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Geraldine Jewsbury (1812–1880)

Autor(a) de The Half Sisters: A Tale

7+ Works 116 Membros 8 Reviews

About the Author

Obras de Geraldine Jewsbury

Associated Works

The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories (2004) — Contribuinte — 20 cópias

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome de batismo
Jewsbury, Geraldine Endsor
Data de nascimento
1812-08-22
Data de falecimento
1880-09-23
Local de enterro
Brompton Cemetery, London, England, UK
Sexo
female
Nacionalidade
UK
Local de nascimento
Measham, Derbyshire, England, UK
Local de falecimento
London, England, UK
Causa da morte
cancer
Locais de residência
Derbyshire, England, UK
Manchester, England, UK
London, England, UK
Chelsea, London, England, UK
Sevenoaks, Kent, England, UK
Educação
Misses Darby's boarding school (Alder Mills in Tamworth)
Ocupação
novelist
translator
essayist
journalist
publisher's reader
literary critic
Relacionamentos
Carlyle, Jane Welsh (best friend)
Pequena biografia
Although popular in their own day, Geraldine Jewsbury's works were forgotten for many years until undergoing a recent literary revival from historians and feminist scholars. She was born in Measham, historically in Derbyshire, England, the daughter of a merchant, and brought up in Manchester. She was educated at boarding school. In 1832, she took over management of the household after the death of her mother and the marriage of her older sister Maria Jane Fletcher (also a well-known writer at the time). Maria Jane died of cholera in India in 1833, leaving her sister devastated; she became a religious sceptic. She was a long-time friend of Jane Welsh Carlyle and moved to London to be closer to her. Geraldine's first novel, Zoe: the History of Two Lives, was published in 1845, followed by The Half Sisters (1848) and several others. She was a frequent contributor to the Athenaeum, Household Words, and other leading journals and magazines. She also was a respected reviewer and editor and influenced the Victorian publishing industry and public tastes through her role as a reader for the publishers Richard Bentley of Bentley's Miscellany and Hurst and Blackett.

Membros

Discussions

Group read: Zoe by Geraldine Jewsbury em Virago Modern Classics (Junho 2017)

Resenhas

... but Geraldine Jewsbury herself still survives, independent, courageous, absurd, writing page after page without stopping to correct, and coming out with her views upon love, morality, religion, and the relations of the sexes, whoever may be within hearing, with a cigar between her lips.
Virginia Woolf, "Geraldine and Jane" in The Common Reader, 2nd Series


If you've heard Geraldine Jewsbury's name, then it might be because Jeanette Winterson borrowed it for a character in Oranges are not the only fruit, or it might be that you've read one of her novels (Zoe was reissued in recent times by Virago, and The half-sisters is in the Oxford World's Classics series). But most probably you've read Virginia Woolf's clever, witty essay "Geraldine and Jane", in which she makes affectionate fun of the gauche, provincial spinster-novelist who somehow managed to wedge herself into the life of one of the great Victorian literary households.

Miss Jewsbury was the daughter of a Manchester businessman. She mixed in intellectual circles there from fairly early on, and sometime around 1840 (when she was in her late 20s) she was invited to visit one of her heroes, the historian Thomas Carlyle, at his home in Chelsea. It turned out that she got on very well with Mrs Carlyle, and the two women launched into a lively (often tempestuous) friendship, mostly carried out by letter. All but one of Jane's letters to Geraldine were destroyed, but Annie Ireland, when she was writing her biography of Jane, came across some 150 of Geraldine's letters, which are published here. Mrs Ireland is a rather infuriating editor, since she took it upon herself to blank out almost all the personal names mentioned in the letters, irrespective of whether they are people Geraldine is being rude about, lovers, passing celebrities, or simply members of her household or people who come to tea (it's usually obvious from the context when she's talking about her brother Frank, with whom she lived for many years, for instance, but his name is blanked out in every letter except the last one. WHY????). And when she does deign to give us a footnote, it's usually to tell us that "Nero" is Mrs Carlyle's dog. She presumably didn't want to cut into potential sales of her biography of Jane by duplicating material... Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any modern edition of the letters.

