Digital Archive Storytelling
Recovering the Neglected Narratives of Women Writers From the Early Modern Period (1550-1700 C.E.)_
_Through the Digital Documentation of Their Material Culture_
The (Prototype) PhD Research Blog of Erica Robert Pallo
THE WOMEN
In Alphabetical Order
EARLY MODERN PERIOD IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
Material Culture Made By Women Writers
Mary Astell (1666-1731)
(English) Writer, Philosopher, Rhetorician
Mary MacLeod (Màiri NicLeòid) (c. 1615-c. 1706)
(Scottish Gaelic) Poet, Songwriter,
Aphra Behn (1640 ? -1689)
(English) Playwright, Poet, Translator, Fiction Writer, Spy
Elizabeth Melville (c.1578-c.1640)
(Scottish) Poet
Elizabeth Cavendish (c.1521/27-1608)
(English) Businesswoman, House Designer, Letter Writer
Mary Sidney (Herbert) (1561-1621)
(English) Poet, Author, Translator, Literary Patron, Alchemist
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)
(English) Philosopher, Poet, Scientist, Fiction Writer, Playwright
Mary Trye (fl. 1675)
(English) Chemical Physician, Medical Book Writer
Anne Halkett (1623-1699)
(English) Medical Practitioner, Auto-Biographer, Poet
Hannah Woolley (1622-1675)
(English) Cookbook Author, Household Management/Behavior Advisor
Anna Hume (fl. 1644)
(Scottish) Translator, Poet
Mary Wroth (1587-1653)
(English) Poet, Fiction Writer
Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639)
(English) Playwright, Poet, Dramatist, Translator, Historian
Jane Sharp (1641-1671)
(English) Writer of Midwifery Textbook
(H)ester Biddle (1629/30-1697)
(English) Quaker Pamphlet Writer, Preacher
Katherine Philips (1632-1664)
(English) Poet, Verse Dramatist, Translator
THE ROVER, OR THE BANISH'D CAVALIERS (1677)
This first edition, with 18th-century prompt-book notes, is at Senate House Library, University of London.
"This copy is of particular interest because it was used as a prompt-book for a mid 18th-century revival of the play at Covent Garden Theatre. Prompt-books are drawn on during performance to remind actors of their entrances and lines. Here, the printed text is interspersed with manuscript notes, alterations and deletions, all made during the rehearsal period. Most of these alterations are cuts which demonstrate that Behn’s comedy was too racy for a respectable Georgian audience.
Aphra Behn’s raucous comedy The Rover, was first published in 1677 at the height of King Charles II’s reign, in the heyday of libertinism. The play itself is a frank, witty commentary on the highly sexualized elements of Restoration society. This copy is of particular interest because it was used as a prompt-book for a mid 18th-century revival of the play at Covent Garden Theatre. Prompt-books are drawn on during performance to remind actors of their entrances and lines. Here, the printed text is interspersed with manuscript notes, alterations and deletions, all made during the rehearsal period. Most of these alterations are cuts which demonstrate that Behn’s comedy was too racy for a respectable Georgian audience."
"Aphra Behn, one of the most influential dramatists of the late 17th century, was also a celebrated poet and novelist. Her contemporary reputation was founded primarily on her "scandalous" plays, which she claimed would not have been criticized for impropriety had a man written them. Behn's assertion of her unique role in English literary history is confirmed not only by the extraordinary circumstances of her writings, but by those of her life history as well.
No one really knows her birth name or when exactly she was born. Her parentage has been traced to Wye, and tradition has it that she was born in 1640. However, an essay by the unidentified "One of the Fair Sex" affixed to the collection of The Histories And Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1696) maintains that Aphra was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Johnson of nearby Canterbury. Johnson was a gentleman related to Francis, Lord Willoughby, who appointed him lieutenant general of Surinam, for which Willoughby was the royal patentee. Whether Aphra was Johnson's natural child or fostered by him is not known, but what has been established with reasonable certainty was that in 1663 Aphra accompanied Johnson, his wife, and a young boy, mentioned as Behn's brother, on a voyage to take up residence in the West Indies. Johnson died on the way, and the mother and two children lived for several months in Surinam. This episode was to have lasting effects on Behn's life. Her most famous novel, Oroonoko (1688), is based on her experiences there and her friendship with a prince of the indigenous peoples. The facts about Behn's life after her return to England in 1664 are also unclear.
