The usurping game is now the best-selling modern board game, by far, with approximately 285 million copies sold. Its digital equivalent, Monopoly Go!, has amassed 150 million downloads, with millions of daily active users.

Some history of Lizzie Magie and her invention is explored in the following piece by Evan Atlas, who recently reimagined Magie’s creation as an online game called Prosperity.

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Lizzie Magie and The Landlord’s Game

Contributed by Evan Atlas

Who Was Lizzie Magie? She was a champion of prosperity. That’s the short version. But this incredibly multifaceted woman defies brief classification. Her path was one of iconoclasm and entrepreneurial creativity. 

Elizabeth Jones Magie (1866 – 1948), born in Macomb, Illinois, was the daughter of James Kingsley Magie and Mary Jane Ritchie. Her father sparked her lifelong interest in economic justice by introducing her to Progress and Poverty, the groundbreaking book by Henry George. It not only inspired The Landlord’s Game, but stayed with her throughout her life. 

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In her early twenties, Magie became a proficient typist and stenographer, even starting her own business centered on these skills. But she was anything but mechanical. At just twenty-six years of age, she secured her first patent for innovating the typewriters she had mastered.

Notably, it was a time when less than 1% of patents were issued to women. This was the engineering side of Magie. She both understood systems and had the inclination to change them:

“We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.”

Artistically, she dabbled in writing, live comedy, and theatre. A collection of her poetry, titled My Betrothed, and Other Poems, reveals other varied interests such as psychology, philosophy, and squandered opportunity:

Society, thou ill-constructed thing,
Reform thyself!
Dethrone the worthless idlers!
Make room for worthy Genius!
O ye men of wealth and power,
Should this be so?
Should Genius, out of place,
Toil on till death, impoverished, unknown?
This poet soul, imprisoned, dreams away.
A thousand brilliant thoughts
Come rushing to his brain,
And, like some caged wild bird,
Flap their wings and cry for liberty,
But find it not,
And fade and die imprisoned.

Elsewhere, she displayed her literary talents as an investigative journalist, covering the grueling working conditions of women. She was a vocal feminist throughout her life, and gained notoriety for placing a satirical ad for “herself” in a newspaper:

“Young woman American slave to the highest bidder: Intelligent, well-educated, refined, true, honest, just, poetical, philosophical, and womanly above all things. Brunette, large gray-green eyes, full passionate lips, splendid teeth, not beautiful but very attractive, features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine; height 5 feet 3 inches; well proportioned, graceful.”

But near the end of her life, she listed her occupation as maker of games.

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Magie was awarded a patent for the Landlord’s Game in 1904

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The Landlord’s Game

Many games have a philosophical aspect to them. It just so happens that Monopoly is more covert than its forgotten predecessor. Its style of play fits neatly within the prevailing economic orthodoxy, so it isn’t recognized as having a distinct philosophical stance. Yet it does. It subscribes to the practice of bundling together land rents and structure rents.

We can see this at work in both the game — and in daily life beyond the board. If I own a property (in Monopoly or in my home state of New York) that consists of land and a house that I built, I’ll be charged a property tax. This tax is based on the combined value of the land and the house.

Magie considered this an economic injustice. Why? Because my efforts and resources produced the value that results from constructing a house, but not the value that is inherent to the land. From this logic, the land value tax was born.

The value of land is a public good that is privately captured. So the remedy is to tax land at a rate that recaptures that value and effectively restores its status as a public good. This is the philosophy that inspired Lizzie Magie, and is the economic foundation of The Landlord’s Game. 

She achieved this with a brilliant game rule that was later left out of Monopoly—the prosperity rule. It follows from the same logic explored above: It should be expensive, not profitable, to hoard undeveloped land. Monopoly, lacking this rule, was born as an ode to injustice. It was in 1935 that the Parker Brothers company bought the rights to her game for just $500.

This has been characterized as a swindle, understandably. But make no mistake: Magie was not duped into thinking that’s all the game was worth. What convinced her was not the $500—it was that they offered to sell and promote The Landlord’s Game along with Monopoly.

She truly believed this was how her Georgist board game would finally reach the wider world. Parker Brothers, however, did little to promote her game, and discontinued it shortly after it went into production. Since then, it has been mostly lost to time, with few having ever heard of it.

In her poem title “Self,” she wrote:

The great are those who make the world
The better by their deeds.

Her dream was buried. But she was true to herself to the very end. I think that Magie, as a maker of games, did a little wordplay here. Of course it is our actions (our deeds) that shape reality. It couldn’t have been far from her mind that the same could be said of our property deeds.

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For the expanded version of this post,
see Prosperity: A Georgist Game

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See (and Play) for Yourself

Lizzie Magie once said, “I am thankful that I have been taught how to think and not what to think.” That’s why sometimes we need games, not textbooks.

If you’re as inspired by Magie’s story and her lost board game as I am, you may be wondering where you can play The Landlord’s Game. That’s why I’ve re-imagined it as a modern online game called Prosperity. Play the game and see Lizzie Magie’s ideas clearly for yourself. With her help, we can change the world.

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Contributed by Evan Atlas. Evan is a writer and political philosopher from New York’s Hudson Valley. His work confronts our most significant challenges, and develops a theory of change for the 21st century that is unlike anything you’ve heard before. He believes that the future of humanity can be more loving, more free, and more beautiful, but that this future is in danger. Join him at evanatlas.com and on his Substack and help create a more beautiful planet.

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Lizzie Magie in 1906
Learn more in “The Woman Inventor Behind Monopoly“

Further reading

• Chokshi, Niraj. “A New Monopoly Game Celebrates Women, but What About the One Behind the Original?” International New York Times / International Herald Tribune. September 2019.
• Dodson, Edward J. “How Henry George’s Principles Were Corrupted Into the Game Called Monopoly.” December 2011.
• Edwards, Gavin. “Overlooked No More: Lizzie Magie, the Unknown Inventor Behind Monopoly.” 
  The New York Times. April 2024.
• Terrell, Ellen. “The Very Fascinating Elizabeth J. Magie.” Library of Congress. September 2022.

The post Lizzie Magie: Forgotten Inventor of The Landlord’s Game appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

As a young woman in the male-dominated society of 18th-century France, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was denied an artistic education and forced to nurture her passion outside of conventional schooling. Vigée Le Brun’s vibrant art, in addition to her charm and beauty, caught the attention of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who honored her as her chosen painter.

At the pinnacle of her fame and fortune, however, the Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun to flee, leaving everything behind except her only child, a daughter.

Drawn from Vigée Le Brun’s memoirs, archival research, and reexamination of the judgment of her contemporaries, this biography paints a fascinating picture of a single working mother who survived because of her cachet, charisma, and artistic talent.

Cast on a storm-tossed continent, solely reliant on her palette, she produced some of her major works during her twelve-year exile, returning to France to continue her work after Napoleon had restored stability. Vigée Le Brun’s story is one of triumph, adversity, perseverance and ultimately, peace.

Judith Lissauer Cromwell has contributed 10 fascinating facts about Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, a painter whose life and work merits wider recognition.

Vigée Le Brun was a feminine icon in her day

Famed throughout Europe and North America for her portraits, Vigée Le Brun, a lover of art, music, letters, and nature, had traveled widely. She knew everybody who mattered in the European world of culture and politics and had painted many of them.

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Portrait of Quieen Marie Antoinette
by Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Versailles Museum

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She was Queen Marie-Antoinette’s favorite artist

Marie-Antoinette’s exacting mother, the Empress of Austria, wanted a formal portrait of her daughter as Queen of France.  Several prominent male artists had, over a ten-year period, failed to please.  Desperate, Marie-Antoinette decided to try a young female artist who had become the fashion in Paris.  Vigée Le Brun’s Marie-Antoinette in Full Court Dress succeeded.  This joint triumph created a bond between queen and artist.

Vigée Le Brun painted many portraits of Marie-Antoinette.  Some went to the queen’s friends in foreign countries, others to French embassies in foreign capitals.  King Louis XVI presented a formal portrait of himself and of Marie-Antoinette (by Vigée Le Brun) to the US Congress to mark the birth of the new nation.  Exposure as the French queen’s painter brought her universal fame. 

Vigée Le Brun was basically self-taught

Barred from a traditional art education because of her gender, Vigeé Le Brun relied on herself to nurture her passion for painting and her ambition to be a great artist.  She developed her unique style by studying master painters. 
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She had an unsatisfactory marriage

At age twenty, the painter made a marriage of convenience to a prominent Parisian art dealer, mainly to escape an unhappy home life.  He was not “a bad man,” Vigée Le Brun tells us, “his nature showed a great mixture of sweetness and vivacity; he treated everyone very kindly…a likeable person.  But his reckless passion for women of ill repute, combined with his lust for gambling, resulted in the loss of his fortune and mine, which he fully controlled.”

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun divorced his wife during her exile, which allowed the painter full control of her earnings so that when she returned to France, Vigée Le Brun had enough to live on comfortably.

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Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist, 1755–1842
is available wherever books are sold
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Vigée Le Brun was socially prominent

Her pretty face, attractive figure and sense of fashion, her charm and gift for making friends, but above all her talent and determination to succeed, propelled the young painter into the top echelons of scintillating Old Régime society. 

The only artist with a salon in the heyday of Paris salons, Vigée Le Brun’s salon attracted prominent members of the bohemian world of arts and letters and aristocrats bored by the stiff formality of Versailles.  It did not matter if the simple food ran out, or a prince of the blood had to sit on the floor because there were not enough chairs; music, laughter, and good conversation satisfied everyone.

