Despite our best efforts to control our afterlife, history will draw its own conclusions about our legacy. Our reputation may rise or fall with the judgments of future times. On the upside, behaviour that is viewed as scandalous in one era may become acceptable, if not the norm. We’ve watched that happen during our lifetime with issues such as out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexual orientation and assisted dying. On the downside, secrets can emerge from dusty closets to discolour people’s images in the eyes of their descendants or society at large. There might be revelations of ill-gotten gains, neglected responsibilities, cruelty, sexism, racism or crime. The following stories remind us that our best recourse is to live what we understand to be a good life. But we’d be wise to look in the mirror of judgment from time to time, preferably the magnifying side with its unforgiving reflection.
As society evolves, deeper application of standards of human rights and common decency can result in revised judgments in the courts of public and private opinion. Over the decades, the chipping of names off buildings, toppling of statues and removal of plaques have provided us with vivid images of history’s verdict. Universities are often a battleground for reputational revisions, because students are demanding that our institutions of learning walk their talk and live their values. In 2017, the University of Victoria removed the name of Joseph Trutch from a residence building because “his attitude to indigenous peoples was particularly negative even for his time.” Trutch was a nineteenth-century commissioner of lands and works and BC’s first lieutenant-governor. In announcing the decision, the university said that Trutch’s actions regarding the land rights of First Nations and his disregard for their concerns conflicted with the university’s mission, vision and values.1 Historians were well aware of Trutch’s legacy, having included him in their 2007 “Top Ten Worst Canadians,” a list compiled by the history magazine the Beaver.2
Yale University made a similar decision in 2017 in renaming one of its undergraduate colleges. Calhoun College was named in 1933 to honour the legacy of John C. Calhoun, a former US vice president and senator from South Carolina before the Civil War. He was also a slave owner. In announcing the decision, Yale’s president said, “John C. Calhoun’s legacy as a white supremacist and a national leader who passionately promoted slavery as a ‘positive good’ fundamentally conflicts with Yale’s mission and values.” As Calhoun’s past caught up with his afterlife, history refocused the spotlight on a deserving role model. Calhoun College has been renamed Grace Hopper College in recognition of Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist who graduated from Yale in the 1930s.3
Some bad actors are still alive to watch as their legacies are rewritten. In 2005, Queen’s University stripped David Radler’s name from a wing of its business school. Radler was sixty-three years old and had just pleaded guilty in a US District Court to charges connected with a $32-million fraud at Hollinger International Inc., part of a criminal probe that included Conrad Black and other former executives. Radler had received the naming recognition in 2000 after pledging a million dollars to Queen’s. The university concluded that the integrity of the gift had been compromised and returned the money. Radler had a long history with Queen’s; both he and his father were graduates. It’s believed to be the first time a Canadian charitable organization returned a gift because a donor later committed a crime.4
But if our bad behaviour can catch up with us, so can the good. We have the earlier example of Grace Hopper, whose scientific legacy was finally acknowledged by Yale University. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2018, the New York Times launched a project to celebrate other overlooked heroines. Since 1851, the vast majority of obituaries published by the newspaper documented the lives of white men. To redress the balance, “Overlooked” will be a regular feature of the obituary section that will shine a light on the women over the centuries who left indelible marks and deserve to have a testament to their contributions. The program began with fifteen obituaries, including ones for Sylvia Plath (whose story you read earlier); Ida B. Wells, an investigative reporter who campaigned against lynching; and Qiu Jin, a feminist poet and revolutionary who became an advocate for women’s liberation in China. Readers are being encouraged to nominate candidates who should be included. Amisha Padnani is the journalist who developed this concept as a way to give remarkable women their due. She wrote, “I’m hopeful it will inspire many more conversations inside the newsroom and beyond about diversity and what we can do to make sure no one is overlooked.”5
A stellar example of revitalizing and solidifying a legacy is the project undertaken by Raoul Peck to immortalize the powerful words of writer and social critic James Baldwin. Peck is a Haitian filmmaker and political activist who was introduced to Baldwin’s writings as a teenager, and his words burned their messages into his brain. Peck is certainly not the only keeper of Baldwin’s flame, but his 2017 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, lit a bonfire under Baldwin’s legacy.
Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of sixty-three, and thirty years later, Peck brought him back to life by letting him tell his own story. Every word spoken in the two-hour film is Baldwin’s, either through archival footage or voice-over narration of his writing. As well, Peck introduces us to new material held by Baldwin’s estate, thirty pages of Remember This House, a manuscript that Baldwin was working on before his death. The unfinished book was to be his reflections on three assassinated civil rights leaders: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.