She is known to have met and taken the name of a man considered to be her husband, who was perhaps a Dutch merchant whose name was either "Ben," "Beane," "Bene," or "Behn." Whatever the true circumstances, from that time on she was known publicly as "Mrs. Behn," the name she later used for her professional writing. Aphra Behn was propelled into writing for a living by the death of her husband in 1665, and her indebtedness as a result of her employment as a spy for King Charles II.
When her husband died, Behn was left without funds. Perhaps because of her association, through him, with the Dutch, she was appointed an intelligence gatherer for the king, who was, at least, to pay for her trip to Antwerp as his spy. But Charles did not respond to Behn's requests for money for her trip home, so in December 1666 she was forced to borrow for her passage back to England. Charles continued to refuse payment, and in 1668 Behn was thrown into debtor's prison. The circumstances of her release are unknown, but in 1670 her first play, The Forc'd Marriage (published, 1671), was produced in London, and Behn, having vowed never to depend on anyone else for money again, became one of the period's foremost playwrights. She earned her living in the theater and then as a novelist until her death on April 16, 1689.
Even before her arrest for indebtedness, Aphra Behn had written poetry. These early poems indicate the versatility of her literary gifts and prefigure the skill and grace that characterize all of Behn's verse. Although it was impossible to make a living from writing poems exclusively, Behn, in the tradition of famous English playwrights whose poetry was also accorded distinction, pursued verse writing as an adjunct to her more lucrative work. Behn's contemporary reputation as a poet was no less stunning than her notoriety as a dramatist. Behn was apostrophized as "The Incomparable Astrea," an appellation based on the code name she had used when she was Charles's spy.
Behn's distinctive poetic voice is characterized by her audacity in writing about contemporary events, frequently with topical references that, despite their allegorical maskings, were immediately recognizable to her sophisticated audience. Although she sometimes addressed her friends by their initials or their familiar names, she might just as easily employ some classical or pastoral disguise that was transparent to the initiated. Behn's poetry, therefore, was less public than her plays or her prose fiction, as it depended, in some cases, on the enlightened audience's recognition of her topics for full comprehension of both the expression and implications of her verse. Such poetic technique involved a skill and craft that earned her the compliments of her cohorts. Aphra Behn's later reputation as a playwright, novelist, and poet has benefited from her value as a model for women writers as noted first by those distinguished Victorian women of letters, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf."
Text sources: British Library and Poetry Foundation
Click below to see Aphra's contributions on the Map.
GLOBAL HISTORICAL RECORD
Material Culture Made By And About Women Throughout Time and Place
(Abkhazian Turk) Painter, Women's Rights Advocate
(Dutch) Linguist, Academic, Writer
(African American) Cookbook Author, Baker
(English) Soldier
(Beothuk People of Newfoundland Island) Cartographer, Writer
(English) Suffragette, Author
SHANAWDITHIT
(Early 19th Century), Canada
Cartographer, Writer
SKETCH NUMBER TWO, 1829. THE BEOTHUKS, OR THE RED INDIANS
The map resides at the The Rooms’ Cartographic and Architectural collection at the Mary March Provincial Museum, Newfoundland, Canada.
"In the map pictured above, Shanawdithit depicted the capture of her aunt, Demasduit, whose English name was 'Mary March.' Howley describes this map:
This sketch is labelled 'The taking of Mary March on the North side of the lake.' And in another place 'Two different scenes and times.' It depicts, on a large scale, the North East Arm of Red Indian Lake. On the south side is again seen [Captain David] Buchan's party, marching in single file towards the outflowing river, with the accompanying Indians in red. Also the four Indians approaching to kill the two marines.… A third red line extends out on the lake upon which four figures are shown. In front of the wigwams on the ice are grouped half a dozen black, with one red figure in their midst. Standing near this group is a single red figure apparently of a large man, as if in the act of haranguing the group, while a little to one side is another red figure lying prone on the ice. It is almost needless to say this represents the furriers taking Mary March, her husband coming back to the rescue, and his dead body, after being shot, lying on the ice.
As a child of Newfoundland’s Beothuk tribe in the early 1800s, she witnessed her people driven to virtual extinction by violent contact with British Marines. Against all odds, she managed to survive, and eventually became known as the last 'full-blooded' member of the tribe. Shanawdithit’s maps, and the stories she told the explorer William Cormack, are among the last accounts of her people’s language, customs, and beliefs—and have become symbolic of a tragic chapter in Canadian history. Shawnadithit was a witness to the final encounters between her dwindling people and the expeditions sent out to capture Beothuks alive. She saw the capture of Demasduit and the brave attempt of her husband Nonosbawsut to rescue her in March 1819. Enraged at his wife's kidnap, Nonosbawsut charged at the intruders until they killed him.
