As someone who turned up her nose at the idea of Women’s Studies, it’s a surprise to find myself immersed, as a publisher and as a writer, in many projects about women and feminism . This page describes some of my work related to women and power, and my growing interest in the varied ways that exist for writing a woman’s life.

Table of Contents

Too Near the Flame

T S Eliot’s Women

Thanks for Typing

The Loves of Lewis Mumford

Women & Leadership

Women Writing Women’s Lives

Writing a Woman’s Life

Too Near the Flame

Too Near the Flame is the title of the book I’ve been researching and writing since 2013. It began as a dual biography of 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 lives. I knew that Valerie had become a lonely alcoholic guarded by the people who managed the fortune she’d made from Cats. Sophia too had often been lonely, but she’d had a way of drawing younger people to her. Her great desire during her last years was to tell her own story after having had it told by men.

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 dragon ladies (one of the topics I’m working on as an associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard). 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.

To write the stories of the Sophia and Lewis Mumford, Valerie and Tom Eliot, and the other women in their lives, I traveled around England, went to Wales and France, interviewed dozens of people who knew the couples (including women who’d been at school with Valerie during World War II), discovered new material, and uncovered stories that they hoped would stay under wraps. I’ve also discovered how resourceful these women were in facing challenges that we still struggle with. Too Near the Flame has become a subversive study of the Cinderella myth, a blended narrative that is primarily about the interconnected lives of the Mumfords and Eliots but includes other stories and explores wider issues. It’s scheduled for publication in the autumn of 2024.

During the years I’ve been doing the research, I have also been writing and speaking about the women whose stories are central to the book. Information about #Thanksfortyping, Women and Leadership, and the 2021 Organization of American Historians panel “Three Loves” is below.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks for Typing #thanksfortyping

In March 2019, I spoke at a conference at Oxford called “Thanks for Typing: The invisible wives, daughters, mothers, and other women behind famous men.” It took place the week before the London Book Fair (remember those days, actual physical, face-to-face events?). It was thrilling to see all the work being done today to bring fascinating and talent women into the light. I wrote several articles about the event and the concept, was interviewed for a podcast, and finally expanded my paper into a chapter for the book Thanks for Typing, published by Bloomsbury. We’re hoping to hold a second conference – perhaps virtual. But I really don’t think this aspect of writing a woman’s life would have become so important to me had I not been able to meet Juliana Dresvina and the others in person!

• “Thanks for Typing: The invisible wives, daughters, mothers, and other women behind famous men” LOGOS, vol. 30, no. 2, 2019, pp. 12-18.
• “Hidden Wives, Hidden Lives,” The Author, Autumn 2019, pp. 92-93. This essay was later riffed on in the Times Literary Supplement.
• Beyond the Book podcast “Thanks for Typing” interview by Christopher Kenneally with Karen Christensen. Copyright Clearance Center, August 2019.

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.