Writing a Woman’s Life

The title Writing a Woman’s Life is that of a surprise bestseller by an English professor that I came across by accident. Then and later I turned up my nose at the idea of Women’s Studies, but providence had its own plans. For several years I have been immersed, as a publisher and as a writer, in projects related to women’s lives and women’s history . This page describes this work, especially that on women and power (and countervailing “strongmen”) and my growing interest in the varied ways that exist for writing a woman’s life.

Thanks for Typing #thanksfortyping

How fortuitous to walk into the Houghton Library at Harvard and see an exhibition inspired by the book Thanks for Typing, to which I’d contributed a chapter on Valerie Eliot and Sophia Mumford. Seven years earlier, in March 2019, I’d spoken at a conference at Oxford called “Thanks for Typing: The invisible wives, daughters, mothers, and other women behind famous men.” It was thrilling to see all the work being done to bring fascinating and talent women into the light.

I then wrote an article about the event and the concept for Logos (“Thanks for Typing: The invisible wives, daughters, mothers, and other women behind famous men” LOGOS, vol. 30, no. 2, 2019, pp. 12-18)and was interviewed on the Beyond the Book podcast by Chris Keneally of Copyright Clearance Center, August 2019. Most exciting was when “Hidden Wives, Hidden Lives” in The Author was riffed on in the Times Literary Supplement. And I finally expanded my paper about Valerie Eliot and Sophia Mumford into a chapter for the book Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History, published by Bloomsbury.

Here’s a bit from Juliana Dresvina’s introduction to the book in which she collected our conference papers:

The stories of our book are but separate pebbles on a vast beach of human lives, washed ashore by the whims of recorded memories and the circumstances of our own existence. Initially several chapters were planned to cover a wider geographical range, but unfortunately these could not be completed in time to appear in this collection. As is, the collection highlights how easy it is for women to be invisible in plain sight, in historically the most well-documented and privileged societies. But we hope that this initial volume and its counterparts will help eventually to expand the research into women’s stories and bring more of them out of oblivion.

My own emotional investment in the topic of the invisible and forgotten women behind famous men of the past began by mourning the unpainted, the unwritten, the uncomposed, the unachieved, the lives not lived to their full potential and satisfaction, the voices silenced, lost or muffled. A painting by Vera Lane Poole, unknown even to specialists, spoke powerfully enough to inspire me to attempt to rekindle the dying ashes and tell her story loud and clear. Soon I discovered many like-minded colleagues who wanted to do the same for the women whose stories they encountered in their own lives, inspiring story-telling, collaborations, friendships, connections, sharing in unpaid labour – the labour of love.

Why have books about and by the wives, ex-wives, and lovers of famous men become so popular? These books often show the hidden contributions of women, and they help us understand our lives and our world. We want to read about the women who attracted those famous men, and we want to know what they experienced, and how it worked, and where it went wrong. And we want to know that we will be seen, recognized, and loved, even if we remain in the background and out of the spotlight. This theme is also found in recent movies such as The Wife and Colette. Here are some reading suggestions:

• Vera Nabokov, whose story was told by biographer Stacy Schiff, gets much credit for her husband’s work and her name has become shorthand for the perfect literary spouse. In fact, an Atlantic article entitled ‘The Legend of Vera Nabokov: Why Writers Pine for a Do-It-All Spouse’ explores this phenomenon (http://bit.ly/2SmysUw).
• Many fictional accounts have sought to fill in gaps of knowledge about the roles women played in their powerful husband’s lives, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald (Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, St. Martin’s; Call Me Zelda, New American Library; Beautiful Fools, Overlook), Ernest Hemingway (The Paris Wife, Virago), Charles Lindbergh (The Aviator’s Wife, Bantam), and James Joyce. Nora Joyce, an uneducated Irishwoman, has been the subject of a huge biography by Brenda Maddox and a recent musical, Himself and Nora.
• There is also Loving Frank, the bestselling novel by Nancy Horan about Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her ill-fated relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright (close friend and sometime enemy of Lewis Mumford).
• The T. S. Eliot story, incidentally, echoes that of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath because Eliot and then Valerie Eliot, his second wife, controlled access to the papers of his first wife Vivien, about whom there has been a play and a movie (Tom and Viv), and a biography (Painted Shadow, Anchor Books, 2003).