In her twenties, hungry and alone, Shanawdithit found work as a servant in a white settlement on the island, where she learned to read and write in English. She became the subject of anthropological interest for Cormack, who was working to establish a center devoted to Beothuk history. Under his watch, in 1829 Shanawdithit created five extraordinary narrative maps in which she compressed and plotted her memories of her tribe’s movements and collisions with the settlers some 18 years earlier. The rivers and lakes that appear in her maps are drawn with incredible geographical accuracy. Her maps, drawings and stories are the last records of the language and customs of her doomed people.
When Cormack left Newfoundland, Shawnadithit responded to his kindness by giving him a lock of her hair and two stones from Red Indian Lake, tiny symbols of all that remained of the great territory in which the Beothuk once prospered. She died shortly after, on June 6, 1829, of tuberculosis, "the cough demon that had victimized so many of her people.
The story of the Beothuk is surely one of the saddest chapters in Canadian history, made personal and melancholy by the story of Shawnadithit herself. As Cormack wrote, "the British have trespassed in this country and have become a blight and a scourge to a portion of the human race; under their power a defenceless and once independent proud tribe of men have been extirpated from the face of the earth."
Text sources: Canadian Encyclopedia and Bloomberg
Click below to see Shanawdithit's contributions on the Map.
HANNAH SNELL
(1723-1792), England
Soldier
HANNAH SNELL (1750)
By John Faber, Jr.
Text (Lettered with title, 6 lines relating the sitter's adventures): inlisted herself by the name of James Gray in General Guise's Regiment then at Carlisle 1745, where she Receiv'd 500 Lashes, Deserted from thence and went to Portsmouth, where she Inlisted in Colonel Fraser's Regiment of Marines, went in Admiral Boscawen's Squadron to the East Indies, at the Siege of Pundicherry where she Receiv'd 12 Shot, one in her Groin Eleven in her Legs; 1750 came to England without the leat discovery of her sex, and on her petitioning His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland, he was pleas'd to order her a Pension of £30 a Year", and "Price 1s-6d" and production detail, all below image: "Richd. Phelps pinxt." and "J. Faber fecit 1750"
The painting hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
"Hannah was 'The Female Soldier,' known as 'James Gray'. She disguised herself as a soldier, serving as a marine for 5 years, traveling as far as India, between 1745 and 1750 when she was discovered. She was discharged but given a pension for her many services.
The artist, John Faber II, son of John Faber (and known as John Faber Junior until the death of his father in 1721), was born in Amsterdam, moving to England around 1698; learned drawing and mezzotint engraving from his father and attended the academy in St. Martin's Lane. He became a leading mezzotint engraver and painter of his day, painting seven portraits of Hannah Snell.
Hannah Snell (1723-1792) was born at Worcester and in 1744 moved to London where she was married. According to her account, she enlisted in John Guise's Regiment after her husband deserted her. She later found out that he had been executed for murder. It is now thought that she never served in Guises' regiment and that this part of her story was fabricated. However, she is thought to have joined the Royal Marines at Portsmouth, going on to serve in India. In August 1748 she took part in the expedition to capture the French colony of Pondicherry. Later, she also fought in the Battle of Devicotta in June 1749. Snell was wounded several times during her service but appears to have managed to keep her sex a secret.
In 1750 she returned to Britain and after revealing her sex she successfully petitioned the Duke of Cumberland for a pension. She also sold her story to London publisher Robert Walker who published her account, 'The Female Soldier'. She also appeared on stage in her uniform presenting military drills and singing songs. In later life she ran a public house in Wapping before moving to Newbury in Berkshire. In 1759 she re-married and eventually had two children. In 1791 her mental condition deteriorated and she was admitted to the Bethlem asylum where she died in 1792."
Text source: British Museum and National Army Museum and National Portrait Gallery
Click below to see Hannah's contributions on the Map.
MALINDA RUSSELL
(c. 1812 - ?), USA
Cookbook Author
A DOMESTIC COOK BOOK, CONTAINING A CAREFUL SELECTION OF USEFUL RECEIPTS FOR THE KITCHEN, BY MALINDA RUSSELL, AN EXPERIENCED COOK, PAW PAW, MICHIGAN, 1866
The cookbook is at the University of Michigan Library's Special Collections Research Center as part of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive.
