by Historical Heroines- 100 Women You Should Know About (retail) (epub)
Mary returned to the US each year for various tours and in 1872 for an exhibition of her work at the San Francisco Art Association. Her date and place of death remain inconclusive, although a death certificate was discovered in London in 1907.
There is nothing so beautiful as the free forest. To catch a fish when you are hungry, cut the boughs of a tree, make a fire to roast it, and eat it in the open air, is the greatest of all luxuries. I would not stay a week pent up in cities, if it were not for my passion for art.
Mary Edmonia Lewis, quoted in ‘Letter From L Maria Child’,
National Anti-Slavery Standard, 27 February 1864.
Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse (1584–1659)
In the seventeenth century men expected to control women in every aspect of society including the criminal underworld. It took a brave, stubborn lass to defy them. Enter Mary Frith, resplendent in her doublet (men’s clothes), smoking a long, clay pipe, swearing like a trooper and dominating her criminal patch.
Despite Mary being born to a lowly shoemaker and housewife, she was taught to read in a brief window of time – during Queen Elizabeth Ist’s reign – when girls were educated. She was a boisterous tomboy preferring to wield a sword rather than sewing needle. She scorned the gentle, pious life of ‘good’ women, revelling in fights, drinking and petty theft. Her contemporaries considered her an entertaining eccentric, whilst the puritanical authors of the eighteenth century were less enamoured.
She came to the public’s attention in 1600 after being arrested for pickpocketing. Her uncle, a respectable minister, tried to reform her by shipping her off to New England. Mary had other ideas and fled from the ship, swimming back to shore and heading for London, where her career in crime took off.
She was the first ‘ladette’, carousing in the alehouses, drinking with the boys and would have set her farts on fire if she knew how. Her critics decried her as a shameless hussy, but mostly they were just buddies sharing a bawdy tale over a pint. Being such an exhibitionist, it was hardly a punishment when she was made to wear a white sheet at St Paul’s Cross as penance for donning men’s clothes. Society was scandalised and amused in equal measure, inspiring two plays about her called The Madde Pranckes of Mery Mall of the Bankside and The Roaring Girl.
During the Civil War she showed passionate support for the Cavaliers by becoming the original Dick Turpin, relieving Roundheads of their loot. Her highway spree ended when she was caught after robbing General Sir Thomas Fairfax. A handsome bribe saved her from the gallows. Instead she was sent to Bedlam, though hanging may have been preferable.
Once pronounced sane, she became a successful fence, managing her own money laundering empire. In pre-industrial Britain possessions were not mass-produced, and being unique stolen goods were difficult to sell. Fences effectively held these goods to ransom, giving thieves a cut of the money.
Mary did all this from her immaculate and feminine home on Fleet Street. She had three maids and several dogs, whom she pampered with home-cooked fare and their own bedrooms. Her home was filled with mirrors so she could gaze at herself as much as any selfie-taking narcissist today. There was more to her than met the eye.
Mary was a robust character. In her diary she gleefully relates teaching a barmaid a lesson for calling her Moll Cutpurse, a nickname she hated from her pickpocketing days. Mary bet the serving girl that her dog could tell if she was a virgin. She had trained her dog to only take meat from her right hand and Mary manipulated the maid to offer only from the left. The dog refused three times and so Mary declared that the maid had slept with three men, blackening her reputation.
Unfortunately in the end Mary, a woman filled with vitality and chutzpah, contracted dropsy disease which made her paranoid and delusional. She died in 1659.
Mary Seacole (c. 1805–81)
Mary has only relatively recently come to historical prominence, portrayed as the mixed race version of the white Florence Nightingale. The real truth is more complicated and the two women’s accomplishments are very different.
A commemorative bronze statue of Mary was unveiled outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London in June 2016, inscribed with a quote from her war correspondent friend Sir William Howard Russell: ‘I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead.’ It’s the first public statue of a named black woman in Britain, although Mary herself would never have referred to herself as a black woman. She was proud of her Scottish and Creole heritage.