The film was ten years in the making. In a 2017 CBC Radio interview, Peck described making the film as a “very heavy burden.” “I had to make the film that would establish Baldwin as the important man, thinker, philosopher, witness, political analyst, et cetera, that he is,” he said, “because people were starting to forget about him—to forget about his role in the history of civil rights, his examination of racism in America, the way he deconstructs the image of the American dream. Nobody will ever again forget who James Baldwin was, and that was my agenda.”6 In his review in the New York Review of Books, the writer Darryl Pinckney describes the film as “a kind of tone poem to a freedom movement not yet finished.” “Peck’s commitment to Baldwin’s voice is total,” he wrote.7
While Baldwin had Peck working singlehandedly to reignite his legacy, the British nineteenth-century author Jane Austen had hundreds of thousands of fans who turned her candles of memory into a forest fire of immortalization.
Jane Austen died two centuries ago and her legacy has been raging apace ever since. She wrote six major novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and even if you haven’t read her books, you may have seen the film and television adaptations. You can buy Jane Austen paraphernalia, from teacups to sweatshirts, or read academic essays, biographies or even a “sequel.” If you want to go all out, you can don a Regency costume and attend a Janeite convention, tea party or ball. And, if you get your hands on a 2013 issue of a British ten-pound note, you’ll likely find Austen’s face.
Given all this exposure, you might be surprised to learn that when Austen died in 1817 at age forty-one, her family went to serious efforts to control and sanitize her image. They put themselves in charge of her legacy with the goal of creating an official portrait of piety and restraint that was appropriate for an unmarried woman of the time. The majority of Austen’s letters were destroyed or censored, most at the hands of her sister. Initially, two family-authored books set the tone for Austen’s reputation: a memoir written by her nephew and a collection of letters published by her great-nephew. Austen was “Aunt Jane” to these men, and Devoney Looser explains in The Making of Jane Austen how their works “promoted their author-ancestor as a very particular kind of aunt—the cheerful, pious, domestic, polite, maiden aunt.” Austen’s nephew describes his aunt’s life as “singularly barren . . . of events.”8
While the Austen family portrayed their Jane as a conservative gentlewoman who led a quiet, sheltered life, Paula Byrne points out in The Real Jane Austen that the truth veered sharply from this picture. Far from being a country mouse, Austen spent much of her life in the city. She was actually well travelled and even used the public transport of the day—the stagecoach. According to the nephew-authored memoir, Austen’s clerical brother formed and directed her taste in reading, but according to Byrne, she required no such teacher. Moreover, Byrne says the nephew’s memoir is humourless, further supporting the family-constructed portrait of a dour spinster. As Byrne says, “Jane Austen was one of the wittiest of writers, but there are not many jokes in the official family record.”9
Over time, Austen’s legacy would fly free from the family grasp, and people would use their own interpretations and agendas to remake Austen in their own likeness. In the process, she became a woman for all seasons, either a champion of domestic values resisting social change or a feminist reimagining women’s role. As Looser says, “Each group saw its image of Austen as the right one, although these versions of the author couldn’t have been more different . . . In some situations, and at some moments, Austen has been presented as gloriously conservative. At others, she’s described as unflinchingly progressive.”10
The imagining and reimagining of Austen’s legacy continues apace. Writing in the New Yorker in 2017, Anthony Lane urges us to read Austen’s final novel, Sanditon, both to understand more about Austen’s never-discussed love life and because the novel is an “exercise in courage.” Austen wrote the manuscript when her health was failing, and Lane says it is precisely because she was dying that the book “brims with life.” “The result is robust, unsparing, and alert to all the latest fashions in human foolishness,” Lane says.11 The title of Lane’s review is “Last Laugh,” a descriptor that sums up Austen’s relationship to her legacy. When we talk about the real Jane Austen, we’ll never know if we got it right, but all these years later, we’re still talking about her.
In the next chapter, we’ll examine how we shape our legacy through instructions to be executed after our death and why it’s important that our directions be carefully thought out. When wills are left undone or estates badly handled, the most beloved memory can be besmirched. Even if we have lived stellar lives, we can tarnish our legacies by leaving our affairs in a mess and forcing others to struggle to clean things up after we’re gone. Living a good life isn’t enough; we need to pay attention to our afterlife.