"Published in Paw Paw, Michigan in 1866, A Domestic Cook Book... is the oldest known cookbook authored by an African American. The JBLCA holds the only known copy of Malinda Russell’s cookbook. A slim volume of 39 pages in paper wrappers, A Domestic Cookbook... was an ephemeral publication to begin with. The fire that largely destroyed Paw Paw, MI later in 1866 likely destroyed many copies of Russell’s cookbook, and it has also complicated the process of learning more about the author. After acquiring A Domestic Cook Book, Jan and Dan Longone conducted research in Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina in an attempt to trace Malinda Russell, but ultimately were unable to be certain whether she was identified in the documents they found. Found among the collection of California cookbook author and food writer Helen Evans Brown, this little book precedes Abby Fisher’s 1881 What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking by 15 years, making it a landmark in African American culinary and publishing history. However, it should be noted that two earlier household/hotel manuals by African Americans are known: The House Servant's Directory (1827) by Robert Roberts and Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters and Housekeepers' Guide (1848) by Tunis Campbell.
All that is known for sure about Malinda Russell are the few details she chose to include in 'A Short History of the Author.' Born and raised in Tennessee, as a member of 'one of the first families set free by Mr. Noddie of Virginia,' Russell set out with a party destined for Liberia at age 19. However, when her money was stolen, she remained in Lynchburg, Virginia and found work as a cook, companion, and nurse. After a brief marriage, she was left widowed with a young son. Russell returned to Tennessee, where she kept a boarding house and later a pastry shop. When she was robbed again in 1864, this time by a guerrilla party, Russell determined to leave the south 'at least for the present, until peace is restored,' and settle in Michigan.
Russell states that she learned her trade from Fanny Steward, 'a colored cook, of Virginia, and have since learned many new things in the art of Cooking.' She also notes that she cooks 'after the plan of the ‘Virginia Housewife,' which is most likely a reference to Mary Randolph’s popular and influential cookbook The Virginia House-wife (1824). Russell’s own cookbook consists primarily of desserts and baked goods, a logical focus, given her ownership of a pastry shop. Most recipes are for dishes common throughout the Eastern United States in the 1860s, but a few recipes such as 'Sweet Potato Baked Pudding' reflect specifically Southern cuisine.
Characteristic of many 19th century cookbooks, Russell’s receipts rely on a certain amount of shorthand and the assumption that the reader already knows her way around the kitchen. For example, the first page of A Domestic Cookbook offers a recipe for 'Cream Cake' in a single sentence."
Text source: University of Michigan Library
Click below to see Hannah's contributions on the Map.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
(1759-1797), England
Author, Suffragette
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN: WITH STRICTURES ON POLITICAL AND MORAL SUBJECTS (1793)
The book is at the Lady Margaret Hall Library, University of Oxford, England.
"Mary was an 18th-century author and women's rights advocate. This book argues that women should have the same fundamental rights as men, as both are equal before God, and in particular this includes the right to a full education.
Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) wrote the book in part as a reaction to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, published in late 1790. Burke saw the French Revolution as a movement which would inevitably fail, as society needed traditional structures such as inherited positions and property in order to strengthen it. Wollstonecraft’s initial response was to write A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a rebuttal of Burke that argued in favor of parliamentary reform, and stating that religious and civil liberties were part of a man’s birth right, with corruption caused in the main by ignorance. This argument for men’s rights wasn’t unique – Thomas Paine published his Rights of Man in 1791, also arguing against Burke – but Wollstonecraft proceeded to go one step further, and, for the first time, a book was published that argued for women’s rights to be on the same footing as men’s.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in 1791 and published in 1792, with a second edition appearing that same year. It was sold as Volume 1 of the work, but Wollstonecraft never wrote any subsequent volumes. Before this date there had been books that argued for the reform of female education, often for moral reasons or to better befit women for their role as companions for men. In contrast, in her introduction Wollstonecraft criticizes women’s education thus:
I attribute [these problems] to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers … the civilized women of this present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect. She goes on to say, revolutionarily, that 'I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties ….'
Wollstonecraft’s arguments were often far ahead of our time. For example, in Chapter 12 'On National Education,' she recommends the establishment of a national education system, to operate mixed sex schools. She also argues that it is essential for women’s dignity that they be given the right and the ability to earn their own living and support themselves.
The chapters of the book cover a wide range of topics, and the many digressions in the text support William Godwin’s report that Wollstonecraft wrote the book quickly over the course of only six weeks. Wollstonecraft’s tone conveys both her own sense of humor but also her anger at the enfeebled situation that the majority of women were forced into:
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone."
Text sources: Bodleian Libraries and British Library
Click below to see Mary's contributions on the Map.