She was fashion-forward

Frustrated by the Versailles court’s formal, ornate, and uniform dress with its stiff corsetry, its blank rouged faces under elaborately coiffed hair, Vigée Le Brun persuaded her sitters to wear simple, pliant, muslin dresses and shawls, unpowdered, naturally arranged hair, and minimal makeup. Vigée Le Brun made an effort to get to know her subjects so that she could portray them as vital human beings.

Having helped to promote a simpler way of dressing in Paris, Europe’s fashion capital, Vigée Le Brun introduced her style to St. Petersburg, where she spent half of her twelve-year exile.  The new fashion became so popular that aristocratic ladies were able to convince an extremely reluctant Catherine the Great to allow it at official court functions.

Vigée Le Brun suffered vicious calumny

The public’s love of reading salacious gossip about the rich and famous stimulated the fertile imagination of pamphleteers.  Pre-revolutionary Paris buzzed with made-up tales, especially about Marie-Antoinette and, since she and Vigée Le Brun were as much friends as two women of such disparate social levels could be, some of the fabricated mud flung at the queen spattered onto her favorite painter. 

Vigée Le Brun could ill afford to ignore the slander because, as a female artist, her credibility depended on keeping her spotless reputation. The lies Parisian pamphleteers spread about Vigée Le Brun were a major reason for her flight from Paris as the Revolution ramped up.

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Julie Le Brun by Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun
(image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access)
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She suffered great tragedy in losing her daughter

Vigée Le Brun adored her only child. She took pretty little Julie with her into exile, lavished love and attention on her, and made sure she had an excellent education.  At age nineteen Julie fell in love with a handsome nonentity. Vigée Le Brun opposed their marriage; the ensuing fracas revealed Julie’s less attractive qualities and caused an irreparable rift with her mother. The marriage ended badly; and syphilis led to Julie’s early death.

Vigée Le Brun wrote her memoirs

Reflecting on her legacy towards the end of her life, on the cruel and unmerited slander she, as a successful woman in a man’s world, had suffered, Vigée le Brun decided to seize control of her life story by creating her last self-portrait.  Souvenirs recounts Vigée Le Brun’s life as she wanted posterity to know it; Souvenirs also presents posterity with Vigée Le Brun’s last, vivid, and richly colored depiction of the Old Régime.

Her paintings have two-fold importance

Today, Vigée Le Brun’s paintings hang in some of the world’s most important galleries, not only for their artistic value but also because she immortalized many of Europe’s movers and shakers at a time when the West stood at the cusp of the modern age.

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About the author, Judith Lissauer Cromwell: After a successful corporate career, Judith returned to academia as an independent historian and biographer of powerful women. Her experience as a magna cum laude graduate of Smith College, holder of a doctorate in modern European history with academic distinction from New York University, veteran of corporate America, mother, and grandmother, enrich Cromwell’s perspective on strong women in history. 

She is the author of the biographies Dorothea Lieven: A Russian Princess in London and Paris, 1785-1857; Florence Nightingale, Feminist; and Good Queen Anne: Appraising the Life and Reign of the Last Stuart Monarch. Her latest biography, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist, 1755-1842 provides a fresh and balanced perspective on the life of a renowned, yet often overlooked, painter. Learn more about Judith’s work at JudithCromwell.com.

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Comtesse de la Châtre (Marie Charlotte Louise Perrette Aglaé Bontemps, 1762–1848)
by Louise-Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun
(image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access)

An Interview with Judith Lissauer Cromwell

What inspired you to write about Vigée Le Brun?

I had never heard of Vigée Le Brun until New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective of her work. Reviewers praised the exhibit, so I went to see it. Vigée Le Brun’s

paintings were riveting, her brief introductory biography intriguing. This remarkable woman, I vowed to myself, would be the subject of my next book.     

Why is Vigée Le Brun, the most sought after portraitist in late 18th and early 19th century Europe, not well-known today?

Until the present day, art historians (mostly male) have generally tended to ignore female artists. Because of her association with Marie Antoinette and the court at Versailles, Vigée Le Brun became famous as a court painter. Certainly, she focused on the aristocracy and the French

court before the Revolution, but both before and after the Revolution, her work, indeed, some of her most celebrated paintings, are not of aristocrats.     

What is the most surprising thing you discovered about Vigée Le Brun?

The tremendous hurdles she faced in achieving her goal to become a great artist. What a multi-faceted woman she was. How the political events she lived through affected her even though she had little to no interest in politics. Her resilience; how she managed to continue her brilliant career during twelve years of exile far from her beloved family and homeland.  

Why have you focused on only fifty of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings when her complete oeuvre includes around eight hundred? How did you decide which paintings to include in your biography?

Rather than cramming into the book as many illustrations as possible from Vigée Le Brun’s copious work, I decided to highlight paintings that are either especially important in her life or exemplify her most illustrious efforts.          

Why does Vigée Le Brun’s art, life, and legacy matter to readers today?

Despite incredible odds, she achieved her childhood goal of becoming a great artist early in life. Aside from her art and the fame it brought her, Vigée Le Brun’s diverse interests, not to mention her looks, charm, and social position (everyone who mattered in the world of culture, society, and politics knew her) made Vigée Le Brun a feminine icon. Dedication to her art brought Vigée Le Brun solace in times of stress and happiness regardless of life’s knocks.     

Which museums hold a selection of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings? Where should readers go to see her art in person?

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre (Paris) currently have some of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings on view; The Hermitage, (St.Petersburg, Russia); the National Gallery, (London); and the Versailles et Trianon museums (Versailles, outside Paris) all own several of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings.

The post 10 Fascinating Facts About Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

They chaffed against the private domestic sphere before leaving it. They found ways to acquire knowledge that was forbidden to their sex and gender. They defied the odds to take ruling power from men, or ruled alongside and equal to their husbands. (Shown above right, Pandita Ramabai.)

During the colonial/imperialist era, they joined and were welcomed into anti-colonialist movements. Later, they came to together and forged feminist movements to throw off the shackles of domination and oppression that tried to contain and silence them.

In the West, we tend to focus on the feminist movements of the U.S. which inspired the movements in Europe. Most feminist authors we read are American, with a handful of French writers. We miss that the world is large, and women across the world rebelled and struggled against the constraints of patriarchy. Through deepening our collective understanding of the feminisms around the world, creativity can spark like a dialectic, as Audre Lorde said.

As the suffragette movement began in the U.S., feminist writers and activists began their own movement, which grew alongside the anti-colonist and reform movement.

I should like to remind the women present here that no group, no community, no country, has ever got rid of its disability by the generosity of the oppressor. India will not be free until we are strong enough to fore our will on England and the women of India will not attain their full rights by the mere generosity of the men of India. They will have to fight for them and force their will on the menfolk before they can succeed. ¹

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The Queens: Sultan Razia, Nur Jahan,
and Rani of Jhansi

Vedic India (1500 to 500 BCE) allowed for some freedoms of gender and for women. However, as that period came to a close, caste took precedence and stratified society narrowly and rigidly. The religion shifted so that righteous actions became tied to caste, caste further tied to family, and the family structure in India was already patriarchal² — increasing the oppression of women.

The feminist movements of 1800s India looked to both Vedic times and to a few ruling queens, as inspiration for women’s liberation. Sultan Razia, full name Raziyyat-Ud-Dunya Wa Ud-Din, was the first and only female Muslim ruler of the Indian subcontinent. She learned the skill of leadership in ruling in her father’s place when he went to battle.

In 1236, Razia learned that her stepmother planned to execute her. She successfully instigated the public against her stepmother and her son. That her rebellion was supported by the public makes her rule unique. She asked the public to depose her if they were unhappy with her rule. The nobles that supported her expected her to remain a figurehead. Razia had other ideas, taking more power over the four years of her reign. She left the purdah (the private sphere that some women in India traditionally occupied), wore the traditionally male clothing of sultans (Muslim rulers), and made public appearances.

Nur Jahan ruled alongside her husband in the early 1600s³. When her husband became ill, she governed in his place. Scholars believe her political acumen and diplomatic skills rivaled those of more famous rulers. When her husband was captured, she led troops into battle to free him. She signed imperial orders, and coins were issued with her likeness.

Prior to her reign, Nur Jahan was an accomplished architect. She made innovations in the use of marble — which later inspired her stepson, Shah Jahan, who ordered the building of the Taj Mahal.

The Rani of Jhansi (rani means queen) was born Lakshmi Bai. Her complicity in colonization is questionable, but the British viewed her as an enemy. They captured her, but she escaped and became a rebel. Jhansi was a leading figure in the Indian rebellion of 1857, wrote on horseback into battle, and died on the battlefield.

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Rassundari Devi

Image: Rassundari Devi Archives, India

“If I am asked to describe my state of mind, I would say it was very much like the sacrificial goat being dragged to the altar, the same hopeless situation, the same agonized screams … People put birds in cages for their own amusement. Well, I was like a caged bird. And I would have to remain in this cage for life. I would never be freed.” 

For Rassundari Devi, feminism was a departure and a rebellion without precedent or support. She born to a high caste land-owning family in rural India in 1809 or 1810. Married off when she was only twelve, responsible for the household by the time she was fourteen, she bore twelve children. Women were not typically educated in that time and place, but she tried to learn by sitting outside a classroom while boys were taught the alphabet⁴.

Her book Amar Jiban (my life) was published in 1868. It’s the story of one woman’s life. An extraordinary book for its time and place, because in writing it, Rassundari Devi told the world that an ordinary woman’s life had worth and merit. Like an early Betty Friedan, she described “the problem that has no name”; that lack of fulfillment and spiritual boredom that came from the repetitive tediousness of domestic labor.

She detailed the struggle to teach herself to read when she was twenty-six. In doing so, Rassundari Devi risked family and societal disapproval and ostracization. She described the process as a form of worship. Her faith was not curtailed to the passive feminine devotion of other women of her era. She read scripture, and she forged her own relationship with the gods.

