AS FANNY MORSE WAS EXPLAINING THE PROJECT, I WAS HALF-LISTENING to her and half-listening to the ice-coated twigs tinkling like fairy chimes in the wind. Last night’s freezing rain had hung a splendid fringe of icicles on Mr. Eliot’s eaves that looked sharp as swords. I’d formed a vivid mental picture of a passing Harvard student being killed instantly by an icicle piercing his hat and brain, and was mentally composing the headline in the Boston Evening Transcript—Harvard student skewered by icicle, or should it be transfixed?—when Fanny said something about nervous invalidism, that wearisome topic.
She was talking about Miss Anna Ticknor, who was so broken-down nervously a year ago that she spent six months at Dr. Weir Mitchell’s rest-cure farm in Pennsylvania, without success. The copious rich food forced upon her there inspired a lifelong distaste for food and the proscription against reading made her an even more fanatical reader. In the end, she returned to her house on Chestnut Street, hired a companion/nurse, and accepted invalidism as her lot.
I knew where this was going, of course. Fanny was using Miss Ticknor’s nerves—which she obviously equated more or less with mine—to lure me into Miss Ticknor’s Society to Encourage Studies at Home. I had nothing against societies, but I assumed this one would turn out to be as old-maidish and earnest as so many others. The Rights of Women were powerfully magnetizing the social atmosphere of Boston during this period, and everyone was abuzz about it. Still, the choices for Woman remained few: Wife and mother, on the one hand; social reformer on the other. Both unpaid. What else was there? Editress of a magazine for ladies, schoolmistress at a girls’ school or a dame school for infants, composer of soporific rhymes and/or moralistic stories to run next to pie recipes in women’s magazines. Nurse? Clara Barton aside, nursing was a plebeian occupation, and I had no wish to handle sick bodies; dealing with my own was onerous enough. There were a handful of dry, bespectacled medical doctoresses in Boston who delivered babies, but I did not care for the sight of blood, which, come to think of it, would rule out nursing as well. People were always saying in those days how far Woman had risen, serving on the Boston school board, attending the new women’s colleges and the land-grant coeducational colleges of the west, even, in the case of some extreme bluestockings, graduate school. But my friends and I had missed the chance to go to college, having been born a decade too soon.
“Fanny, do you ever wish for a nor’easter or something—just to liven things up?”
“Not really.” I watched her worried eyebrows bunch up. “Anyhow, during one period in bed, Miss Ticknor began to feel oppressed by the number of volumes in her library, which was her father’s, as you know, and is considered the finest private library in Boston.”
“That may be, but I don’t think Miss Ticknor can rest on her laurels, library-wise. William may well overtake her at some point.”
Plowing past my irrelevancies, Fanny went on to relate that Miss Ticknor, seized by a desire to share her books with women who had none, did what any self-respecting Boston bluestocking would do—gathered the intellectual women of Boston and Cambridge around her and founded a society, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home.
“Do bear in mind, Fanny, that I am the misguided product of Father’s pedagogical experiments. I have a very shaky intellectual foundation. I’m not sure I ever learned fractions. No Latin at all, of course.”
Fanny, I am obliged to admit, was a model of forbearance. “No one’s asking you to teach Latin, Alice. Anyhow, we’re not teachers; we are called Managers. Our students are sent books and we correspond with them about their reading. It would be easy for someone as well-read as you.”
She showed me a pamphlet describing the Society that was given out to students. I flipped to the end, where there were a few paragraphs cautioning female students against “overdoing,” culminating in a burst of feminine poetry. I read these lines aloud:
Lose not thyself nor give thy humors way,
God gave them to thee under lock and key!
“What does that mean, Fanny? That God locks us up but supplies us with a key? Or are the humors—whatever they are—meant to be locked up? It is not at all clear.”
“Don’t worry about it, Alice. Health is a sort of fixation with Miss Ticknor, because she was such a terrible invalid.”
“I hope at least she is not the fussbudget type of invalid.”
