Jocelyn - Scribbling women: true tales from astonishing lives

Text copyright 2011 by Marthe Jocelyn

Published in Canada by Tundra Books,
75 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9

Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York,
P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010928788

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisheror, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Scribbling women: true tales from astonishing lives / by Marthe Jocelyn.

eISBN: 978-1-77049-230-1

1. LiteratureWomen authors.
2. Women authorsBiography. I. Jocelyn, Marthe

PN6069.W65S37 2011 808.899287 C2010-903162-8

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

v3.1

For Kathy

I like to write outside, at a table on my front porch, or even in the hammock. Sometimes I sit on a park bench and scribble away while I watch the world around me. Once in a while, I stay in bed on a cold winter morning, with a hot water bottle, a cup of tea, and a notebook across my knees.

I am a professional writer. I write books for young readers and get paid for it. Occasionally I have a worrisome deadline or a computer glitch that causes a few stormy hours, but thats as awful as my writing life gets. I am lucky to have a job that changes every time I turn a page, that allows me to read books, look at art, wander through the streets, travel afar, talk to and eavesdrop on people all in the name of research.

Whether Im writing a book of information, like this one, or making up a story with entirely fictional characters, part of every day is spent in research. Reading about one thing inevitably uncovers fascinating details about something else, and I love to follow where curiosity leads me.

This happened while I was working on a book called A Home for Foundlings, about a centuries-old institution in England that rescued hundreds of abandoned children. As I delved into that topic, I came across the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the ambassador to Turkey nearly three hundred years ago. In one of her many letters she described the common practice of inoculation against smallpox performed by the Turks. In England, where this dreadful disease was killing one person in six, Lady Marys observations were a crucial step toward ending the smallpox epidemic. The foundlings were used, with no ill effect, in medical experimentsthe first recorded instance of what we now know as clinical trialsto help doctors determine the correct procedure and dosage to use on the general population.

As I learned and thought about Lady Marys life, I realized that there must be dozens of other women who had written letters, or travel journals, or essays, or diaries; women whose observations, like Lady Marys, had chronicled or changed the world around them, even in very small ways.

A quick search in the library and on the Internet told me there were not dozens, but thousands of women who had recorded their livesjoyful, challenging, illuminating, wearisome, and passionateon countless pages, throughout history and around the world.

Limited by language, I looked only at texts written, or translated into, English. There were still more words written by women than I could read in a lifetime. The trouble was not where to begin but where to stop. Finally the list was narrowed to those whose stories made me catch my breath.

The physical act of writing intrigued me: where and when had these girls and women found time to put words down on paper? A few of my subjects depended on writing for part of their livelihood, but most of them had plenty else to consume their days, from waiting on royalty to surviving blizzards, stealing horses, delivering babies, visiting cannibal tribes, performing surgery in a war zone and so much more.

In some cases, the discovery or preservation of a particular journal or manuscript is a key part of the tale. Todays electronic correspondence is fast and convenient, but it leaves us with nothing to hold on to. Even if we are somehow able to read e-mails two or three hundred years from now, there will not be the tangible connection of fingering a lock of hair or a scrap of flannel pinned to the edge of a diary page, where every third or fourth word required the pen to be dipped again into the ink, or the pencil to be sharpened.

Most of my women would be surprised to find themselves inside a book. They might not be surprised, however, to know that the title began as a sneer, made by a famous male writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter to his publisher in 1855, where he complained about what he considered the irritating fad of scribbling women.

Everyone has trials and sorrows, and moments of boredom or immense delight. But these scribbling women wrote it down, passed it along, told us they were here, and took the time to illuminate their worlds.

For us, their grateful readers.

Sei Shonagon
9651010

I really cant understand people who get angry when they hear gossip about others. How can you not discuss other people? Apart from your own concerns, what can be more beguiling to talk about and criticize than other people?

H ow can you not discuss other people? We all do it.

There is simply nothing more fascinating to people than other people. This has been true for at least a thousand years. The words above were written in the tenth century, by a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court of Japan.

We know her by the name of Sei Shonagon, but that would not have been what she was called. Sei was her family name, and the word shonagon meant junior counsellor, probably the job of one of her male relatives. Some scholars think her personal name was Nagiko, but here shell be referred to as Sei.

Seis masterwork, called in English The Pillow Book, is not a memoir, nor a diary, nor poetry, but in a way it is all of these. Written in snippets during ten years at the royal court, The Pillow Book