In doing so, Rassundari Devi broke through the cage that was designed to contain her — broke through the social structures that kept the lives of women domestic and small.

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Pandita Ramabai

“My soul thirsted for freedom, for knowledge, for spiritual light; and I am determined that I must seek them at any cost.”⁵

Rassundari Devi’s book has survived, but the books of other feminist writers of India have been lost to history. One of those books was authored by Tarabai Shinde. Tarabai was a lower caste (class) woman whose work was explicitly feminist and theoretical: The Comparisons of Men and Women⁶.

Pandita Ramabai (1858 – 1922) is the best-known of the feminist agitators and rebels of her time. She did not independently chose to leave the private sphere: she was thrust out of it. She helped start local women’s movements, travelled the globe to gain an education and to seek out feminist discourse, authored multiple books, and founding schools for girls.

Before her birth, her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, wanted to teach his wife Sanskrit (the ancient language of Hindu and dharmic scriptures). For this progressive rebellion, he was ostracized and driven away from his home before Pandita’s birth. Desperate for money, the family became nomadic scholars, reciting scriptures for pay. Pandita was taught by her mother, and could recite the 18,000 lines of the Bhagavata Purana from memory⁷. Pandita lost her family⁸ to the famines of 1874.

Although Pandita had religious knowledge that would rival that of scholarly man of her time, her family’s experiences made her turn from religion and to the cause of womankind. She had two great advantages: that she learned about social reality and occupied the public sphere because of her nomadic travels, and her deep learning and understanding of Hindu ideology⁹.

Armed with these weapons of feminist rebellion, she travelled throughout India, agitating and starting women’s movements. She wrote a book arguing against religious practices that hurt women, and for women’s emancipation.

Pandita then traveled to England. Here, she learned English, learned about Christianity. Originally, she wanted to study medicine, but had to drop out because of her deafness. She then travelled to the U.S., where American feminism inspired her to start thinking of setting up schools for girls in India.

To fundraise, she wrote The High Caste Hindu Woman, her most famous work. As the title implies, her views could be narrow because of her high caste and unwillingness to look to women outside of that caste. As well, she advocated from a position of feminine moral superiority — under the presumption that women were morally superior to men¹⁰.

How true is the claim of many Western scholars that a civilization should be judged by the conditions of its women! Women are inherently physically weaker than men, and possess innate powers of endurance; men therefore find it very easy to wrest their natural rights and reduce them to a state that suits the men. But, from a moral point of view, physical might is not real strength, nor is it a sign of nobility of character to deprive the weak of their rights . . .

[A]s men gain wisdom and progress further, they begin to disregard women’s lack of strength to honor their good qualities, and elevate them to a high state. Their low opinion of women and of other such matters undergoes a change and gives way to respect. Thus, one can accurately assess a country’s progress from the condition of its women.¹¹

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Sarojini Naidu

Sarojini Naidu rebelled early. She choosing to marry a man from a different state in India than her own (so their native languages and cultures were different), and marrying outside of her caste (class; marriages in India are typically arranged strictly within castes). She became a poet and orator before meeting Gandhi and joining the non-cooperation movement against British colonialism.

Sarojini’s anti-colonialism was part of her feminist advocacy. When arguing with anti-colonialists, she framed women as essential “nation builders” without whom the independence movement could not succeed. Through her advocacy, the women’s liberation movement became part of Indian nationalism.

Sarojini also advocated for women’s suffrage in India, helped start the Women’s Indian Association, and helped women organize strikes and non-violent protests. She became the first Indian female president of Indian National Congress, the first modern nationalist movement of the British empire, and today, India’s major liberal political party.

Her sister-in-law, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, was a more radical feminist than Sarojini. Kamaladevi shocked society by choosing to remarry a playwright after she was widowed. She helped found the All-India Women’s Conference. She’s best remembered for her work in promoting the socio-economic status of women through promoting the learning of Indian handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre.

The Reform Movements of the Early 1800s

Prior to the 1857 – 1858 conquest of South Asia, women and men in India had already begun to organize against casteism, poverty, and rape. Reform movements began around the time of Rassundari Devi’s birth. The oppressions that the reformers wanted to reform included: sati (widow burning) widow remarriage, child marriage, women’s property rights, and polygamy.

The reformers argued to raise the age of consent and marriage to 16 or 18¹². Reformer K.C. Sen argued that child marriage was a “corruption of scriptures” and impeded India’s advancement. Reformer Dayananda Saraswati wrote that child marriage caused Indians to be “children of children”. He advocated for girls to be educated prior to marriage. In 1872, there was some success in the Marriage Act, which raised the marriageable age for girls to 14, and for boy to 18.

The reformers also advocated for the education of women. Both liberal and orthodox reformers supported the cause. Some believed that education would make women better wives and mothers, and better allow women to teach their children traditional values. Between 1855-1858, a forerunner of the movement, Vidyasagar, opened forty schools for girls.¹³

The brahmins (highest caste) organized a 1920 meeting for the compulsory education of women (their demand was denied). Rabindranath Tagore — winner of 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature — revolutionized a school for the revival of Indian arts and culture that his father had started. The school not only allowed women, but emphasized the conditions necessary for bringing out the creative in women.¹⁴

 Women began to graduate from colleges by the 1880s. Some women went further: going to England to study law and establishing medical schools in India.

At the time, most of the reformers were male of high caste (rigid Hindu class system). There’s the shortcoming of movement spurred by men, with little input from women and the lived experiences of women. This led to a greater issue: that the issues that the reformers wanted to address mostly affected higher caste Hindu women, to the exclusion of women from other religions and the lower castes. It’s the same problem that’s plagued women’s movements across the world, and it’s a problem that still troubles India’s modern-day feminist movements.

There was some lower caste reformers, like Jotirao Phulu (1827 – 1890), who opposed child marriage and advocated for women’s education and remarriage. He started several schools: one for the education of girls, two for the education of the lower castes, and one for the education of the children of widows. In his last book, published 1872, Phulu wrote against the stereotypical sexist language, eg., instead of “all men are created equal”, he wrote “each and every man and woman.”¹⁵

Why Is This Important

The early feminist movement in India serves as a powerful example of decolonial feminism, of how pre-colonial history and the movement against colonization spark women’s liberation movements. Because the two movements were historically entwined, the feminism of India doesn’t set up women’s liberation into narrow binaries.

As for the feminist activists and advocates of India, and those of the global majority, India’s early feminism can spark inspiration and creativity. The women and men of these movements showed great resilience in the face of adversity, courageously defied tradition, and spoke up and wrote for what they believed in. Their stories aren’t history to be forgotten; they are guides to show us what is possible.

Contributed by Feminism for All, a newsletter/blog/project that encourages readers to think about equality for all women through the lens of under-known/overlooked literary fiction, literature by lesbian women, and feminist theory.

Notes

1 Jawaharlal Nehru, speech at Allahabad, March 31, 1928. From: Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. (Kali for Women, 1986, republished by Verso Books 2016). p 73.

2 “Righteous actions”, or dharma, are the basis of the dharmic religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.). One is born into one’s caste, caste duties are taught within the family — so if a society is casteist, it is necessarily very oriented around the idea of family.

Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. (Kali for Women, 1986, republished by Verso Books 2016). p 74.

3 Lal, Ruby. Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2018).

4 Naaz, Hira. The Caged Bird Who Sang: The Life and Writing of Rassundari Devi | #IndianWomenInHistory. Feminism in India. March 23, 2017. https://feminisminindia.com/2017/03/23/rassundari-devi-essay/

5 Kosambi, Meera. Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Making of a Modern Hindu Woman. 2003.

6 Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. (Kali for Women, 1986, republished by Verso Books 2016). p 90.

7 Celarent, Barbara. The High Caste Hindu Woman by Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati Pandita Ramabai’s America: Conditions of Life in the United States. American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 1 (2011): 353–60. https://doi.org/10.1086/660901.

8 Ibid, p 90 – 91. Pandita’s parents and sister passed away. She and her brother survived.

9 Ibid, p 91.

10 Celarent, Barbara. The High Caste Hindu Woman by Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati Pandita Ramabai’s America: Conditions of Life in the United States. American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 1 (2011): 353–60. https://doi.org/10.1086/660901.

11 Kosambi, Meera. Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Making of a Modern Hindu Woman. 2003. p 169.

From: https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/09/pandita-ramabais-book-on-america-1889.html

12 Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. (Kali for Women, 1986, republished by Verso Books 2016). p 83.

13 Ibid, p 87.

14 Ibid, p 85.

15 Ibid, p. 84.

The post Feminist Activists of India Before 1900: A Brief History appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

In 1891, timid Jo van Gogh-Bonger lived safely in the background of her art dealer husband Theo’s passionate for selling work by unknown artists, especially his ill-fated, deceased brother Vincent.

When Theo van Gogh died unexpectedly, Jo’s brief happiness was shattered. Her inheritance—hundreds of unsold paintings by Vincent—was worthless. Pressured to move back to her parents’ home, Jo defied tradition, opened a boarding house to raise her infant son alone, and chose to promote Vincent’s art herself.

Her ingenuity and persistence drew the powerful opposition of a Parisian art dealer who vowed to stop her and sink Vincent into obscurity. It would take Jo fifteen years for the world to finally take note of Vincent van Gogh.

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Learn more about Saving Vincent by Joan Fernandez
Saving Vincent is available on Bookshop.org*, Amazon*,
and wherever books are sold

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As I researched and wrote my story about Jo, I frequently returned to a few questions to deepen and explore her story. Why was Jo so fully invested in promoting Vincent, and how did she guide his works to rise from anonymity into the worldwide adoration we know him today.

