization that most things are not as they seem. As women we call upon our intuition and instincts in order to sniff things out. We use all our senses to wring the truth from things, to extract nourishment from our own ideas, to see what there is to see to know what there is to know, to be the keepers of our own creative fires, and to have intimate knowing about the Life/Death/ Life cycles of all nature – that is an initiated woman.
Stories with Vasalisa as a central character are told in Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland and throughout all the Baltic countries. In some instances, the tale is commonly called “Wassilissa the Wise.” I find evidence of its archetypal roots dating back at least to the old horse-Goddess cults which predate classical Greek culture. This tale carries ages-old psychic mapping about induction into the underworld of the wild female.’
I certainly see the tale as one of female liberation. Vasilisa journeys from a position of childlike submission to one of strength, wisdom and independence. The little wooden doll advises and supports her, but Vasilisa herself must choose what actions to take. Step by slow step, she turns from a girl into a woman. She sheds her old skin and is reborn.
You may also like to read my writing blog of Fairy Tale retellings:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/spotlight-fairy-retellings
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
The legendary figure of Kate Ferrars, the infamous highwaywoman, is brought gloriously to life in this gripping tale of infatuation, betrayal and survival.
'The distant thrum of galloping hooves conjures nothing but doubt and fear these days.'
1648: Civil war is devastating England. The privileged world Katherine Ferrars knows is crumbling under Cromwell's army, and as an orphaned heiress, she has no choice but to do her duty and marry for the sake of family.
But as her marriage turns into a prison, and her fortune is decimated by the war, Kate becomes increasingly desperate. So when she meets the enigmatic Ralph Chaplin, she seizes the chance he offers. Their plan is daring and brutal, but it's an escape from poverty and the shackles of convention. They both know if they're caught, there's only one way it can end...
My Thoughts:
I absolutely loved Katherine Clements’s debut novel The Crimson Ribbon which was inspired by the true-life story of Elizabeth Poole, a mystic and writer during the English Civil War who became famous for her boldness and vision (she told Oliver Cromwell not to execute the king, for example).
It was one of my Best Books of 2013, and so I was excited to hear Katherine Clements had published a new book, also set during the English Civil War.
The Silvered Heart tells the story of Lady Katherine Ferrars, an impoverished noblewoman-turned-highwaywoman. The book begins when she is only thirteen, and is travelling to her wedding with the son of another aristocratic family. The Cavaliers and the Roundheads are at war, though, and so the roads are dangerous. Her carriage is held up by highwaymen, and young Kate barely escapes with her life. The events of that day foreshadow what will happen to her later, as she struggles to survive the imploding of her world.
I have always loved books set during the English Civil War and never understood why it has not become as popular a period as Tudor or Elizabethan times. It has everything. Bloody battles, betrayals, executions, kings-in-hiding, star-crossed lovers, spies, witch-hunts, highwaymen and, of course, the legend of the Wicked Lady - a woman who tried to shape her own fate by taking to the roads. The character of Lady Katherine Ferrars is fascinating. She’s headstrong, impetuous, romantic and, at times, both selfish and unkind. This makes her seem so real – she just gallops off the page.
The Silvered Heart is an exciting and engaging mix of drama, romance, and history – I really loved it and hope Katherine Clements is writing another book.
You might be interested to read another of my reviews The Lady's Slipper by Deborah Swift:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-ladys-slipper-by-deborah-swift
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.
But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.
My Thoughts:
This year I travelled to Greece for research for a novel I am writing, and I set out to read as many books as I could set in the Hellenic Republic. I was particularly interested in novels inspired by Greek myth, and so bought this on the recommendation of a friend.
What a brilliant recommendation! It is truly spellbinding.
Circe is, of course, the witch in Homer’s The Odyssey who turns Odysseus’s men into swine. Madeline Miller’s reimagining of the story put Circe right at the heart of the narrative, a young woman struggling to find her way in a world filled with lust, violence, and misogyny.
The daughter of Helios the sun-god and a nymph, Circe seems to have inherited none of her parents’ glamour and beauty. She falls in love but is betrayed, and in her grief and rage turns her rival into a dreadful ravenous monster. Her own power frightens her, and those around her, and she is banished to live alone on a remote island. But Circe’s family is at the heart of the ancient Greek world, and its power struggles swirl around her not matter how much she struggles to be free. She encounters the Minotaur, Medea and Odysseus, among many others, as she slowly grows into her powers. And the ending! It had me in tears.