T S Eliot’s Women

The January 2020 opening of T. S. Eliot’s love letters to Emily Hale was momentous for those who study Eliot. The #MeToo aspect of Eliot’s behavior has divided male and female scholars, and raised questions about Valerie Eliot’s actions before and after her husband’s death. I contributed a piece about being at Princeton on the opening day to the T. S. Eliot Annual. After the archives closed that first day, I stood in a dark hallway by the lockers with a reporter from The Times and told him what I suspected was Valerie Eliot’s role in writing the “I did not have sex with that woman” letter that Harvard had released at lunchtime. Here’s his article in The Times.

Time Present, the journal of the TSE Society, has essays by those of us who were at the archives for the opening. The essay cluster was then published in Volume 3 of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.

Biographer Carl Rollyson hosts a popular podcast, “A Life in Biography.” This episode, he explains, is “A wide-ranging discussion with Karen Christensen, publisher and biographer, about libel, indemnity clauses, the widow Eliot and others widows and wives. Click here to listen.

Valerie Fletcher Eliot (1926-2012) was the much younger second wife of T. S. Eliot and guardian of his legacy for nearly 50 years. My memoir about working with her, “Dear Mrs Eliot,” was a cover story in the Guardian’s literary review . Here’s a response to a New Yorker article about the James Joyce estate that mentions me, and here is Valerie Eliot (1926-2012) [obituary] in the New York Times. This blog feed comes from the section Writing a Woman’s Life, with an emphasis on the Valerie (Mrs T S) Eliot story. A year after leaving her job with Mrs Eliot, Karen was interviewed on the BBC news program “Open Air” about her first book, with a crying baby on her lap. Watch it here.

Sophia Wittenberg Mumford (1899-1997) was married to Lewis Mumford for nearly 70 years. Her obituary in the New York Times refers to the book about her life that she and I were working on, and the podcast “Sophia Mumford Talks about Working at The Dial in the 1920s” comes from one of the conversations we recorded in 1996.

Paths to Power: Women & Leadership

The Loves of Lewis Mumford

Thanks to Chinese law professor Jerome A. Cohen, I met Gerald and Nina Holton in 2014. Through Gerald Holton, I learned about a collection of letters between Mumford and his last lover, Jocelyn Brodie, which are now at the Schlesinger Library thanks to the efforts of a family friend, Ann Braude, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Our conversations led to Braude’s organizing a panel on “Three Loves of Lewis Mumford at the 2021 Organization of American Historians Conference. The recording of the panel can be viewed with this link: https://youtu.be/aX2Qlr26pH0. Here’s the program description:

Lewis Mumford, one of the most widely-read and far-ranging public intellectuals of the twentieth century, referred in autobiographical writing to his “loves,” plural, the women who engaged him both intellectually and sexually. Mumford found intellectual and sexual attraction mutually reinforcing. His view that sexual and intellectual exchange could not be separated was an aspect of his call to twentieth-century Americans to live as whole human beings, not as the segmented, alienated products of a mechanized world. But it was also a source of conflict with his desire for a stable marriage that would support his legendary literary productivity. What Mumford did and did not reveal about his adulterous love affairs has complicated the reception of his autobiographical accounts and of biographical treatments of him. It has also obscured the characters and careers of the women he loved.

Upending the historiography on Mumford, this panel will look at his three best-documented “loves” from the point of view of their own interests, and ask how they advanced their own agendas—intellectual, creative, personal, and sexual–through their interaction with Lewis Mumford. First and foremost among these women was always his wife, life-partner, and sometime editor, Sophia Wittenberg Mumford. But he also placed much importance on and exchanged extensive correspondence with two other women, one in youth and one in old age: Catherine Bauer and Jocelyn Brodie. All three of these were notable historical actors in their own right whose stories nonetheless became mere shadows in the bright light thrown by Lewis Mumford. The panel consists of three papers, one on each of these three women, examining her creative work outside her relationship with Mumford before viewing it in light of that relationship.

