Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' TURNING VICTORIAN LADIES INTO WOMEN : THE LIFE OF BESSIE RAYNER PARKES, 1829 - 1925 Responses By Emma Lowndes (Academica Press, 2012) xv + 288 pp. Guidelines Reviewed by Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley on 2012-07-31. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us "Nothing [is] truer than a letter. for letters reveal the inner self of the correspondent" (qtd. 5). Or so Marie Belloc Lowndes told her grand-daughter Emma Lowndes, speaking particularly of the copious records left by Bessie Rayner Parkes Masthead Belloc, their mother and great-grandmother respectively, and a central figure in early British women's rights. As Lowndes frames her memoir, she seems on the one hand to take her grandmother's claim to heart. Yet she occasionally also recognizes the complexity of her subject's life--a complexity that challenges the truth value of any single document. How Feedback does a century's collection of letters represent "truth" about a woman who was-- over the course of her life-- a dutiful upper-class Victorian daughter, a Unitarian, a committed women's rights activist, an intensely passionate female companion, a writer of literary aspirations, a devoted wife, a Catholic convert, a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War, an adoring mother to two daughters and also (perhaps especially) to her son Hilaire Belloc, the anti-semitic statesman and novelist? Even without Parkes' multi-faceted history, what is the truth of an inner life lived by someone with a sense of her own potential celebrity? Prompted equally by her commitment to truth and her desire to tell an engaging story of her great- grandmother, Lowndes has produced just the kind of female family biography that reached the height of its success in Parkes' era. Along the way, Lowndes has also produced a compelling case study in the possibilities and challenges of using the material traces of a Victorian life to represent an "inner self." Lowndes has indefatigably researched her subject. Besides consulting several key studies of Victorian women's history, she has drawn on unpublished family documents and anecdotes, on the well-known wealth of Parkes' personal papers in the Girton College archive, and on a variety of documents scattered through other archives. One of her most frequently cited sources is a typescript prepared by Marie Belloc Lowndes for a biography she never completed. With the aid of this material, Lowndes tracks in detail Parkes' ninety-six years, from the height of the Victorian reform era to the aftermath of the First World War. Lowndes richly documents Parkes' early schooling, her life with traditional Victorian parents, and her growing commitment to women's rights---most emphatically the right to work, a commitment solidified by her life-long friendship with Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Mining the Girton archives, Lowndes retrieves the daily lives of the women who worked at the Langham Place offices, especially in establishing The English Woman's Journal, which Parkes edited, but also in other projects for promoting women's right to work, property, and education. Lowndes also extensively tracks "Bessie's" travels, both with her family and--unchaperoned--with female friends across the Continent and into Algiers, where Barbara settled for several months every year after her marriage to Eugene Bodichon. Parkes' conversion to Catholicism helps to explain her attraction to religious women's working communities and to the circle of London Catholics she came to know and befriend. Moving well outside Langham Place, in fact, Parkes' broad circle of literary and political friends included George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Brougham, Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Cardinal Henry Manning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Herbert Spencer. Though the title of her book retains her great-grandmother's better-known given name, Lowndes' narrative of Parkes' life moves well beyond her marriage to Louis Belloc in 1867, where most work on Parkes concludes. In her forward, Bonnie Anderson explains that scholars have shown little interest in reconciling Parkes' feminist activities with the less activist phase that coincides with her later Catholicism. After her 1864 conversion and her marriage three years later, she never returned with zeal to the political causes she spearheaded at Langham Place: causes that seem to have exhausted her emotionally and physically. But she lived for six more decades, and in the final third of this memoir, Lowndes tells us what filled them: her continued international friendships, the death of her husband and of Bodichon, the publication of five books (mostly biography and memoir), her return to England after her sojourn in France, her continued concern over the well being of her three children and grandchildren as her family fortune ebbed, her support of her son's literary career, and