Fanny looked weary, and I thought I could read her mind. My bouts of invalidism were my way of withdrawing from life, and would no doubt continue until I became completely housebound and set in my ways, like Miss Ticknor before she started the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. (Not that she was entirely normal now. Fanny did mention that meetings with her were “like being swept up in the tail of a comet.”)
In Boston, it should be noted, the habit of introspection (or “thinking about yourself too much”), especially when combined with the condition of “having too much time on your hands,” was deemed morbid, leading inevitably to queer behavior if not to the asylum. Fanny was trying to rescue me from this fate by getting me interested in “something outside of myself.” That I was naturally inclined toward the inner world more than the outer was something I could not explain to her.
But, reading the disappointment on her face, I did feel contrite for being such a hard nut to crack. “Oh, but pay no attention to my silliness, Fanny. I shall think about joining your Society. It is very kind of you to invite me.” She did not look like she believed me.
Over the next two months, she threw herself into the Society and became less available to her friends, prompting Sara to grumble about “Fanny’s prairie ladies.” One day I was drifting through the dining room looking for the Advertiser, standing near the dumbwaiter. Through the shaft I could hear Mother and Aunt Kate talking down in the kitchen as they inventoried the dry goods. Aunt Kate was saying, “What she needs, poor girl, is a constant change of air for a year or more. Her Cambridge life seems blighting to her.” I drew in my breath. I thought I’d convinced everyone I was fine.
“I don’t know why,” I heard Mother say. “Other girls manage to flourish in Cambridge.” As they drifted off toward the pantry, I waited. When they moved in my direction again, I heard Mother say, “Her health does seem to improve when she has something to do other than contemplate her own uselessness.” I almost dropped the cup and saucer I was holding. All these years, had Aunt Kate been my secret ally, pleading my case with Mother, while I went about like an unfinished sentence? Blighted!
And so to curtail further contemplation of my uselessness, I invited Fanny to tell me more about the Society. Delighted, she took me through all the printed materials, the reading lists, the charter, the lists of Managers and the students who paid two dollars to sign up. The charter emphasized the founders’ desire to stay out of the newspapers and to educate Woman without taking her out of her proper Sphere, compromising her domestic duties, or overtaxing her sensitive Nervous System.
“Most of our students have no books and no libraries,” she explained. “They are starved for the written word! We send them books, and they write essays and we reply by mail. It’s like an extended intellectual conversation!” The Society had compiled a lending library, she explained, organizing itself into six departments, English, History, Art, French, German, and Natural Science. The Manager in charge of each discipline compiled a reading list.
When I told William about the Society, I expected him to joke about hen parties, but he took it very seriously.
“You must do it, Alice. The women of the world need you as a professoress.”
“But I have had no coherent education, having been torn up by the roots repeatedly as a child, due to Father’s Ideas.”
“No more do I. Mr. Eliot seemed to have this idea I could teach and I couldn’t bear to disappoint the poor man. It has given me a reason to get up in the morning. That may sound like a trivial thing but—”
“It’s not.”
“No.” A moment passed in which we silently understood each other.
And so I said yes.
Fanny actually clapped her hands together in her exuberance. “Next week we’ll meet with Miss Loring, who is in charge of the historical young women.”
“I fear the learned Miss Loring will be dismayed by my unsystematic scholarship.”
“Oh, come, Alice. Everyone knows you’re the brightest star in our constellation.”
“I am?” This was a genuine surprise to me.
In a departure from my usual modus operandi, I made a major decision without consulting my parents or Aunt Kate. I could not face their anxious hovering and I had already made up my mind.
Miss Katherine Peabody Loring was a Boston female powerhouse two years my junior, who was involved in numberless intellectual and charitable causes and spoke up frequently for the Rights of Woman. I’d met her first at a North Shore luncheon given by Fanny on December 27, 1873 (a date that would later be memorialized as our anniversary, though of course we did not know this yet). She was the type of woman of whom people said, “Such a pity she is not a man! If she were a man, she’d be running a great company.” In her presence I feared being unmasked as a useless dilettante and was quiet and subdued at the first meetings of the History department, which consisted only of Miss Loring, Fanny Jackson née Appleton, and me. (I was quickly able to forgive Fanny for marrying the beautiful Charley Jackson and discovered I liked her very much.)