Fans of Florence Nightingale have taken great umbrage at the perceived slight; the hospital is where Ms Nightingale established a teaching school (the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery). They frostily point out that in stark comparison Mary never even worked in a hospital.
How about we don’t compare them to each other at all and instead view them as two separate but equally headstrong, determined women who each made their own contributions to society. In the midst of the Victorian era, Mary was a mixed race woman who travelled, practised herbal medicine, ran various businesses and helped the war effort.
Mary Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica to a Scottish soldier father and a free-born Jamaican mother (slavery existed in Jamaica until 1838) who practised traditional medicine, remedies and healing, as well as running a boarding house. There is no doubt that she passed on that knowledge to her daughter, who referred to herself and her mother as ‘Doctress’.
Mary started her own small business on a journey to England, where she sold jams, pickles and other preserves. On her return to Jamaica, she married naval officer Edwin Horatio Seacole in 1836 and together they ran a shop.
After Edwin died in 1844 (her mother would die shortly afterwards), she spent time in Panama with her brother running her British Hotel for gold prospectors who were en route to California. She used some of her remedies to treat patients of the cholera epidemic, most notably and unfortunately using lead acetate and mercury.
As the Crimean War started, she travelled to London on business for her gold stocks. Whilst there, she applied to volunteer and join Florence Nightingale’s nursing team but failed the interview. Was it because of racial prejudice? Or was it because she wasn’t experienced enough or lacked a ‘proper’ education? Perhaps the truth is a combination of both.
Whatever the reasons, Mary wasn’t going to let a word like ‘no’ stand in her way. Using money from her gold speculations and previous businesses, she self-funded her passage to the Crimea (actually meeting Florence Nightingale briefly en route in Scutari). She spent the first couple of weeks offering tea and lemonade to soldiers, before setting up the British Hotel with a family relative/business partner close to Balaclava in 1855. Calling it a hotel was a stretch; it had two rooms for boarders, a shop selling essential supplies such as blankets and boots and a refectory for army officers, offering hot food and drink. She set up her own mule train, transporting life-saving supplies, food and medicine to sell at the front lines across the war-torn region. She would also administer first aid to soldiers and cook food for them. They affectionately called her Mother Seacole.
At the end of the war in 1856 and on her return to London she was broke. In a show of unity and warm gratitude, the British army and newspapers worked together to raise money to help clear her debts and open a new store in Aldershot, although ultimately the new business failed. Financially supported by her British friends, she lived in comfort in Paddington, London until her death at the age of 76 in 1881.
Mary Shelley (30 August 1797–1 February 1851) and the Ghosts of Fanny Imlay and Harriet Shelley
Fanny Imlay (1794–1816)
Mary Shelley is a gothic legend, her desperate tale of a monster and his far more monstrous creator has sent layers of fear through its readers, from a violent beast to our more deep-seated angst about existence and morality. And the book’s own birth story takes place in just the type of dark and stormy nig
ht that all good ghost stories hail from. In 1816 Mary had run off with the romantic rebel Percy Shelley to Switzerland, where they joined Byron, the dark and brooding bad boy incarnate. In the company of these literary giants and against the backdrop of a stormy summer, Byron proposes a horror story competition, and Frankenstein is conceived, when she is just 19.
Her most famous novel, Frankenstein is just a pale reflection of the tragedy and horror that layer Mary’s real world and that of the women who hung around these bohemian behemoths, Françoise (Fanny) Imlay and Harriet Shelley.
Fanny was Mary Shelley’s half-sister. At just 22 she travelled alone to an unremarkable boarding house in Swansea. She went to her room and wrote a letter to explain that she no longer wanted to be a burden and that soon her existence would be forgotten. She then took a fatal dose of laudanum. Percy and Mary having received a disturbing letter raced to Wales but it was too little, too late.