How could Jo be so certain that Vincent was an amazing talent when so many art experts said he was not? Here are some fascinating facts about Jo’s background and how she overcame resistance to her late brother-in-law’s artistic vision:

Translated musical concepts to visual appreciation. Jo grew up immersed in music thanks to her industrialist father, Hendrik, who splurged on music lessons for his seven children, and frequently took the family to concerts. In her studies, Jo earned the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in music. She could draw from this early exposure to music’s abstract concepts when appreciating Van Gogh’s art.

Acquired art knowledge through Theo’s tutelage. After Jo became engaged to Vincent’s brother, Theo van Gogh, they lived apart: Jo in Amsterdam and Theo in Paris. As a result, nearly every day they exchanged letters, discussing several topics but many were on art, reflecting Jo’s keen interest in Theo’s work as an art dealer.  Once they married, Jo became a behind-the-scenes confidante to Theo. This was an unofficial apprenticeship for when she had to make decisions on Vincent’s art after Theo’s death, Jo would recall what she had learned from their conversations.

Found personal connection to Vincent through letters. Jo only met Vincent three times in life. A few years after his death, Jo discovered that Theo had hoarded his correspondence with his brother—800+ letters over ten years—and she read them all. The correspondence opened the elusive brother-in-law to her as he shared dreams, hopes, philosophies and commentary on his own art. Vincent’s inner life was revealed to her and she became personally invested in his success instead of relying on Theo’s judgement alone.

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Jo (Johanna) van Gogh-Bonger in 1890  with baby son
Vincent Willem (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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As Jo faced resistance to Vincent’s art, what did she do to overcome it?

Followed counterintuitive marketing instincts. After Theo’s death, Jo inherited all of Vincent’s artwork. Within a few months, she moved to a small town in the Netherlands. She took ten crates of Vincent Van Gogh paintings with her, despite the objection of Theo’s artist friends. They argued that Paris was the epicenter of art trading. Jo had a different idea. Her first strategy was to approach Dutch art dealers to sell and exhibit his works. Vincent’s artwork was already outside the norm; gaining a foothold among his native Dutch countrymen gave her confidence, and was an initial step to his being accepted elsewhere. The plan worked.

Cultivated Van Gogh fandom. Based on her own experience of appreciating Vincent after reading his letters, Jo began to loan the letters to critics. In the process, this turned them into advocates in the process. She ran excerpts of Van Gogh’s letters (along with drawings) in a series of six articles over several months in a Parisian art magazine. This generated curiosity among the art-loving public, bypassing the art dealers and art critics who were gatekeepers when it came to what the public saw.

Drew upon Vincent’s art to support poverty relief. Caring about the impoverished working class was a core value for Jo. As a little girl, she had been dismayed by the risk and dangers of dock workers employed in the shipping trade where her father worked. Vincent also identified with laborers, feeling more at home with them instead of “money men.” Inspired by this shared empathy, Jo broadened access to Vincent’s art by paying entry fees for the poor and discounting or waiving them for students and workers.

Held to ambitious vision. Jo holds the record for staging the largest museum exhibition of Van Gogh art ever: she refused to take no for an answer when she requested an exhibit at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s premier art museum dedicated to modern art. On her third try, the museum directors acquiesced. Over seven weeks (July 15 – Aug 30, 1905), Jo rented out seven galleries to display 484 works, drawing an estimated audience of 4,500 people. This strategy proved successful, marking the breakthrough she had sought. As a result, Vincent’s name was cemented alongside Cezanne and Gauguin as a founder of modern art.

Through a combination of innate artistic sensibility, honed through musical education and an unexpected apprenticeship with her art dealer husband, Jo van Gogh developed a unique understanding of Vincent’s work. Driven by a profound conviction forged through his letters and a resolute belief in his genius, she defied conventional wisdom and followed her own counterintuitive marketing ideas despite resistance from the status quo.

What a joy it has been for me to share how Jo’s unwavering ambition catapulted Van Gogh from obscurity to securing a permanent place for him in history. Jo’s extraordinary vision is an inspiration.

Joan Fernandez is a novelist who brings to light brilliant women’s courageous deeds in history. She is a former senior marketing executive and general partner of the financial powerhouse Edward Jones. In 2018, she retired from a 30+ year career to be a full-time writer. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society, the Author’s Guild, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA). In April 2020, she founded a Historical Fiction affinity group within WFWA that grew from a handful of people to nearly two hundred authors. Her short story, “A Parisian Daughter,” is published in the anthology, Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women. Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh, (April, 2025) is her debut novel. Find her at JoanFernandez.com.

See more Fascinating Biofiction: Novels About Real-Life Women.

Further reading 

• Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)
• The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh
• Johanna van Gogh and Vincent’s Legacy

The post Her Vision, His Genius: How Jo van Gogh-Bonger rescued Vincent van Gogh’s Legacy appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A love letter to museums mainly around the U.S., it’s an eclectic collection that features Bob’s distinctive artwork. It was interesting to discover that several important museums were founded by women, and that’s what we’ll focus on here. 

You’ll find plenty of art museums, of course, but other types of museums are well represented as well. Science, culture, transportation, history, and historic homes are represented. The entries offer basic info, but what really makes them shine are the personal stories from visitors to each venue.

In addition to those highlighted below, I hadn’t realized that the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in NYC was founded by three women collectively known as “the Ladies” — Abby Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. 

Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums is a book to treasure and dip into. I love it, and I think any art and culture aficionado will, too! Make sure to scroll down to read a Q & A with Bob. 

Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums by Bob Eckstein
is available on Bookshop*, Amazon*, and wherever books are sold

From the publisher: We already know and love Bob Eckstein’s New York Times bestselling Footnotes from The World’s Greatest Bookstores. Now, Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums looks at the most beloved museums in North America. More than 75 museums are featured here (full list below) including those specializing in art, natural history, academia, science, and more.

Profiles from curators and museum workers appear alongside 155 original pieces of whimsical artwork that illustrate a story about the museum or showcase a particular work of art in its collection. This is a thought-provoking, inspiring reminder of why we go to museums and in the first place why we love them so much.

Artists, art lovers, students, travelers, and adventurers of all ages will delight in this highly giftable book. The following entries on the four museums are adapted from Footnotes from The World’s Greatest Bookstores, by permission of the author.

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Whitney Museum of American Art

New York City, Est. 1930

The Whitney, or officially the Whitney Museum of American Art, was founded by socialite Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930. The museum is most famous for its Whitney Biennial exhibition which showcase up-and-coming artists.

Its latest location is in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan. Its eight stories and two-hundred-thousand square feet consist of New York City’s largest column-free exhibit spaces. The museum includes an education center, library, theater, a conservation laboratory, and observation decks.

Their famed Independent Study Program, which boasts a list of accomplished artists, curators, and art historians as their alumni, is free and located in Roy Lichtenstein’s Greenwich Village studio. Michelle Obama attended the ceremonial ribbon-cutting of the new Renzo Piano–designed building in 2015 with Mayor Bill de Blasio.

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Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Boston, Massachusetts, Est. 1903

Built in 1901, Fenway Court was the former home of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Two years later it became the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a must-see attraction in Boston filled with excellent examples of European, Asian, and American paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts.

“We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art. I decided that the greatest need in our country was art. . . . So, I was determined to make it my life’s work if I could.”

The new wing of the museum, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, opened in 2012 and will help preserve the original historic building by hosting all the museum’s public performances and events. 

The museum highlight is a magnificent fifteenth-century Venetian palace courtyard. The courtyard has a glass roof that illuminates the museum’s galleries by diffusing the natural light. Gardner purchased eight Venetian stone balconies which overlook an exceptional Roman tile mosaic for the parameter of the center sanctuary.

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American Visionary Art Museum

Baltimore, Maryland, Est. 1995

Fifi, 2001, Theresa Segreti

One eight-year-old was brought by her grandparents. She loved AVAM so much she sat in our gallery floor and refused to move, declaring, ‘I am going to live here.’ They reasoned, ‘Where are you going to sleep?’ ‘What will you eat?’ She had plausible answers for all. The museum store had snacks, she could bathe in our sinks, and there’s a water fountain in the basement.” (—Rebecca Hoffberger, retired founder, director, and curator)

American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) specializes in outsider art, also known as “intuitive art” or “raw art.” Baltimore granted the land to the museum under the condition it would remove the pollution from the copper paint factory and whiskey warehouse that was there previously. Congress has designated it America’s national museum for self-taught art.

The one-acre campus contains sixty-seven thousand square feet of exhibits, features three floors of space, the Tall Sculpture Barn, the Wildflower Garden, and the Jim Rouse Visionary Center. The museum uses guest curators for its shows and focuses on themed exhibitions with titles like Wind in Your Hair and High on Life.

The museum’s founder, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, ran AVAM “pretty un-museumy” and, at the time of its 1995 opening, rejected academic scholarship and museum “tradition,” reportedly upsetting prominent members of the art world. But the museum has since won the support of collectors, critics, and the public.

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Museum of Motherhood

St. Petersburg, Florida, Est. 2002

Museum of Motherhood is the first of its kind—a museum and educational center devoted to mothers, mothering, and motherhood in the world, covering the art, science, and history of mothers.

“By understanding the complex nature of family and women’s place in society, we become more compassionate and inspired in everything we do,” said Martha Joy Rose, the founder.

“I watched a couple of kids from the local high school try on the pregnancy vests and then waddle around groaning. Within five minutes they begged to take them off. One of the kids lamented how much they weighed. ‘Can you imagine doing that for nine months?’ the one asked. Is that how long they take to cook?’ the friend replied.”

The founder’s vision of the new building is that it will be in the shape of a womb with a front entrance symbolizing where motherhood all begins.