All the same, it is fun to read the letters, following Geraldine's crazy rush through the emotions and her much calmer reflections on religion, the role of women in society, literature, plain starching, medicine, the pleasures of smoking, and "George Sandism". She disapproved of the fashion for imitating the great French writer, even though she herself liked to wear men's clothes and smoke cigars, often asserted that she was in love with a married man, and had at least one serious lesbian affair besides her — probably — unrequited passion for Jane. On religion she's gloriously inconsistent as well — sometimes she's talking about her unshakeable faith or sitting piously in church (even if the book she has open in front of her isn't necessarily a prayer-book); at other times she's mocking respectability, Unitarianism, Tractarians, and religious hypocrisy. And she seems to have a sneaking admiration for the Roman Catholic Church, even though her most famous novel is about a Catholic priest who finds he has no faith.

One unexpected side-alley for me was when I chased up Geraldine's references to a friend she calls "the Chevalier", and whom Mrs Ireland uncharacteristically identifies in a footnote: he's the Austrian musician, globetrotter, diplomat and presumed spy, Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm (1778-1858), pupil of Joseph Haydn, who seems to have come to rest for a while in Manchester in the 1830s and 40s (amongst other things putting on a performance of The Creation). He apparently liked to entertain Geraldine with raunchy reminiscences of Talleyrand and Chateaubriand. I'd never heard of him, but thanks to the wonders of streaming, I've been listening to quite a bit of his music (fun, in a sub-Mendelssohn kind of way). He sounds like an interesting character to follow up.

A frustrating book if you're trying to piece together a connected story — Woolf had obviously read Mrs Ireland's biography of Jane as well — but nevertheless an entertaining and uninhibited Victorian voice, and a lot of interesting people moving about in the background: Dickens, W.E. Forster, Mrs Gaskell, G H Lewes (if George Eliot is there as well, she's buried between the blanks), Jenny Lind, Mrs Browning (curious to see that the unfortunate Nero suffered from the same dog-napping problems as Flush), and many more. If only we could be sure which was which out of all the blanks...
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Marcado
thorold | Dec 13, 2019 |
Geraldine Jewsbury and Zoe are scarcely known nowadays, except perhaps to readers of lesser known Victorian fiction. However, when Zoe was first published in 1845, it was considered sensational material. The Manchester Public Library withdrew it from circulation, not just for fear of offending feminine sensibilities, but also out of fear for its effect on the minds of young men.

Originally, Jewsbury started writing the novel as a joint project with her good friend [[Jane Carlyle]], and a mutual friend, Elizabeth Paulet. Jane felt the novel was taking an indecent turn, that it was "... an extraordinary jumble of sense and nonsense, insight beyond the stars, and blindness". She and Paulet withdrew, leaving Jewsbury to continue on her own. Jane was to retract her criticism once the novel was published, when she called it "wonderful".

What then caused all the commotion? [Zoe] is subtitled "The History of Two Lives". While Zoe herself may have shocked the English reading public, the second character, Everhard Burrows presented it with disturbing questions.

Everhard is introduced first, a precocious and neglected young boy, who becomes a renowned Catholic priest and scholar. Zoe makes her entrance some 68 pages in, arriving at the home of her uncle, a respected Anglican clergyman, where she is to be brought up. Zoe's background was murky. She was the daughter of an English captain and a beautiful Greek woman he had rescued from pirates. They married after Zoe was born.

Here, in the tradition of [[Mathew Lewis]] and [[Ann Radcliffe]] are things aplenty to disturb the reader: priests, illegitimacy and Mediterranean people - foreigners. This is not a Gothic novel though. Instead, it addressed two challenging concepts central to nineteenth century thought: the role and purpose of religion, and the role and education of women. Zoe had become a highly educated and attractive woman, one capable of challenging Mirabeau, and more importantly, able to debate Everhard and hold her ground. It is the philosophical encounters and developing relationship between Everhard and Zoe that are the heart of this book. There are standard Victorian maxims here; "...life is no holiday game; they who live earnestly are weary enough at their journey's end - they rejoice when the time comes to rest from their labours". However, now, as then, the interpretation is with the reader. This one saw it as an encouragement to keep questioning.
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SassyLassy | outras 3 resenhas | Nov 22, 2017 |
This book has a killer premise: a father in the eighteenth century gives his daughter a classical education, like a man would receive, and as a result she ends up unable to fit into either the world of man or woman. You wouldn't know it, though, because it barely does anything with that premise; we're mostly just told that it's true, but we never really see Zoe move through society or try to find her place in the world, except when she decides to get married, and though she has her occasional regrets after that, they're not developed substantively or interestingly.

