1. Adventurer: Lady Mary Wortley Montague and the Role of Women in the 18th Century
My remote British ancestor, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, has been written about extensively, most thoroughly in The Life of Lady Wortley Montague by Robert Halsband (Oxford, At the Clarendon Press, 1956) and, more recently, in Lady Mary Wortley Montague by Isobel Grundy (Oxford University Press, 1999). Her life has been studied because of her extraordinary literary achievement displayed in four published volumes of her letters, verses, and journalism. She has also attracted three centuries of attention because of what some considered her scandalous life, excoriated in Alexander Pope’s scurrilous verses.
These stories have tended to overwhelm her significant achievement in introducing the smallpox vaccine to 18th century England, long attributed to others, and her originality, most prominently displayed in her flight, at fifty, to Italy to pursue the gay man with whom she was in love, the Italian count Francesco Algarotti. However, since she did not see him for two subsequent years, he served more readily as an excuse for flight from her adult children, her social position and her husband, Sir Edward Montagu Wortley.
Excellent and thorough research on the part of both these biographers has left no stone unturned. However, more needs to be written about the origin of the smallpox vaccine, particularly interesting now—Lady Mary proved its worth by vaccinating her two small children—and her part in the spread of British colonialism as the wife of the first British ambassador to Turkey.
Visiting the British sites associated with her—Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire and Middlethorpe Hall, near York—is easy, but crucial exploration of the sites associated with her life as ambassadress in Istanbul is more difficult. However, I have the priceless advantage of my friend Ozlem Ezer, scholar and feminist and native Turk, who lives in Istanbul and has offered to help me with an investigation of the British Ambassador’s residence and what remains of the harems—Lady Mary was the first European to visit these.
And a modern examination of the works of Alexander Pope, widely read in broadsides in 18th century London, based on his anger when Lady Mary rejected him as a suitor, creates the possibility of a root study of the ways in which verbal and written abuse affect women.
I have been thinking about this biography for years, since my mother joked that when Lady Mary was upbraided at a London party for her dirty hands, she said, “You should see my feet…”
2. Dead With a Parrot: The Forgotten History of Randy Stiles and the Collateral Damages of the Civil War Choice
The youngest of three sons of a devoutly Presbyterian family in the pre-Civil War South. All three enlisted early in the Civil War and served throughout. Randy was shot in the head and suffered what today we would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, unrecognized at the time. Since he refused to practice his Presbyterian minister’s form of orthodox Christianity, he was expelled from the family and spent his last days alone except for his parrot in a New Orleans boarding house.
I have discovered extensive family letters in the archive of the Georgia Historical Society, including correspondence between Mrs. Robert E. Lee and Mrs. Stiles. However, most touching are the letters Randy wrote to his mother and his sister from the New Orleans boarding house, pleading for money and for a visit. On the basis of religion and the minister’s dominance, neither woman ever visited Randy.
Randy’s story has never been told.
An excellent historical novel, Stranger in Savannah by Eugenia Price (Doubleday, 1989) details the history of the Stiles family through four generations in Georgia. The story of well-off Southern families who were notably pious and also owned slaves needs further elucidation. Various branches of the family, well-off and patrician, owned houses in Savannah as well as a plantation called Etowah Cliffs. They retreated there with ten children, all cousins, after the Civil War but for unexplained reasons left the house which was allowed to fall down.
My research in women’s lives at this period, primarily in three enlightening books by Catherine Clinton, has raised many unanswered questions. Since the wife of the plantation owner was expected to make the slaves’ clothes, what kind of contact, physical and emotional, did this entail? And where are the slaves buried?
One woman stands out in these faded, hard-to-read 18th-century letters: Caroline Clifford Nephew, later married to Reverend Stiles. At fourteen, she was sent to the Lafayette Female Seminary in Lexington, KY; I have two scrapbooks from her time there. When General Lafayette visited in 1824, she read him a lengthy poem full of patriotic cliches. Four years later, married to a domineering evangelical minister, she bore four children but was constantly trying to escape. What happened to the bright girl?
3. Unacknowledged Sacrifice: Austin Brown, the CIA and the Cold War
Austin Brown was my first cousin and my mother’s godchild. A promising student, she attended Radcliffe College in the 1930’s until her deteriorating grades caused my mother to end her financial support. Austin dropped out of Radcliffe before graduating.
Through his CIA connections, my father procured her a job with the Voice of America in New York. Later described as a secretary, she undoubtedly learned a good deal about the CIA’s support of the Hungarian rebels in the revolution. When that support was abruptly withdrawn and the revolution was crushed, she was deeply disappointed.
She also worked for a time in World War II London, probably also under the auspices of the CIA. My father saw her at Cliveden, the gathering place for British opponents of the war; his letter describes her as wearing one of my mother’s cast-off dresses and looking like her.
For reasons that have never been explored, Austin committed suicide on the train tracks at Princeton, N.J., in the 1950’s.
Research into the dealings of the CIA and especially its use of the Voice of America of course encounters roadblocks; my Freedom of Information requests have been denied. However, as we are able to see through the glamor of World War II and examine its true causes and consequences, Austin’s brief life will shed some needed light—particularly on the role of women spies.
Three Ideas
[Please also see my follow-up post and poll, “Some More Questions.”]
Leave a Reply