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Contributed by Bob Eckstein, a New York Times bestselling author. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, GQ, Wall St. Journal, and publications worldwide. He is also a Contributing Editor at Writer’s Digest and his newest book is Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums.  Visit his website and connect with him on Substack.

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*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

The post 4 Fascinating Museums that Were Founded by Women appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

These books are intensely practical in their philosophical narratives and also present ideas that are beautiful in a genre-defying kind of way. As Albert Einstein once said: “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” There’s something literary and artistic in a well-crafted idea.

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Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows:
on the philosophy of complex systems

Many people are now discussing topics relating to “systems thinking” and the science of complexity. We have women like Donella Meadows to thank for it. Because it’s one thing to have a siloed academic discussion about these topics, and quite another to have them enter mainstream thought.

Complex systems are incredibly important for understanding everything from the evolution of life on our planet, to the social dynamics of cities, to the inner workings of our minds. Meadows’ book, Thinking in Systems, is the perfect primer for those who are just dipping their toes into this subject. You will learn about important and generalizable principles, such as what Meadows calls leverage points:

“Leverage points are…places in the system where a small change could lead to a large shift in behavior. This idea of leverage points is not unique to systems analysis—it’s embedded in legend: the silver bullet; the trimtab; the miracle cure; the secret passage; the magic password; the single hero who turns the tide of history; the nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles.” 

This book challenges us to see the world in a whole new way and acts as a map for the new territory it describes. Where might we find these leverage points that dramatically transform the systems we live within?

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The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler:
on the philosophy of hierarchies

There is some baggage that comes with the word “hierarchy.” This is something Riane Eisler, author of ten books and now in her 92nd year of life, must know. But she doesn’t want us to throw out the idea of hierarchy, or indiscriminately hate it.

Her work, The Chalice and the Blade, actually has the potential to bring much more positive aspects of hierarchies to light. And that begins with her distinction between two “flavors” of hierarchies. The first (symbolized with the blade) is the domination or dominator hierarchy which many people think of when they hear this word.

For them, this is the only kind of hierarchy. It is, in that view, a structure of oppression and inequality, fueled by violence, and leading toward the concentration of power. The second variety (the chalice) is what Eisler calls an actualization, growth, or partnership hierarchy.

This is an organizational structure of mutual fulfillment, fueled by love and reciprocity, and leading toward the distribution of power.

“Domination hierarchies are very different from a second type of hierarchy, which I propose be called actualization hierarchies. These are the familiar hierarchies of systems within systems, for examples, of molecules, cells, and organs of the body: a progression toward a higher, more evolved, and more complex level of function. By contrast, as we may see all around us, domination hierarchies characteristically inhibit the actualization of higher functions, not only in the overall social system, but also in the individual human.”

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The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch:
on the philosophy of goodness

Iris Murdoch is the author of twenty-six novels, several of which have won prestigious literary awards. In addition to her beloved works of fiction, Murdoch also wrote several impressive books on philosophy.

She was particularly adept as a modern spokesperson for the kind of Platonic realism that was largely out of fashion—making her into an iconoclastic defender of ideas that others were ready to discard. Along with several other influential literary ladies, Murdoch helped breathe new life into moral philosophy and post-God metaphysics. 

Her most powerful and succinct work of philosophy is arguably The Sovereignty of Good. Though it is still dense and challenging, it is also highly readable. In the quote below, Murdoch shares some thoughts on her distinctive brand of naturalistic mysticism.

“There is a place both inside and outside religion for a sort of contemplation of the Good, not just by dedicated experts but by ordinary people: an attention which is not just the planning of particular good actions but an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue… This is the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, though perhaps also difficult and easily corrupted.”

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Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom:
on the philosophy of economics

Does economics seem dry? Un-literary? Don’t worry—this isn’t one of those books that tediously demonstrates how change X in supply chain Y has effect Z on the price equilibrium of toothpaste. Rather, Eleanor Ostrom was a philosopher of economics who challenged our deepest assumptions and broadened our world.

Her best-known work, Governing the Commons, explores a neglected third road that runs between two other long-standing economic paradigms. This third route is meant to address one of our thorniest and most persistent problems:

“Hardly a week goes by without a major news story about the threatened destruction of a valuable natural resource … A New York Times article focused on the problem of overfishing in the Georges Bank… Everyone knows that the basic problem is overfishing; however, those concerned cannot agree how to solve the problem … The issue in this case–and many others–is how best to limit the use of natural resources so as to ensure their long-term economic viability …

Some scholarly articles about the ‘tragedy of the commons‘ recommend that ‘the state’ control most natural resources to prevent their destruction; others recommend that privatizing those resources will resolve the problem. What one can observe in the world, however, is that neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals to sustain long-term, productive use of natural resource systems.”

Ostrom was recognized with a Nobel Prize for her work—the first woman to ever receive that award in an economic field. Those who open her books will find wisdom that has never been more relevant than it is today. Her lessons can help us shape better and more just economic systems.

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Shakespeare’s Last Plays by Frances Yates:
on the philosophy of Shakespearean magic

Writing about Shakespeare is like writing about love or religion or politics. There are so many voices that compete for space that it’s hard to be confident that one is saying anything new at all. Like Iris Murdoch once wrote, one can reach a moment of negation in which “all one’s hard won knowledge and carefully thought-out conclusions suddenly seem to be commonplace.”

So what can be said about Shakespeare that will surprise us? What about connecting him to a tradition of serious occult magic, secretive esoteric societies, a powerful Queen, and the expansion of the British Empire?

Frances Yates argues in Shakespeare’s Last Plays that his later works take a decidedly magical turn. As in, they are not just comedies or dramas to be casually enjoyed. They are also works of philosophical fiction that conveyed just how serious the vocation of magus was during the Renaissance.

Characters like Prospero in The Tempest were modeled after the real magicians of the Elizabethan era–figures like John Dee, who was the Queen’s “in-house” alchemist. 

“It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John Dee, the great mathematical magus of whom Shakespeare must have known… Dee permeated the whole Elizabethan age, from the Queen downwards. That he was the inspiration of Shakespeare’s Prospero is very strongly indicated… To treat of magic, or the magical atmosphere, in Shakespeare one ought to include all the plays, for such an atmosphere is certainly present in his earlier periods. In the Last Plays this atmosphere becomes very strong indeed and, moreover, it becomes more clearly associated with the great traditions of Renaissance magic–magic as an intellectual system of the universe…, magic as a moral and reforming movement.”

The “moral magic” hidden in Shakespeare’s last plays was, thankfully, rediscovered by Yates. And we can still turn to her work when seeking lessons about how to transform our world.

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Contributed by Evan Atlas. Evan is a writer and political philosopher from New York’s Hudson Valley. His work confronts our most significant challenges, and develops a theory of change for the 21st century that is unlike anything you’ve heard before. He believes that the future of humanity can be more loving, more free, and more beautiful, but that this future is in danger. Join him at evanatlas.com and on his Substack and help create a more beautiful planet.

The post 5 Life-Changing Philosophical Books by Women Writers appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

With access to all archival holdings at the Isabella Stewart Garner Museum—including thousands of digitized and newly accessible letters and other unpublished records—as well as original sources in Paris, Venice, and more. Dykstra brings Isabella to life as never before.

An incredible achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holding can be seen as a kind of living memoir—how Isabella “put herself on display… her taste, her passions, her sorrow, her nerve, her capacious curiously, relationships,” Dykstra reveals.

Isabella’s meticulous curation of the exhibits became her voice, enabling her story to be told through the objects she cherished most.

Enjoy the following fascinating facts about the life of the American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, excerpted from material provided by Mariner Books, the publisher of Chasing Beauty by Natalie Dykstra.

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Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1888
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Isabella married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner at age 19

Before her marriage to Jack, her childhood was spent in New York and Paris where she studied art, music, dance, French, and Italian. Provided with a picture of her childhood, one begins to understand why the spirted, original, sophisticated young Isabella (known then as Belle) was not later embraced by Boston society.

She had a competitive, simpatico relationship with John Singer Sargent

Together Gardner and Sargent—considered the most successful portrait painter of his time—constructed quite the scandal surrounding his iconic 1888 portrait. Jack Gardner said to his wife at the time. “It looks like hell, but it looks like you.”

Isabella was an entrepreneur

Much attention has been devoted to how Isabella used glamour and even scandal to assert her cultural position. Chasing Beauty shows how the public performance was in many ways a screen for her more serious, radical work of competing as a connoisseur/collector in order to create her sui generis museum.

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“Mrs. Gardner in White” by  John Singer Sargent (1922)

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She had a fraught but essential relationship with Bernard Berenson

Jack Gardner came to mistrust Berenson, the brilliant historian of the Italian Renaissance, for his lack of transparency in business matters. Isabella, however, knew how to parry with Berenson but not keep him close, as she relied on him to secure her greatest art purchases.

Jack Gardner was a loving and supportive husband

Jack showcased Isabella’s moves, supported her ambitions—and forgave her after one notable affair of the heart. Jack’s parents, typically Bostonian in most ways, were fiercely loyal to her as well, which bolstered her nerve. They were married for 38 years.

Isabella was friends with Henry James

Isabella’s friendship with Henry James textured one his novels – elusive and complicated; but the friends understood each other. James compared her to a shining jewel in a magnificent setting and finding in her character inspiration for his fiction.

Isabella was a spiritual woman

Isabella turned to the spiritual as a means of healing. Later in life she paid attention to social causes, particularly those helping women, children, and others in need— she gave substantial funds, for example, towards the building of an African American Episcopal church on Beacon Hill.