One of my best books of the year!
You might also like to read my review of Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood here:
BOOK REVIEW: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Discovery. Desire. Deception. A wondrously imagined tale of two female botanists, separated by more than a century, in a race to discover a life-saving flower . . .
In Victorian England, headstrong adventuress Elizabeth takes up her late father's quest for a rare, miraculous plant. She faces a perilous sea voyage, unforeseen dangers and treachery that threatens her entire family.
In present-day Australia, Anna finds a mysterious metal box containing a sketchbook of dazzling watercolours, a photograph inscribed 'Spring 1886' and a small bag of seeds. It sets her on a path far from her safe, carefully ordered life, and on a journey that will force her to face her own demons.
In this spellbinding botanical odyssey of discovery, desire and deception, Kayte Nunn has so exquisitely researched nineteenth-century Cornwall and Chile you can almost smell the fragrance of the flowers, the touch of the flora on your fingertips . . .
My Thoughts:
One of my favourite genres of fiction are books that weave together two separate narratives, one set in contemporary times and one set in the past. I also really love books about gardens and flowers and secrets and danger. So I had high hopes for Kayte Nunn’s new book, The Botanist’s Daughter, which promised so many elements I love.
The story begins in present-day Australia, when Anna finds a mysterious old notebook and an engraved metal box hidden inside the wall of her dead grandmother’s house. The box is locked, and Anna does not have the key.
The narrative then moves back in time to Cornwall, 1886, and the story of Elizabeth, a strong-willed heiress and the daughter of a botanist who has recently died. The metal box is hers, and contains boots that she hates. Chafing against the constraints of Victorian society, as exemplified by those tight, uncomfortable boots, Elizabeth decides to set out on her father’s last planned expedition, to Argentina and Chile …
It’s a marvellous beginning, and the story gallops on from there. Elizabeth discovers her father was searching for a rare flower with miraculous powers, and that many other dangerous men are also on its trail. Anna – who is a botanist herself - discovers that the box contains a sketchbook of exquisite botanical drawings, a photograph, and a bag of seeds. She is intrigued despite herself, and begins to try and unravel the mystery. But Anna has secrets of her own, and her quest threatens to bring them out of the shadows.
The Botanist’s Daughter is an utterly riveting story of two women, divided by a century in time, but united by their quest to discover a rare and dangerous flower said to have the power to heal as well as kill. Fast-moving and full of surprises, The Botanist's Daughter brings the exotic world of 19th-century Chile thrillingly to life while delivering a poignant and heart-warming story of romance and new beginnings in its contemporary thread. A must-read for lovers of Kimberly Freeman and Mary-Rose MacColl.
You might also like to read my review of The Peacock Summer by Hannah Richell:
BOOK REVIEW: The Peacock Summer by Hannah Richell
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
A young woman is both a bard--and a warrior--in this thrilling historical fantasy from the author of the Sevenwaters novels.
Eighteen-year-old Liobhan is a powerful singer and an expert whistle player. Her brother has a voice to melt the hardest heart, and a rare talent on the harp. But Liobhan's burning ambition is to join the elite warrior band on Swan Island. She and her brother train there to compete for places, and find themselves joining a mission while still candidates. Their unusual blend of skills makes them ideal for this particular job, which requires going undercover as traveling minstrels. For Swan Island trains both warriors and spies.
Their mission: to find and retrieve a precious harp, an ancient symbol of kingship, which has gone mysteriously missing. If the instrument is not played at the upcoming coronation, the candidate will not be accepted and the people could revolt. Faced with plotting courtiers and tight-lipped druids, an insightful storyteller, and a boorish Crown Prince, Liobhan soon realizes an Otherworld power may be meddling in the affairs of the kingdom. When ambition clashes with conscience, Liobhan must make a bold decision and is faced with a heartbreaking choice. . .
My Thoughts:
One of my all-time favourite writers, Juliet never disappoints. I love her signature mix of history, folklore and romance, all written in beautiful lyrical language and with a powerful and wise message of the importance of caring for this beautiful world of ours at its heart.
The heroine of the tale is a young woman named Liobhan who desperately wants to be chosen to join a band of elite warriors. She and her brother Broc are training hard, though they still have time to sing and create music.