her variety of local philanthropic activities with Catholic and women's charities. In aiming "to share the itinerary of a woman who was committed to the never-ending task of improving the world at large by improving women's lot, and to literature, religion, travel and her family and friends" (6), Lowndes places this book in the tradition of nineteenth-century women's memoirs written to commemorate a loved one: memoirs such as Mary Howitt's autobiography edited by her daughter Margaret, Gerardine MacPherson's memoir of her aunt Anna Jameson, or In a Walled Garden (1895), one of Parkes' own collections of biographical sketches. Lowndes marks her familial connection and intention not only with a genealogical table in the introduction--tracing her lineage to Bessie's parents Joseph Parkes and Elizabeth Rayner Priestly--but also with a dedication "to my grandchildren," a generation absent from the genealogical table. In quoting extensively from her sources, Lowndes makes this book--like its predecessors--especially helpful for researchers who cannot reach the archives or who are preparing for an archival visit. The evidentiary value of these quotations, however, raises scholarly questions that Lowndes does not always fully recognize. Take for instance her account of the possibly "apocryphal" report that Parkes travelled to Haworth with Elizabeth Gaskell when Gaskell was gathering material for her Life of Charlotte Bronte: One literary excursion that Bessie was to recall, according to her daughter, was the occasion, in July 1855, when Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell asked her to go on a visit to Charlotte Brontë's home town of Haworth, a few months after the writer's death. Gaskell had decided to undertake writing Charlotte's biography. Gaskell was fond of Bessie and had been told about Marian Evans' decision to live with George Lewes by Bessie herself. Marie recalled being told by her mother that during the visit Brontë's sorrowful father was far more helpful to them than was Charlotte's husband. Although the father made it understood that he did not approve of the idea of a biography, he gave Gaskell all the papers that remained on Charlotte's desk. Bessie and Gaskell also took care to go round the village and speak to everyone who had known her. Curiously, no reference is found in Gaskell's correspondence mentioning Bessie's part in the visit, so it is possible that the story is apocryphal (76). Lowndes' only source for this story is Parkes' recollection to "her daughter," Marie Belloc. Straying from her usual habits of careful citation, Lowndes offers no direct documentation from Marie's typescript, but she admits that she finds no trace of the story in either Gaskell's Life or her Letters (ed. J. A. V. Chappell and Arthur Pollard [1966]). Nevertheless, Gaskell and Parkes had a mutual friend in Eliza Fox, who--in 1855--co-led with Parkes the Married Women's Property Committee while Gaskell composed her Life. We have reason, then, to consider the possibility that Parkes silently accompanied Gaskell on her bleak literary pilgrimage. As told by Lowndes, Parkes' life consists of a variety of these potential political and literary exchanges, presented for others to confirm or deny. Firmer evidence undergirds Lowndes' account of Parkes' friendship with George Eliot. Though no other source confirms the claim that Parkes was Gaskell's informant on Evans' cohabitating with Lewes, Lowndes often cites--from Gordon Haight's exhaustive edition of Eliot's letters --her extensive correspondence with Parkes. They met in Coventry in 1850 after Bessie's father Joseph Parkes had funded Evans' translation of David Friedrich Strauss' The Life of Jesus. Ranging over several decades and across geographic and political distances, their letters reveal both literary and professional agreements and disagreements. With Eliot's letters, Lowndes takes full advantage of her stated hope that nineteenth- century voices will speak above hers (6). But what does Eliot's voice tell us? Though she often sounds affectionate in writing to Parkes, her letters to Barbara Bodichon also criticize the decisions and actions of their mutual friend. Listening for the novelist's voice, as Lowndes hopes her readers will, one begins to wonder if Parkes was as important to the life of Eliot as Eliot was to the life of Parkes. While the records of Parkes' friendships limit access to her inner life, her conversion to Catholicism challenges Lowndes with a different kind of problem. In a single chapter on her conversion (which she occasionally mentions thereafter), she notes that Parkes' friends, namely Bodichon and Eliot, objected to it. By her own account in the Girton archives, which--says Lowndes--reveals "a great deal about how Bessie saw herself," Bessie turned to "the Christian fold" because she was "haunted by the misery of the world" (qtd. 147). This response does not explain why Parkes would choose the more socially difficult Catholic church over High Anglicanism.