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Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Courtyard Boston, MA

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The museum was performance art for Isabella

It acted as a kind of “Isabellaland,” as a memoir using objects instead of words. She juxtaposed the life and movement of the dancer in Sargent’s El Jaleo with grief and memory at the other side of the Spanish Gallery, in the small chapel, a memorial to her only child who died before the age of two.

Radically, she placed Titian’s great Europa above a framed section of satin taken from one of her own Charles Fredrick Worth-designed gowns. She also filled the Raphael Room with objects that show or fill a woman’s life: paintings depicting—her collections most frequent motif—Madonna and Child; cassoni filled with luxurious fabrics; fine old Italian furniture arranged as if for a parry.

Jewlery played an extraordinary in Isabella’s life

She used a language of pearls, borrowed from aristocratic portraits and earlier eras, to make her own statement. In much of the portraiture done of her she can be seen wearing a string of pearls.

Isabella was a “late bloomer”

Isabella’s later decades are often skimmed over, despite having compelling and moving accomplishments as she aged. Isabella opened her museum in 1903, as she was about to turn sixty-three. She became more expansive and curious as she got older.

She found family-like relationships with artists and writers, designers and activists. Her relationship with in her sixties with Okakura Kakuzō, Japanese art expert living in Boston for a time, was especially intense and remarkable.

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Chasing Beauty is available wherever books are sold
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About Natalie Dystra, Author of Chasing Beauty

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, MA.

The post 10 Fascinating Facts About Isabella Stewart Gardner appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

And so this became a kind of game that ultimately takes the cliché of art imitating life — and vice versa  — to dizzying new heights.

In his description of the character, who he calls Maria, Auster accurately describes some of Calle’s real life projects, and in other cases, he makes up projects that sound as if they could have been done by here. His description of the fictional Maria gives the viewer insight into the real Sophie Calle:

“Maria was an artist, but  the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly defined as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these description was accurate and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way.

Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be though of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline. Ideas would take hold of her, she would work on projects, there would be concrete results that could be shown in galleries, but this activity didn’t stem so much from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it.”

Calle decided to turn Auster’s writings into a project as well as a kind of game — she collected all the projects she had actually done, and that he described, into an exhibit as well as a book, juxtaposing the pages, with the appropriate paragraphs outlined in red, with the projects, and in other cases, where Auster himself made up the projects, she took his cues and executed the project as a new undertaking.

Life imitates art imitates life …

The result is a provocative blend of fact, fantasy, and fiction with a unique twist — though it does not encompass all of Calle’s important projects (notably absent are Exquisite Pain and The Appointment). It becomes a retrospective of diverse works in one neat package.

Fascinated by the relationship between public and personal lives — her own and others’ — Calle has often crossed boundaries of privacy. Frances Morris, commenting in Art Now, wrote that this fascination (or obsession):

“… Has led Calle to investigate patterns of behavior using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behavior so that her live, as lived and as imagined, as informed many of her most interesting works.”

I like to imagine that Sophie Calle fictionalizes her life in some ways — not to dupe the viewer, but to gain the courage to behave in ways to advance her art. She may well have an alter ego — though the alter ego’s name is still Sophie Calle — that allows her to play a stripper, poke through strangers’ belongings, stalk acquaintances and then publicize the results, or create performances based on the private lives of others.

“Voyeurism, exhibitionism, and a needling strain of sadism course through Calle’s work, which is inescapably fascinating even as it’s ethically disturbing — and often quietly melancholic. She’s the artist as stalker, delving fearlessly into the minutiae of other people’s lives long before popular culture took up similar material in “reality” TV shows …” (David Rimanelli, Artforum)

The question becomes whether an artist who is so inventive and bold can remain relevant in the era of social media, in which everyone puts their own life up for grabs — or, as noted by David Rimanelli, above — reality TV, blogs, Instagram, TikTok, and other spaces in which private and public lives blur in today’s times.

Calle’s diaristic impulses foreshadowed the kind of self-revelation common to personal blogs and visual platforms like Instagram. These forms of social media allow anyone who wishes to participate to be both voyeur and exhibitionist; and they’ve become so pervasive in our culture that the subtle shock value of work like Calle’s, or any other artist whose works or performances deal in self-revelation may not seem like such a big deal to a new generation of viewers.

Of course, one might argue that blogs aren’t art, and appeal to a different audience, but they do epitomize the blurring of the private and public. Then, when art is presented purportedly doing the same thing, it may not seem as unique or thought-provoking as it once was.

It’s Calle’s aesthetic as a conceptualist that keeps her work stimulating for me. I love the bold grids of framed text juxtaposed with images, whether in installation or in the pages of a book. The idea matters, particularly in conceptual art, but ideas can become dated once their initial freshness, uniqueness, or even shock value diminishes. 

The Detective, The Blind, and Exquisite Pain

The Detective, for example, doesn’t resonate with me as much as it did when I first encountered the series. That the arrangement of reams of text and pictures aren’t strikingly arranged doesn’t help. There’s little engagement to be had apart from the project’s concept, which, frankly, seems trivial and lacking in emotional content.

I react differently to the series of The Blind, however. There’s something compelling in the display of the words and images, and so much compassion in the photography of the sightless subjects. The concept of beauty, as presented in this series, comes off as simple, soothing, and universal.

Interest in artist’s books and fine editions is certainly strong and in this context, Calle’s work shines. Books on her work are a unique blend of monograph and finely produced limited edition. As described by Anna Gerber in The International Review of Graphic Design, the book version of Double Game “was that rare thing, an artist’s monograph that was actually a work of art in and of itself, a furthering of Calle’s vision rather than ‘just’ another exhibition spin-off.”

The book version of the conceptual exhibit Exquisite Pain can be described similarly. Photos I’ve seen of the exhibition installation seem quite striking, but it’s equally pleasurable to hold this chronicle of a broken heart in one’s hands. Yes, it’s a confessional, but like The Blind, has a sends of universality — who among us has not suffered a broken heart, and felt awfully sorry for ourselves over it? Calle’s interviews of people detailing the moment when they most suffered doesn’t trivialize the pain of a broken heart, but helps put it in perspective for herself and the viewer.

Delving into Double Game was for me a very rich and stimulating experience, but since it covers so much ground, it can be rather overwhelming to consider as a whole.

It’s more satisfying to think about Calle’s projects individually; less so through the all-encompassing lens of  “Maria.” Though Maria comes off as bizarre and compulsive, Calle seems completely delighted to complete a circle of life imitating art that imitates life. Or vice versa.

Sophie Calle’s Double Game and Beyond

As that is somewhat the point: In Double Game, it’s hard to tell where life leaves off and art begins, and at what point art and life merge. In hear art and life Calle plays characters, some of whom are not who she is, but at other times, she’s playing a character whose persona is Sophie Calle. She’s not trying to dupe the viewer, but simply shooing different aspects of herself.

In a New York Times review of the Double Game exhibit, Grace Glueck wrote  that “as a diarist, Ms. Calle’s amusingly deadpan, obsessively detailed reports on her activities have a certain fascination. But unfortunately she is no great shakes as a photographer, and the long sequences of shots documenting her actions are less than compelling.”

The latter, I suspect, describes The Detective, and Suite Venetienne, which I agree aren’t her strongest concepts or presentations. Other critics have described her photography as unremarkable, but then, Calle doesn’t pretend to be an accomplished photographer.

Glueck also suggests that someone who lives so vicariously is to be pitied, perhaps momentarily forgetting that this is not Calle’s life but her art, and that sometimes her life is her art. It’s as if there is no longer a real Sophie Calle, but merely a Sophie Calle simulacrum.

If Calle’s work can be put in a nutshell, it might be the exploration of public lives and private selves. Though an age-old idea, it resonates because we all long to connect with other human stories. Much as I admire her work, I found myself a bit more uncomfortable with some of her projects than I was when I first encountered them.

At a time when all of us are faced with disturbing governmental and corporate intrusions into privacy, somehow, I didn’t findThe Address Book,Suite Venetienne, or The Hotel as clever and amusing as I once did. I don’t want the government prying into my private life; why is it better when done in the name of Art?

I haven’t kept up with Sophie Calle for some time, aside from retrospectives and the continuing travels of Exquisite Pain. I’m curious to see what will come next, as she is a great talent and remarkably inventive.

Has she had to step back and pause to consider how to proceed in an era when self-revelation is commonplace and spying is considered reprehensible? More likely, she’s working on a way to reinvent the persona of Sophie Calle so that she can do what she seems to love best — indulge in her obsessions.

Find views and lives outside the strictly literary realm in Other Voices on this site.

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About The Portraitist:

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is ready to draw the line between art and politics in The Portraitist. Award-winning author Susanne Dunlap paints a historical retelling of real-life Adélaïe Labille-Guiard, a female portraitist and painter, and her earnest battle to win recognition as an artist in 18th-century Paris amidst the French Revolution.

Paris, 1774. After her separation from her abusive husband, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is at last free to pursue her dream of becoming the premier woman portraitist in Paris. Free, that is, until she discovers at her first public exhibition that another woman artist is poised to claim that role — and she has more training and better connections in the tightly controlled art world.

To have a chance of competing, Adélaïde must first improve her skills in oil painting. But her love affair with her young teacher gives rise to suspicions that he touches up her work, and her decision to make much-needed money by executing erotic pastels threatens to create as many problems as it solves.

As her rival gains lucrative portrait commissions and an appointment as portraitist to Queen Marie Antoinette, Adélaïde continues to struggle, until at last she earns a royal appointment of her own, and, in 1789, receives a massive commission from a member of the royal family.

But the timing couldn’t be worse. Adélaïde’s world is turned upside down by political chaos and revolution. With danger around every corner of her beloved Paris, she must find a way to survive and adjust to the new order, starting all over again to carve out a life and a career—and stay alive in the process.