The History Department was so popular that Miss Loring had fifteen students to supervise, Fanny sixteen, and I fourteen. Over the next months, I came to know my students through their letters and essays on the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the British Empire. As I read their letters, I marveled at these lives, seemingly so bleak and so remote from mine. Often, contemplating a pioneer woman’s struggles to educate herself despite every conceivable hardship, I dissolved in tears. Other students were more comfortably settled in places like Illinois, yet even they were condemned to what I considered a cultural wasteland, without public libraries, lecture series, Browning societies, Dante circles, visits from Mr. Charles Dickens, or any of Boston’s considerable intellectual amenities. Most of my students were intelligent and intellectually curious but had, until now, no access to the world of ideas.
Sara’s references to our “rusticated scholars” and “sages of the sagebrush” became more frequent and caustic.
“Why don’t you join, Sara?” Fanny said.
“Please! I have no time for feminine crusades. I am much too occupied with the children.” Meaning the young Nortons.
In my letters to Nanny I treated the subject in a jocular manner—in case she thought the Society was silly and because I still felt a fraud as a teacher—but in the PS I admitted to being deeply moved by the sacredness of books in my students’ eyes.
In late August, Harry returned from New York. I had been attentively reading his Transatlantic Sketches, among which I recognized some of the places we’d visited with him. But how changed they were in his account, in which Harry wandered lonely as a cloud, having insights. He’d also published a first collection of stories, A Passionate Pilgrim, which Mr. Howells reviewed in the Atlantic Monthly in a gushing way. (We may compare him with the greatest, and find none greater than he.) Other critics were less flattering, for apparently Harry’s artistic interests, tailored English suits, and sharp tongue did not endear him to every American. I hoped he wasn’t too hurt by the snide reviews.
But the Transatlantic Sketches received favorable reviews, sold a thousand copies, and seemed destined for a long life in the bookshops. More and more Americans were swarming over Europe now, apparently, needing to know what to appreciate.
His time in New York had shown him that he would be obliged to work like a dog as a journalist, mass-producing reviews and notices, just to stay afloat. In the months he’d lived there he churned out 39 reviews and notices for the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and Galaxy, which were artistically unsatisfying and barely covered his rent, leaving no time for his fiction. The robust sales of Transatlantic Sketches encouraged him to think he might try Paris.
He was explaining all this to me in his thorough, painstaking way as we circled Fresh Pond on a muggy August afternoon, serenaded by bullfrogs. I’d had no idea he felt that way about New York; he certainly hadn’t told me. Maybe he only confided in the Nortons nowadays. Now he was listing everything that fatigued him about New York—the journalistic rat-race, the summer heat, his lonely apartment, the constant scribbling of reviews, the elevated train that spewed flecks of coal and live embers onto the street. (Through his eyes I could see it as if it were a painting.) The city lacked conveniences and social atmosphere, he said; the scenery did not speak to him, and neither did the world of trade, the real life of the city.
I had been hoping for months to visit him in New York, but he never invited me, no doubt because he was working so hard. Now I was trying to absorb what he’d just told me. “But Boston, Harry. Why can’t you live in Boston?”
That was when he confessed that he’d written to the New York Tribune offering to replace their Paris correspondent, and the editor had hired him. He’d also persuaded the Atlantic Monthly to advance him four hundred dollars and now thought he could afford Paris better than New York. He already had a ticket and a sailing date.
Harry the schemer! Clearly he’d always meant to go back, had only pretended to “try” New York. I’d overheard Father telling Mr. Howells last week that Harry had “no power to push himself into notice, but must await the spontaneous recognition of the world around him.” He was dead wrong. Harry’s ambition was grandiose!
If only he’d leave quickly and get it over with. These good-byes took so much out of one. I felt the air becoming thin, as if I were floating out in lifeless space. Words were spilling out of me in a torrent. I heard myself complain that the Norton children were not real children at all but more like rare hybrids grown in a hothouse. I’d seen little Lily having a fit over a blueberry stain on her pinafore. “She kept saying, Oh dear! Oh dear! Papa will be angry, won’t he? Auntie will be displeased. Over and over again. It was frightful, Harry.”