Their musical talent finds them chosen for a dangerous mission, in which they must disguise themselves as travelling minstrels. The harp of kings has been stolen, and they must try and get it back in time for the coronation of the new ruler.
All sorts of danger awaits them and their companions, including a journey into the magical world of the faerie. They had made the harp and given it to humans as a symbol of a peaceful accord between the two races. Liobhan must find out if they were the cause of the harp’s disappearance, and what that means to the fragile accord. A beautiful way to while away a few hours.
You might also like to read my review of The Girl in the Tower by katherine Arden:
BOOK REVIEW: The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden
‘Help me, sweet Love!’ she cried, and then began to weep.
‘Poor Queen Blanchelys!’ said Love. ‘Your rose-tree is dead then.’
‘My tree is dead,’ sobbed Queen Blanchelys, ‘and the King loves me no more. Ah, tell me who has killed my tree?’
‘Your cousin Zaire has killed it,’ said Love. ‘She asked Envy to help her, and Envy has given her a viper, which she laid at the tree’s roots, and it has spat its deadly venom on to the red heart (of the rose) … and killed it.’
‘Tell me, then, how to make it live again,’ gasped the Queen.
‘There is only one thing in the world that can do that!’ said Love.
‘And what is that?’ asked the Queen.
The blood from your own heart,’ said Love.
Mary de Morgan, ‘Seeds of Love’
On A Pincushion & Other Fairy Tales (1877)
Ask anyone for the names of the great fairy-tale tellers, and most people will answer Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. A few may summon up the names Andrew Lang, Oscar Wilde or George Macdonald.
But hardly anyone will mention Mary de Morgan, even though her literary tales were as beautiful, strange and eerie as any told by the famous men above.
Mary de Morgan was born in London in February 1850, a month of wild storms in which windows were broken by hail, slates were torn off roofs, chimneys were blown down, and ships were wrecked upon the shore. She was the youngest daughter of the brilliant mathematician Augustus de Morgan and his wife Sophia, who was tutor to Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and an accomplished mathematician herself.
When Mary was three years old, her sister Alice died from measles at the age of 15. This great sorrow drew her mother into spiritualism, and she began to hold séances in her home and to attend lectures and demonstrations by mediums. At the age of six, Mary began to dream about Alice, seeing her playing in a garden attended by doves and haloed with gold. Her mother Sophia began to record Mary’s dreams and other psychic occurrences (including Mary’s uncanny ability to tell people’s futures from reading their palms). Sophia de Morgan’s book From Matter to Spirit: The Result of Ten Years’ Experience in Spirit Manifestation was published in 1862, when Mary was thirteen. It is one of the seminal work on spiritualism in Victorian times.
A year or so later, Mary and her favourite brother, William de Morgan, met William Morris and were drawn into the circle of Pre-Raphaelites. William de Morgan eagerly adopted the principles and philosophies of this group of free-thinking bohemians, and became a famous potter, designer and novelist.
Mary and her brother were frequent guests at the Morris home, and were well acquainted with Edward Burne-Jones and his family, and with Christina Rossetti and her artist-brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Mary was known for her boldness and outspokenness. She once told the landscape artist Henry Holiday: ‘All artists are fools! Look at yourself and Mr. Solomon.’
Agnes Poynter, Georgiana Burne-Jones’s sister, wrote of her at the time: ‘She chattered awfully, and Louie, she is only just fifteen. I believe a judicious course of snubbing would do her good!’
Mary’s mother Sophia was an early campaigner for women’s rights, attending meetings and marches, and signing the famous petition of 1866. From the age of sixteen, Mary was active in the suffragette movement too, and was also involved with her mother in the fight against animal cruelty.
Her family were sadly riddled with consumption, and in Mary’s late teens she lost her her brother George, her sister Chrissie and her father. Sophia and Mary moved in with William in his rather ramshackle artist’s lodging, and Mary began to write stories of her own. Her first publication was in 1873, a collection of stories co-authored with a female friend, Edith Helen Dixon, and entitled Six by Two: Stories of Old Schoolfellows.
In 1873, at a Christmas party at the Burne-Jones’s house in Kensington, Mary entertained the children by telling them fairy-tales. Her audience included Jenny and May Morris, Philip and Margaret Burne-Jones, and their cousins, Rudyard and Alice Kipling, and Angela and Denis Mackail.