One can't help but feeling that if Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot had turned their hands to this premise, you would have got a book with keener insight. The narrator comes out with these sweeping generalizations about women, and it's like, where did you even get this from? Aren't you a woman? Be smart for a second! "A true woman always blames herself, and it is a point on which her lover, to do him justice, never contradicts her" (387)? Really? But I guess it's mean to blame Jewsbury for the fact that no one had come along and invented Realism yet. (Mary Barton was three years away, and that's where I would peg it.)

Also there is a story about a doubting priest named Everhard (the second of the subtitle's "two lives"). Like Zoe's story, this one starts interesting but soon meanders into nothingness, and then we end up pondering whether Zoe's stepdaughter Clotilde will marry the right man, which isn't really what any of us came here for. The Everhard subplot does yield, however, the book's funniest moment, an apology from the narrator:

"It is very troublesome to have to deal with a hero of seventeen! A girl of seventeen, fortune favouring, may be made into a very interesting heroine; people will believe all that can be said of her beauty, wit, and wisdom, and will patiently read through three or even six volumes full of her adventures, and find themselves much edified with the perusal. But a lad of seventeen! merciful heaven! to make a hero of him would require a suspension of the laws of nature! All his graces of childhood have run to seed, and the victims of manhood have not yet replaced them; he is no longer the chubby darling [...] but an unfinished, uneasy biped, a plague to every body within his reach, and with whose doings and sufferings, nobody, not absolutely obliged, wishes to have the least concern." (40)

I think that if the whole novel had been that fun, well, it would have maintained my interest much more.
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1 vote
Marcado
Stevil2001 | outras 3 resenhas | Jun 9, 2014 |
I bought this book because I was lead to believe that one of the eponymous half sisters, Alice, married a scientist. This is not quite true; she marries a man who works in business vaguely depicted, but she does meet him in a town where members of the British Association are meeting. I think he's there to hear about scientific breakthroughs that will affect his work, though he's not a scientist himself. I must trace the original reference to see if the error of understanding was mine or theirs.

In any case, this is a decent novel. I've seen Jewsbury compared to Elizabeth Gaskell, which I don't think is quite right-- Gaskell is better with interiority and less prone to overt moralizing-- but The Half Sisters is still a decent read. It chronicles two half sisters, one from a conventional middle-class background who marries too hastily, the other an Italian actress who tries to make it in England. Both women find their lives constrained by social pressures. Jewsbury is pretty scathing of contemporary women's education, and she shows how it warps both men and women's perceptions of women's roles in society: "A woman is a rational being, with reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, and yet she is never educated for her own sake, to enable her to lead her own life better; her qualities and talents... are modified, like the feet of Chinese women, to meet an arbitrary taste" (219).

It's a little melodramatic at times, but Jewsbury avoids excess; I was particularly impressed with how characters who in other hands could have been simple villains (such as Alice's sometimes-thoughtless husband) were more complicated and understandable than that. This is very much a novel where social pressures and societal expectations are the villains, not individuals, not even the worst of them.

The Half Sisters sparkles with the occasional insight or witticism worthy of George Eliot, even; I liked Jewsbury's description of a "worldy" man: "his ideas about women became coarser and more rigid; and after the fashion of that style of men, he expected them to do all the virtue going in the world, in spite of their own individual efforts to thwart it in all the women they came near" (168). Or, in talking of the attempt of a man to remember his lover's suffering: "our own personality sits closer to us than any other feeling; no generosity can enable us to get rid of it; our 'self-negation' is at best but a generous fiction" (211). Ouch! But perhaps too true.
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1 vote
Marcado
Stevil2001 | outras 2 resenhas | Jul 3, 2013 |

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Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
7
Also by
1
Membros
116
Popularidade
#169,721
Avaliação
3.2
Resenhas
8
ISBNs
18

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