The Portraitist is based on the true story of one woman artist’s fight to take her rightful place in a man’s world — and the decisions she makes that lead her ultimately to the kind of fulfillment she never expected.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard began her career in a world where royal patronage was the height of accomplishment and ended it after a bloody revolution and a new political system that set women’s rights and autonomy back about a century.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité—brotherhood—men ended up with all the privileges in the Napoleonic code. Worth noting — there’s no actual French word for sisterhood.

Nonetheless, Labille-Guiard was remarkable for what she did achieve, and her artworks can be found in museums and private collections all over the world. So why is she so little known?

Fascinating Facts About Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

She didn’t come from an artistic family. Adélaïde’s principal rival, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, was taught to draw and paint by her artist father, her godfather was the artist Gabriel Doyen, and she was surrounded by the best artists of the day.

By contrast, almost nothing is known about Adélaïde’s early training. Her father was a modiste who owned a fashion boutique in Paris called À la Toilette. Interesting tidbit: before Madame du Barry became Louis XV’s official mistress she was a shop girl by the name of Jeanne Bécu in that boutique.

Adélaïde was one of two surviving children of eight; her mother died when she was 17. It’s unlikely that her sickly mother took the time to teach her how to draw. And there’s little information about her schooling either.

It’s possible that—like her rival Elisabeth—she was sent to a convent school for some of her education. But that’s pure conjecture. In any case, she somehow acquired the education she needed, although one biographer laments that she wasn’t educated enough.

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Portraitist: A Novel of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
is available wherever books are sold
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She married at the age of 19 (and was legally separated 8 years later). Divorce was illegal in Catholic Ancien Régime France. Adélaïde couldn’t get a divorce until after the laws changed in 1793, twelve years later.

She took up with François-André Vincent, a history painter, after becoming his student in 1776. Although her divorce came through soon after the Revolution, they didn’t marry until 1800.

There’s no evidence today that explains why she and André didn’t marry as soon as they were able. But it could have something to do with the fact that once they married, she relinquished the name of Labille-Guiard—the name associated with her artistic career—and became known as Madame Vincent.

Adélaïde started out painting miniatures. Painting miniatures was seen as a genteel occupation for girls and women in the 18^th century, and they were generally painted with watercolors—inexpensive, easily cleaned up. But Adélaïde clearly didn’t approach the practice of art as a pretty pastime.

We know that she studied the painting of miniature watercolors with François-Élie Vincent, a member of the Académie Royale, who just happened to be the father of Adélaïde’s eventual lover and husband. She also studied pastels with Maurice Quentin de la Tour, the most famous pastellist of the time.

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Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self Portrait, watercolor on ivory, 1774
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Access to training in the technique and art of painting was a significant hurdle for women. The Louvre housed the École des Beaux Arts, but those classes were closed to women, so the only recourse was individual tutelage.

Without an artist family member or connections, Adélaïde must have been determined and passionate to have broken into the insular, sexist field.

Adélaïde and her rival dogged each other’s steps throughout their careers. Obviously, the opportunities for top-notch women artists were extremely limited. Hardly surprising, then, that these two would find each other competing for the same or similar achievements.

The parallels are remarkable nonetheless: They both exhibited for the first time in the same salon, they both had royal patronage (although Elisabeth had the prize of being Marie Antoinette’s official portraitist), they were both elected to the Académie Royale in the same year and exhibited in the same salons every other year until 1789.

After that, Elisabeth was off painting in the courts of Europe, having fled and been declared an exile and enemy of the Republic because of her ties to the royal family.

Unlike her rival, Adélaïde became a highly respected teacher and was much in demand. Her studio before the Revolution consisted of nine talented women, her nine “muses,” she called them. They were a consistent source of income for her, and one of them—Marie-Gabrielle Capet—not only became a close friend, but Adélaïde and André adopted her after the Revolution so she could inherit their estates.

Elisabeth didn’t like teaching.

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Marie Gabrielle Capet, Atelier of Madame Vincent,
Oil on Canvas, 1808
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After years of trying, Adélaïde became the first woman to be awarded a studio and accommodations in the Louvre. The Louvre was neither a museum nor a royal residence at that time. It was instead a center of art and creativity, and free lodging was given to members of the Académie who requested it. That is, if they were men.

Adélaïde struggled financially and lobbied for those free accommodations before, during, and after the Revolution. Her first attempt in 1787 was thwarted by the conservative Comte d’Angiviller, controller of all things artistic in France, who claimed that allowing women to come into the Louvre to study would be a corrupting influence.

She finally succeeded in 1795 and became more famous as a teacher than an artist.

Adélaïde was never paid for her biggest commission: a massive painting for the Comte de Provence. Louis XVI’s younger brother hired Adélaïde to paint a 17 x 19-foot picture to hang in the École Militaire.

Since payment always came upon completion, Adélaïde had to fork out her own funds to purchase the expensive materials—the finest canvas from the Low Countries to be stitched together for such a huge painting, masses of pigments and brushes, scaffolding, gesso, and so on.

Mesdames (the king’s aunts, who were Adélaïde’s royal patrons) secured studio space for her in the disused Bibliothèque du Roi, since her own studio was nowhere large enough to accommodate a project of that size.

She was supposed to get thirty-thousand Livres, or about $18,000 in today’s currency—bearing in mind that this amount had a great deal more purchasing power then that it has today (the average laborer earned about $30 a year).

However, instead of a big payday, Adélaïde ended by losing 8,000 livres of her own money, about $5,000. The ultimate irony is that all that’s left of this mammoth painting is an oil sketch.

Adélaïde painted a portrait of Maximilien Robespierre. Before the dark days of the Terror, Adélaïde made an effort to prove her loyalty to the Republic—despite her history of royal patronage—by painting portraits of all the delegates to the national convention, free. At the time, that included Robespierre.

His portrait has been lost along with all the others, which were destroyed during the worst excesses of the Terror. In fact, many of Adélaïde’s paintings and pastels met the same fate, which is one reason why there are so many fewer works by her in museums today than by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

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Adélaïde Labille-Guiard,
Self Portrait with Two Students, Oil on Canvas, 1785
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When André Vincent died, the paintings in his possession by his late wife were sold for mere pennies.  Adélaïde died in 1803 at the age of 54, cause unknown, but she had likely been ill for a while. I have been unable to discover the location of her grave. However, her history-painter husband is interred in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and his works sold for many thousands of Livres when he died.

Adélaïde’s work was underappreciated until late in the twentieth century. Her most famous painting, the self-portrait with her students Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemonde, is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A detail of this work is on the cover of The Portraitist.

In the Catalogue Raisonné of her output by Anne Marie Passé, of the 143 paintings identified, over half are lost (labeled “unknown location”). Compare that to her rival’s output of somewhere around 600 works, and you can easily see why Adélaïde Labille-Guiard remains relatively unknown.

The Portraitist is my attempt to change that!

Susanne Dunlap is the author of twelve works of historical fiction for adults and teens, as well as an Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach. Her love of historical fiction arose partly from her studies in music history at Yale University (PhD, 1999), partly from her lifelong interest in women in the arts as a pianist and non-profit performing arts executive. 

Her novel The Paris Affair won first place in its category in the CIBA Dante Rossetti awards for Young Adult Fiction. The Musician’s Daughter was a Junior Library Guild Selection and a Bank Street Children’s Book of the Year, and was nominated for the Utah Book Award and the Missouri Gateway Reader’s Prize. In the Shadow of the Lamp was an Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award nominee. Susanne earned her BA and an MA (musicology) from Smith College, and lives in Biddeford, ME, with her little dog Betty. You can find her at Susan-Dunlap.com.

See our Other Rad Voices category to explore more amazing women outside the literary realm.

The post 10 Fascinating Facts About Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, French Portraitist appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses, wrote in Shakespeare and Company about James Joyce’s family:

“I was very fond of them all: Giorgio, with his gruffness, hiding or trying to hide his feelings; Lucia, the humorous one – neither of them happy in the strange circumstances in which they grow up; and Nora, the wife and mother, who scolded them all, including her husband, for their shiftlessness.”

People didn’t normally think of Lucia as the humorous one; she was generally seen as being rather tragic, and later in life was in a mental institution for many years. In her contribution to Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle talks tenderly about how the fragile Lucia came to see her one day in 1928:

“Whether it had been suggested to her that she come, or whether she had come of her own accord, I did not know. But as she sat in the sunlight that came hot through the plate-glass window, I felt her tragically reaching, seeking for what could probably never be found and for a fearful moment I believed I was looking at my own reflection in a glass.

She was like the high, perishable, wishful tendril of a vine moving blindly up a wall, and the vine from which she sought escape was rooted in a territory that had for her  recognisable name. I thought of Joyce’s poem to his blue-veined daughter, and there in her delicate wrists I could see the veins, so vulnerable under the silky, transparent skin.

She was then (as perhaps I too was then, and as perhaps all daughters are until they cease being merely daughters) precariously only half a person, and the other half she sought for in panic first in one direction and then in another, not knowing in whose mind or flesh or in what alien country it might live.”

The poem that Boyle refers to comes from the small selection of Joyce’s early poems, Pomes Penyeach, which was published with Lucia’s illustrations and facsimiles of Joyce’s handwritten texts by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in 1932, though Sylvia Beach had published a regular edition in 1927.

Harry and Caresse Crosby of the Black Sun Press had originally suggested the idea of a deluxe, illustrated, facsimile, limited edition to Joyce; he was happy for Lucia’s work to be published, happy for her to have something, to be something in her own right. Not that it was anything very much in her own right to illustrate her father’s work; her drawings would never otherwise have been published, and she would have been in no doubt about that.

Still, Joyce made sure she got a third of the royalties. Only twenty-five copies of the deluxe edition were printed, on lustrous Japanese nacre, with Lucia’s illuminated capitals delicately colored; all were signed by Joyce.