The children were enchanted and kept begging her for more. Mary wrote down the stories she told them, and these were published in 1877 under the title On A Pin-Cushion, when she was just twenty-seven.
Some of the tales in this collection are just extraordinary. There’s ‘The Story of Vain Lamorna’, a pretty girl who is badly scarred in her quest for beauty and only then realises the emptiness of vanity; ‘The Seeds of Love’, a tragic tale of love gone wrong; and ‘The Toy Princess’, a subversive tale about a princess whose fairy godmother rescued her from the stifling etiquette of the royal court and replaced her with a robot-princess who only spoke a few stock polite phrases. The real princess is brought up by a fisherman and his family and learns the value of hard work and true love.
I love this last story of Mary de Morgan’s in particular, and retold it for my collection of feminist fairy-tales, Vasilisa the Wise & Other Tales of Brave Young Women (illustrated by Lorena Carrington & published by Serenity Press).
Another fairy-tale collection, Necklace of Princess Florimonde, was published in 1880. The stories show her strong liberal philosophies, with tales like ‘The Bread of Discontent’ illuminating the evils of poor-quality mass-produced goods, in contrast to the loving work of artisans and craftspeople.
In 1887, Mary’s brother William married another artist, Evelyn Pickering, who (under her married name, Evelyn de Morgan) became one of the most accomplished (and mystical) painters of the later Pre-Raphaelite movement. Mary had to move out and live on her own, supporting herself as a typist while she continued to write. Her tragic novel of social realism, ‘A Choice of Chance’, was published in that same year.
Her friendship with William Morris continued to deepen, and she became involved with his activities with the early British socialists. She undertook social work in East End slums, attended suffragette rallies, and in 1899, joined Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘Women’s League’.
In 1898, she was one of the few people admitted to William Morris’s bedchamber as he lay dying of tuberculosis. She helped nurse him and told him stories to keep him entertained, and helped his wife Jane and daughter May embroider the famous bed-hangings which can now be seen at Kelmscott Manor.
In 1900, Mary’s last book ‘Wind Fairies’ was published, and five years later she went to Egypt to run a reformatory school for girls. She died in Cairo in 1907, of tuberculosis.
In 1963, Victor Gollanz published The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde – The Complete Fairy Stories of Mary de Morgan, with an introduction by Roger Lancelyn Green. Mary is quoted as saying: ‘I am so thankful I have only a small income – it is so delightful planning things and deciding what one can afford. It would bore me to death to be rich!’
I find the life and work of Mary de Morgan utterly fascinating. I badly wanted to tell her story in my novel Beauty in Thorns, inspired by the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood, but in the end her chapters ended up on the cutting-room floor. Maybe one day I will turn them into a novel!
It has been suggested that Mary de Morgan’s stories have been forgotten because she was a woman, and certainly her feminism was radial and confronting for the times in which she lived.
It may also be because many of her tales ended tragically, eschewing the traditional ‘happy ever after’ denouements of classic fairy-tales.
Not all stories end happily, however, and there is something so powerful and sorrowful about Mary de Morgan’s struggle to change the world through her storytelling.
‘… Then she kissed him softly thrice, and bid him adieu, and went out of the palace to her dear rose-tree in the garden. It was nothing now but a bare black stump. So Queen Blanchelys lay down on the ground, and put her arms round the trunk, and from the dead branch she tore a long smooth thorn, and pierced her heart with it, and the drops of blood trickled to the roots of the tree, and at once the serpent at the roots shrivelled and died, and the tree again began to bud and sprout.
When the King awoke in the morning the first thing he saw was the Queen’s letter, and he took it and read it at once, and as he read his cheeks turned pale, and he sighed bitterly, and then he called his courtiers, and told them what had happened, and they all went out into the garden to the rose-tree, under which lay dead poor Queen Blanchelys.
But the tree which before was only a piece of dead wood was covered with green leaves and rose-buds.
The King kissed the Queen’s pale face, and ordered that there should be a grand funeral, and that she should be buried under the rose-tree, and from that day forth the King thought of no-one but Queen Blanchelys … but Zaire was stripped of all her fine dresses and jewels … and was banished from the land, and had to beg her bread for door to door.
But when the rose-tree burst into bloom, the roses which were white before were as red as the blood which sprang from the Queen’s heart …’
Mary de Morgan, ‘Seeds of Love’
On A Pincushion & Other Fairy Tales (1877)