MIHRI RASIM MÜŞFIK AÇBA
(1886–1954), Turkey
Painter
SELF-PORTRAIT (PRE-1918)
This painting is housed in the private archive of artist and academic Burcu Pelvanoglu. The technique and size are unknown, lost.
"One of the very first female painters from Istanbul is Mihri Rasim Müşfik Açba (1886–1954). She was ethnically an Abkhazian. As her father was the Minister of Health during the reign of Abdulhamid II and her aunt was one of Sultan’s wives, she was raised in a privileged environment, and was given lessons by the court painter, Fausto Zonaro. In the early 1900s, she left Istanbul and went first to Rome and then to Paris, where she probably attended workshops for further education and earned a living painting portraits of the elite. Her first known marriage was to Müşfik Bey (İnegöllü) who she later divorced. In 1914, after her return to Istanbul, at a time when women were not even officially accepted as students in many European academies, she helped co-found the Fine Arts School for Women. Mihri became the first female director and teacher of this Istanbul Ottoman State School.
She consistently promoted female students to paint in the streets and the open air for the first time. With Mihri’s efforts, they were even able to study nude models. She was the first to encourage her female students to organize a collective exhibition. She also gave her sister Enise Hanım’s talented daughter Hale Asaf, her first drawing lessons, who later became a very important painter but unfortunately died at an early age. She was also the first in the country to cast a death mask, that of her close friend, humanist poet and intellectual Tevfik Fikret, just after his death. Her apartment flat in Istanbul’s Bomonti was also her gallery and studio.
Unable to settle in Istanbul during 1920s, she moved again to Rome, then to New York. In 1928, her paintings were exhibited at a solo show at Maziroff Gallery in New York. All through her life Mihri worked as a portraitist, and has made portraits of Atatürk, F. D. Roosevelt, Edison, Edwin Markham, D’anunzio, and many more. Though she spent many productive years of her artistic life in Europe and in USA, her works in those countries are mostly lost. In addition to her masterful paintings that are left in Istanbul, we have some of her private letters and newspaper interviews which reflect her strong personality and reveal some details from her life. Mihri died in 1954, in USA."
Text source: Kim Mihri
Click below to see Mihri's contributions on the Map.
ANNA MARIA VAN SCHURMAN
(1607–1678), The Netherlands
Linguist, Writer, Academic
SELF-PORTRAIT, ANNA MARIA VAN SCHURMAN (1607-1678), AGED 33.
Text (translation): No pride or beauty prompted me to engrave my features in eternal copper; But if my unpractised graver was not yet capable of producing good work, I would not risk a more weighty task the first time. A.M. à Schurman engraving and drawing. 1633.
(Adapted from Katlijne Van Der Stighelen's book ‘Et Ses Artistes Mains…’ The Art of Anna Maria Van Schurman.
Painting at Risd Museum, The Netherlands.
"Here, Anna Maria van Schurman presents herself as a learned lady (composing a legend in Latin) who is also modest. Anna Mariawas a poet and scholar as well as a visual artist, for whom engraving was one of many artistic pursuits including painting and engraving calligraphy on glass with a diamond. She learned to engrave from the professional engraver Magdalena van de Passe in Utrecht. Anna Mariawas remarkably erudite (she was the first female student at the University of Utrecht) and was celebrated by male intellectuals in her time for her knowledge of several languages. She published an essay on the education of women: her conclusion was that women should be educated in all matters if it did not interfere with their domestic duties, a radical position at the time. She saw engraving and other arts as a means by which a virtuous woman could occupy idle time.
Anna Maria was regarded throughout the 17th century as the most learned woman not only of the Netherlands but also of Europe. She was “the Star of Utrecht,” “the Tenth Muse,” “a miracle of her sex.” As the first woman to attend non-officially a university, she was also the first to advocate, boldly, that women should be admitted into universities. A brilliant linguist, she mastered at least fourteen languages and was the first Dutch woman to seek publication of her correspondence.
Between 1626 and 1636 she was member of 'de Republiek der Letteren,' a European community of intellectuals. It was through this network that the impressive Anna Maria gained international fame and became known as “the most learned woman of her time.” Women were excluded from universities, but in 1636 something ground-breaking happened. With help from her neighbour, Professor Gisbertus Voetius, Anna Maria was permitted to attend lectures in literature, medicine and theology. She had to sit behind a curtain to avoid distracting the male students. This made her the first female student of the Netherlands and possibly even of Europe."
Text sources: Oxford Bibliographies and Art Herstory
Click below to see Anna Maria's contributions on the Map.