The British Library has number 25; it’s very beautiful. Number 3 was auctioned in 2015 with an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000 but failed to sell. This is the poem about Lucia that Kay Boyle referred to:

A Flower Given to My Daughter

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair – yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

Boyle knew Lucia on and off through her life; many years later, after Lucia’s death in 1983, Boyle had an exchange of letters about her with Joyce’s first major biographer, Richard Ellman; she told him how she and Samuel Beckett had spent an evening together sometime in 1932 when he tried to convince her that unhappiness and madness were not the same thing – Lucia was unhappy but that was not all there was to it. Boyle wrote to Ellman:

“One day, when we chance to meet again, I want to tell you of my first meeting with Samuel Beckett. It was in the sad time of Lucia’s first crisis, the beginning of it all, and Sam and I talked together at a crowded party in Walter Lowenfels’ apartment in Paris.

We both remember every word of that talk of over fifty years ago, talk which lasted from nine in the evening until two o’clock the next morning, during which he convinced me that there is such a thing as madness, and that love or understanding or any emotional response to that condition is not the cure.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

Everybody I Can Think of Ever is available on 
Amazon US & Amazon UK
 . . . . . . . . . .

Soon after Beckett had arrived in Paris in November 1928 to take up his teaching post at the École Normale, he first met Lucia Joyce the same evening he met her father, at their apartment in Paris. He was introduced by fellow Dubliner Thomas MacGreevy, who had preceded Beckett as a lecturer there in 1926.

MacGreevy and Beckett quickly became close friends, a friendship that lasted their lifetimes. A large number of Beckett’s letters are to him, perhaps the only person, and almost certainly the only man he ever seems to have truly confided in.

As well as the Joyce family, while in Paris, MacGreevy became a friend of Sylvia Beach, Nancy Cunard, and especially Richard Aldington, husband of HD (Hilda Doolittle), who described Beckett as “the splendidly mad Irishman.” In Beckett Remembering, Beckett describes that first meeting, though he doesn’t mention Lucia.

“I was introduced to Joyce by Tom MacGreevy. He was very friendly – immediately, to the best of my recollection. I remember coming back very exhausted to the École Normale and, as usual, the door was closed and I climbed over the railings.

I remember that: coming back from my first meeting with Joyce. I remember walking back. And from then on we saw each other quite often. I can still remember his telephone number!”

Joyce was keen to ask Beckett about everything that had been going on in Dublin and was also keen to find an assistant to help him transcribe sections of what was then called Work in Progress but eventually became Finnegans Wake.

Joyce’s eyes were by now very weak and painful. Beckett says that he was never officially Joyce’s secretary, but he was at Joyce’s apartment a lot of the time. It was through Joyce that Beckett met Ezra Pound at one of Joyce’s favorite Paris restaurants. Pound was in a bad mood, possibly because he was having to dine at a restaurant favored by Joyce, who liked eating at the Trianon.

Beckett still remembered the dinner and Pound many years later, though not warmly: “The only time I remember having met Pound was one evening at dinner with the Joyces in the Trianon, Place de Rennes. He was having great trouble with a fond d’artichaut and was very aggressive and disdainful.”

When Beckett first met Lucia there was no suggestion of her madness, though she was already troubled and in conflict with her parents, particularly Nora, who did not want her to pursue the dancing career she felt was her chosen path. She and her brother Giorgio had been moved between several countries while they were younger and had to learn a new language every time – someone said that Lucia was illiterate in four languages.

And being the daughter of such a universally revered father was difficult for her. Nora saw her main duty as being to allow Jim the quiet and space he needed to write – the children came second. But despite her parents’ objections, Lucia took dancing lessons, and took them very seriously. She performed in public several times. Beckett went with the Joyces to a dance performance she was in at the Bal Bullier on May 28, 1929.

Joyce’s niece wrote about Lucia’s shimmering costume (there is a photograph of her wearing it on the front cover of her biography by Carol Loeb Shloss).

“It was in silver sequins edged with green. One leg was covered to the heel and the other came right through the costume, so that when she put one behind the other, she created the illusion of a fishtail. Green and silver were entwined in her hair.”

Not long after, Lucia began to have self-doubt,  and by November of that year she had given up dance forever. When she met Beckett, Lucia was twenty-two and he was twenty-three, but he was already much more mature than her; she was still a girl, having difficulty differentiating herself as an individual from the strong personalities of her mother and father.

Lucia was both attractive and attracted to men; Joyce’s niece said she was “pretty, with dark, curly shoulder-length hair and blue eyes with a slight cast but … attractive in spite of it.”

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Lucia Joyce on Bloomsday;
Photograph by Berenice Abbott
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In photographs like the portrait by Berenice Abbott it’s easy to see the strabismus or squint in Lucia’s eye, which she had tried to have corrected, unsuccessfully. It does give her a rather wild look; any doctor inclined to think she was mad would not have a hard time convincing other people.

No one knows whether Beckett and Lucia slept together, but everyone agrees that she was the one pursuing him. Of course, there are precedents for artists becoming close to the daughters of their artistic mentors: Wagner and Liszt’s daughter Cosima; Ezra Pound and Dorothy, the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, Yeats’ mistress.

And there are many precedents for daughters looking for a partner who can substitute for their genius father. It might have been the perfect match, but Lucia seems to have pressured Beckett too much and for too long. He wrote to MacGreevy on July 17, 1930: 

“ . . . a letter from Lucia too. I don’t know what to do. She is unhappy she says. Now that you are gone there is no one to talk to about that. I do not dare go to Wales [the Joyce family were staying in Llandudno], and I promised I would if they were there on my way through. But that is impossible. There is no solution. What terrible instinct prompts them to have the genius of beauty at the right – or the wrong – moment!”

Years later she was still pursuing him, even though he had told her one day in May 1930 at her parents’ apartment that he only went there to see her father and not her. She was devastated and told her mother.

Nora took her daughter’s side; she told Beckett not to play with her daughter’s affections. James Joyce told him he was not welcome at their apartment anymore. The rift between the two writers lasted until Joyce finally realized that his daughter was genuinely ill and that a serious relationship with Beckett would have been a disaster.

Years later, Beckett described his relationship with Lucia to his biographer James Knowlson curtly and rather cruelly, as if she had meant very little to him. He minimizes the rift with Joyce and Lucia’s part in it. He says that when he went to Joyce’s apartment that day:

“Lucia was there, already very disturbed mentally. Sometimes she was perfectly normal. I had to tell her finally that I went to the house not to see her, but to see Joyce. Joyce was my interest. And, according to some accounts, Joyce was very upset . . .  And we used to walk, when she was perfectly normal. And then she had these crazy spells. I never saw her in them though. They all understood that she was incurable. But Joyce could never agree with them. He was all for trying different treatments, with Jung and so on.”

Despite his later attempts to play down Lucia’s importance to him, she undoubtedly played a big part in Beckett’s life. In 1932 he wrote a novel, only published posthumously, called Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In the novel there are three women, one of whom is called Syra-Cusa, representing Lucia – St Lucia of Syracuse is the patron saint of eyesight, a very good saint for Joyce, with his lifelong eye problems, to name his daughter for, but a cruel Joycean irony that she too had an eye problem in spite of, or perhaps because of it.

The narrator in the novel, obviously a version of Beckett himself, describes her – although she is fictional, she is quite similar to the actual Lucia whom Kay Boyle describes.

The Syra-Cusa: her body more perfect than dream creek, amaranth Lagoon. She flowed along in a nervous swagger, swinging a thin arm amply. The sinewy fetlock sprang, Brancusi bird, from the shod foot blue arch veins and small bones, rose like a Lied to the firm wrist of the reins, the Bilitis breasts. Her neck was scraggy and her head was null . . .

She was prone, when brought to dine out, to puke, but into her serviette, with decorum, because, supposedly, the craving of her viscera was not for food and drink. To take her arm, to flow together, out of step, down the asphalt bed, was a foundering in music, the slow ineffable flight of a dream-dive, a launching and terrible foundering in a rich rape of water. Her grace was supplejack, it was cuttystool and cavaletto, he trembled as on a springboard, jutting out, doomed, high of a dream-water. Would she sink or swim in Diana’s well? That depends what we mean by a maiden.

Like Joyce, Beckett here needs footnotes, two in particular: Brancusi was the sculptor whose drawing is on the title page of Harry and Caresse Crosby’s publication of Joyce’s Work in Progress, and Songs of Bilitis is an 1894 erotic, lesbian, fin de siècle sequence of prose poems written by Pierre Louÿs – a friend of André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Claude Debussy – who claimed to have translated from a previously unknown Greek original. As for being a maiden, Lucia’s former love interest claimed that she was when she left him for Beckett.

But if Beckett thought he could get rid of Lucia so easily, he was mistaken. She continued to stalk him, as we would say now, for years. In a letter to MacGreevy of February 20, 1935 he is still saying: “She wrote wanting to see me. I have done nothing – except make détours.” In Middling Women, the narrator says:

We thought we had got rid of the Syra-Cusa. No such thing, here below, as riddance, good, bad or indifferent. Not having the stomach formally to disprove her letters merely, quickly, cite a circumstance of no importance to tickle our fauces. For days, holidays, she came not abroad, she stayed mewed up in her bedroom. What was she up to? Hold everything now. She was doing abstract drawing! Heavenly Father! Abstract drawing! Can you beat that one?

. . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

More about Lucia Joyce

• Fire in the Brain (The New Yorker)
• How James Joyce’s Daughter, Lucia, was Treated for Schizophrenia by Carl Jung
• Why Was James Joyce’s Daughter Lucia Written Out of History?

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