What drove Fanny to such a lonely and tragic end? Fanny had the misfortune to live in the midst of the Romantic Movement’s brightest and most self-absorbed stars. Whilst her mother Mary Wollstonecraft adored her daughter, describing her as vivacious and bright, her real father was a flaky American entrepreneur with no interest in her, and her step-father, William Godwin, dismissed her as mediocre. Her mother’s immense personality as a celebrated feminist cast yet another shadow for Fanny to get lost in. In addition Godwin, who raised her, made it clear he believed Mary had inherited their mother’s talent. Fanny was a great housekeeper, though.
And then in this bleak parody of a Grimm’s fairytale, her mother died shortly after giving birth to her sister Mary. Fanny was only 5. When Godwin brought home Jane Clairmont, their step-mother, the girls couldn’t stand her and Jane favoured her own children. Fanny was, perhaps, too self-conscious of her bastard status, a broken cuckoo in a shockingly bohemian nest. She passionately admired the brilliant minds that circled her – Percy was a frequent visitor and fan of Godwin’s anarchic ideals, especially free love.
Living with this brilliance was another matter as their genius seemed entwined with deeply unpleasant narcissism. Godwin believed the world owed him a living but in the aftermath of the vicious Robespierre Terrors, the world had fallen out of love with his socialist radicalism. Like a begging Cinderella, it was left to Fanny to plead to patrons for more money. The increasing debt fell on her shoulders and the atmosphere in the household became progressively more hostile and bitter.
Mary and another sister Claire escaped by running off with Percy Shelley. Caught up in the daring, romantic whirlwind the teenage sisters left Fanny behind to deal with their father’s fury and misery. There has been speculation that Fanny too had fallen for Percy’s charms, adding a broken heart to the dismal situation.
Fanny could almost be a character from a bad penny dreadful, the woman in distress, abandoned with no protector living in a depressing atmosphere of tension at the mercy of self-serving and egotistical men.
Percy, the son of rich aristocracy and a huge admirer of Godwin, had been supporting him financially. But now Fanny had to ask him for more money whilst Godwin took the high ground and refused to talk to the disgraced teenagers. Where was his free-thinking, bohemian idealism now? When the Shelleys returned to England she found herself caught in the middle, and middlemen rarely fare well. By now Percy too was in debt and not inclined to fund Godwin. Fanny apparently begged to live with them when they were in Bath in 1818. They refused.
Finally after an unpleasant visit to Percy, Fanny boarded the train to Wales. Fearing the scandal for Godwin and himself, when Percy arrived in Swansea, he removed anything identifying her and destroyed her letters leaving her to be buried in an unnamed grave. They effectively erased a woman whose ordinariness had already rendered her negligible to the dramatic, genius world of the Godwins and Shelleys. Her tragedy inspired some of Percy’s poetry – self-serving or genuinely devastated, we will never know as the family took such pains to cover up this shameful episode.
Harriet Shelley (1795–1816)
The dystopian fairy tale continues. Just a few weeks after Fanny’s suicide Percy’s first wife Harriet, aged 21, is found dead in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. She is heavily pregnant and presumably killed herself, though conspiracies suggest Godwin murdered her so Percy could marry Mary. The evidence: his diary talks about Harriet’s death before she is discovered – spooky.
Harriet also eloped with Percy at the age of 16 in what seems to be rather an unfortunate habit for the womanising poet. Again, they run off with another woman in tow, her sister. By this point the best spin doctor would have trouble rescuing Percy’s reputation or so you would think.
Some rather vicious gossip suggested Harriet was pregnant by another man and therefore unworthy of pity, and Percy absolved himself of all responsibility by painting her as a hysterical depressive who emotionally blackmailed him into marriage by threatening suicide. Further tarnishing her image, he described her as an unnatural woman refusing to breastfeed their first baby – and let’s all praise to god that we don’t live in the nineteenth century anymore. It is several years before history rewrites Harriet’s script more sympathetically.