I’d been wounded to discover that Harry had written Grace Norton several long, thoughtful letters from New York and none to me. The Nortons stood for everything that was luring him away—art, refinement, old cultures, private parks, aesthetic theories. Wherever he went, he’d be buoyed by their letters of introduction. (They knew everyone, naturally.) I had a bleak presentiment of life after he sailed. Dining with the Nortons in the room with the Tintorettos, the children displayed like Infantas, Grace gushing, “I have just had the most delicious letter from Harry.”
Harry was staring fixedly at his boots, the furrow between his eyebrows deepening.
“Strange things occur in the woods, I hear,” I said, pounding my walking stick into the ground with unusual ferocity. “Don Carlo and Theodora appear suddenly from behind bushes and trees, or skirting the edge of the horizon. For a widower of fifty with six children at his back it is almost immoral; don’t you think so, Harry?”
He made no reply. The subject clearly embarrassed him, and this made me more adamant. I wanted to get a rise out of him—something passionate, not evasive.
“They say old Mrs. Norton has put her foot down about Charles bringing a new wife into the family. Apparently, they will have to wait for her to expire.”
“It may be some time. Mrs. Norton is very spry.” Harry passed his hand over his face, slippery with sweat.
I knew I was growing strident, but could not seem to stop. There is something about a rant that is strangely satisfying. “It might be a good plan, when Charlemagne marries his young wife and starts a fresh brood, to dispose of some half dozen of his children to their various aunts. Wouldn’t you agree, Harry?”
I had gone too far and I knew it. The corners of Harry’s mouth turned down. He was too indebted to the Nortons to see them as characters in a farce. We walked in silence for a few minutes, our boots squelching through the muddy patches. My throat felt parched. Whatever my brothers might do, I was doomed to remain behind. Father would go on winding the clocks at night, Mother would keep the household accounts and carp about the Sullen Laundress and the price of coal. Father would go off to the Saturday Club and come back with anecdotes. The Advertiser would be read in the morning, the Transcript in the evening, and there would be discussions of who had died and who had produced an infant.
After a pregnant pause, Harry promised me that he would think of me whenever he had a new and startling sensation, that he would describe everything to me so I could feel it too. I felt absurdly grateful.
He sailed a month later on a slow Cunarder bound for Liverpool. The crossing was rough, with gale winds. Anthony Trollope was a fellow passenger and Harry talked to him daily, finding him one of the dullest Britons he had met. “I take possession of the Old World,” he wrote us. “I inhale it—I appropriate it! I shall immortalize myself; vous allez voir!”
He was right about that.
In Cambridge the trees were losing their leaves. I watched them drift slowly past the windows to turn brown on the ground. Late autumn was the saddest season. How wrenching to watch everything in the natural world die in its turn and to foresee what lay ahead—black ice, short daylight, influenza, blizzards, Father losing his balance on icy sidewalks.
From Paris Harry reported that he was living in a third-floor apartment at 29 rue de Luxembourg and writing a new serial called The American. He told us that the waiters in restaurants were his chief society, and Mother worried that he was lonely and hoped he would get Paris out of his system soon. I knew this would never happen. (Some months later, we would read that Christopher Newman, of The American, imagines that the worst punishment for an American in Paris is “to be carried home in irons and compelled to live in Boston.”)
Not long afterward, Harry met Ivan Turgenev, who took him under his wing and introduced him to Flaubert and George Sand. Within a few months he was attending Flaubert’s literary cénacles at the high end of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. To me he confessed that he was seeing much of the little rabble of Flaubert’s satellites, including Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, and Alphonse Daudet. Most of the Frenchmen were immoral and insular, in his opinion. Each of these letters, postmarked Paris, made me feel that I was living a kind of exile.
Harry did not forget his promise, and wrote me,
Whenever I see anything very stunning, I long for the presence of my lovely sister, & in default of it promise myself to make the object present to her eyes by means of the most graphic and spirituelle descriptions.