Karen Christensen’s paper on Sophia Mumford, “A Book of My Own,” is based on extensive interviews she conducted with Sophia Mumford before her death. She explains the self-evaluation that Mumford undertook in her nineties, which included comparing herself with the other women her husband had loved and assessing the choice she had made to let her life be governed by his work and his needs.

Ann Braude, director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, discovered both sides of the suppressed correspondence of unknown artist Jocelyn Brodie and Lewis Mumford in Brodie’s rural Vermont home following Brodie’s death. The paper situates the ten-year correspondence within the trajectory of Brodie’s literary and artistic oeuvre, as well as exploring both the reasons the correspondence began and the reasons it was suppressed.

In “Sex and the Single Woman, circa 1930,” Nancy Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University, re-examines Mumford’s formative erotic and intellectual relationship with housing expert Catherine Bauer, a “New Woman” of the 1920s ten years his junior. This reassessment will place the Bauer-Mumford relationship in the context of Bauer’s immediately previous and subsequent sexual/intellectual relationships with men, and compare it to other roughly parallel temporary pairings of her single contemporaries with attractive older partners.

Aaron Sachs, professor of history at Cornell University and currently working on a book about Herman Melville and Lewis Mumford, will respond to the papers and chair the session.

Too Near the Flame

Too Near the Flame is how I think about the lives of women who have attached themselves to prominent men and somehow lost themselves. The other side of the coin is women who use their relationships to gain power of their own. There are many examples in history, and I’ve written about some of them.

I’ve known two famous keepers of the flame: Sophia Wittenberg Mumford (1899-1997) who was married to the US social critic Lewis Mumford and Valerie Fletcher Eliot (1926-2012) who was the second wife of Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot. Sophia and Valerie were young typists who eventually became keepers of the flame and guardians of the legacies of the men they loved. The stories of the Mumfords and Eliots intersected over many decades, and when I was young I became Valerie’s confidante in London and then Sophie’s friend in upstate New York. When Sophia died at 97, she and I were working on a book about her life.

“Dear Mrs. Eliot,” my memoir about working with Valerie Eliot, was the cover story of the Guardian Review on 29 January 2005, but I only saw the connections between these keepers of the flame after Valerie died in 2012. I was indignant about the way their stories were being told , and hoped I could learn something from Sophia and Valerie’s live – not least because I myself knew what it was like to have a famous older lover and was worried about how my own Cinderella story might end. As I began to look for other examples of intelligent, ambitious women drawn to charismatic, dominating men, I found similar patterns in the story of Heloise and Abelard, in the Victorian novel Middlemarch, in early feminist writing, and in accounts of Chinese concubines and modern dragon ladies (this is a subject I’m working on as an associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard). Women have long sought independence and power, as well as love and passion and motherhood.

I found many examples in fiction (think of Pride & Prejudice). Here is a passage from Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn, from Madame Goesler’s letter to the Duke of Omnium turning down his proposal of marriage:

I will own that I have been ambitious, too ambitious, and have been pleased to think that one so exalted as you are, one whose high position is so rife in the eyes of all men, should have taken pleasure in my company. I will confess to a foolish woman’s silly vanity in having wished to be known to be the friend of the Duke of Omnium. I am like the other moths that flutter near the light and have their wings burned. But I am wiser than they in this, that having been scorched, I know that I must keep my distance.

In Middlemarch, I found a passage that summed up the kind of woman I was writing about – not women who sought money but who were looking for a path that would take them into a bigger world.

Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.

Women and Leadership includes my chapters on “Paths to Power” and a new one on “#MeToo and Its Impact,” and the video from the 2021 Organization of American Historians panel “Three Loves” is linked below.