Harriet had started married life as a giddy bride, eager to support and follow her husband everywhere. She is described by Percy’s close friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg as always adapting to suit him as well as bright and intelligent. However after romancing her with poetry, Percy gets bored and moves in with another luscious beauty for some time. He always seems to come back to her, if only for short times, so it is very possible that she is pregnant with his baby when she is found in the lake.
After tiring of his current ladylove (free love after all or maybe just some murky values dressed up as high-minded ideals), Percy practically moves into the Godwin household. Depending on whether you are on Team Harriet or Team Mary, Mary seduces him or he seduces her by her mother’s grave where she loves hanging out – each to their own. And then he elopes again leaving Harriet pregnant with their second child.
Never fear though because Mary and Percy generously invite Harriet along – as a sister or part of a ménage à trois? Luckily she has enough respect to tell them where to go and so they travel to Switzerland where Mary’s other sister Claire Clairmont falls pregnant to Lord Byron who then ditches her – the last of the great Romantic poets?
When Percy’s funds dry up, he asks Harriet for money to support him and Mary – it’s getting harder and harder to work out why all those women fell for him, he must have had a large carrot to tempt them. By the time the newlyweds return to England Harriet, unsurprisingly, has suffered many spells of melancholy. By this point she is alone because her sister has taken Harriet’s daughter to the country – another abandoned woman living in abject misery. She goes to live in Chelsea under the name of Harriet Smith, perhaps to save her family the scandal of her suicide.
Of course these women were not characters in a gothic piece of fiction, it was very real and none of them were all evil or all good. There should never be a Team Mary or Team Harriet. Harriet continues to appear in Percy’s poetry and it is believed he was deeply affected by her death. All these people were so young – rebellious teenagers – influenced by the heady world of radical Enlightenment.
As for Mary Shelley herself, the years following her great escape with Percy and Claire were filled with tragedy and financial hardship. She was devastated by the loss of two children, they had returned to England to hide Claire’s unmarried pregnancy, her father wouldn’t talk to her and Percy continued his adulterous habits. It is likely Fanny’s death hit her hard as the sisters, despite events, were close and Fanny had comforted her after the loss of her child.
One can only imagine how she processed so much loss. Her lack of reaction to Fanny’s and Harriet’s deaths may well have been a paralysing type of numbness or fear of scandal ruining her family who were already living precariously.
Alas there was no happy ending for Mary either as Percy himself drown
ed in a boating accident in 1822. Now a single mother, she managed to earn money writing to support her son – Percy’s family wouldn’t help and it is thanks to her continued promotion of Shelley’s work that, for all his faults, we can read his amazing poetry. Her other novels such as Mathilde, though lesser known, are considered classics.
Mary Willcocks, aka Princess Caraboo (1791–1864)
Mary Willcocks was a Victorian journalist’s dream. She sold newspapers as a mysterious ‘oriental’ princess and made even more headlines as the trickster who successfully hoodwinked the gullible upper classes.
The Victorians were fascinated by the ‘Orient’ and loved curling up to an exotic story of the lesser people who lived in a land far, far away. These idealised, inventive ideas were manna to Mary Willcocks when she burst into their lives one day as Princess Caraboo.
She was found wandering destitute in a small town near Bristol. Petite, pretty and wearing a black scarf, turban-style, on her head, she spoke in a strange language and was taken to the county’s magistrate Samuel Worral at his home in the awe-inspiring Knole Park. The benevolent Mrs Elizabeth Worral took her to a nearby inn but the next day the owner reported strange behaviour. She wouldn’t sleep on the floor and performed some bizarre rituals. It was quite the mystery and captivated Elizabeth Knowles, who brought her home.
News of this exotic creature spread and many gentlemen and ‘experts’ came to investigate. She delighted them with strange practices: fasting on a Tuesday; only eating certain food; praying over cups of tea (no matter how deeply an English person may involve themselves in a fraud, they will never pass up a cup of tea); and, their favourite, swimming naked.
