Married Men

I’m back in the States, sans bed bugs and I wrote about fashion month for Paloma Magazine if you’d like to read.

I also finished Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay collection Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature.* This week, I’ll be starting North Woods by Daniel Mason and A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor. On audio, I’m doing The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. I’ve seen the latter in every museum’s gift shop for years but finally succumbed to the book.** It’s a good continuation of my reading-about-marriage-for-no-reason theme. Finally, instead of writing this newsletter, I spent twenty minutes looking for a theory book which I know I bought in April but somehow can’t find…

Initially, I thought this newsletter would be an essay on Tube Girl. I’d pull out some theory and fire off some hot takes. But then, I started to feel lukewarm and nixed the draft. Below, you’ll find a question that has been occupying my mind during the last week.

What can loving a married man do for a female writer?***

The Charlotte Brontë Case Study

The Brontë sisters had a rough life and Hardwick’s essay “The Brontës” elucidates this point while highlighting key differences in their personalities and how those differences impacted their fiction.

One of the more interesting things I learned is that Charlotte (Taurus) fell in love with a married man while living abroad in Belgium. The man, Constantin Héger (Cancer or Leo), was first her teacher and then her employer. From what I gleaned from the essay, it does not appear that Héger reciprocated Charlotte’s feelings.

In her final letter to Héger, she admits the she tried to forget him but could not. She finds her inability to control her thoughts ‘humiliating’ and then she asks, “Why cannot I have just as much friendship as you, as you for me—neither more nor less? Then should I be tranquil, so free—I could keep silence then for ten years without an effort.”

Hardwick looks at Charlotte’s work, in particular, Jane Eyre and Villette, and argues that “Falling in love with M. Heger laid the ground for the emotional intensity and recklessness in Charlotte Brontë’s novels. She experienced to the fullest a deep, scalding frustration. The uselessness of her love, the dreadful inappropriateness and unavailability of its object, turned out to be one of those sources of pain that are also the springs of knowledge.”****

The Elizabeth Smart Case Study

While reading The Baby on the Fire Escape, I discovered Elizabeth Smart (Capricorn). Even though Smart does not a get a lot of real estate in the book, she is only mentioned in the section on Doris Lessing, I found her story to be fascinating.

Born in Ottawa to a prominent, well-to-do family, Smart was… well, smart. Highly precocious, she published her first poem at 10 and a collection at 15. At the age of 24, after reading a book of poetry by George Barker (Pisces), she falls in love and begins telling everyone that she would not only meet the poet but also marry him. Girl was manifesting! Speaking it into the universe and things did work out. Kind of.*****

Barker would become the lifelong love of her life and the father of her four children. However, Barker was also a womanizer and a drunk. He promised to leave his wife but he never did and by the end of his life, he would father 15 children with four different women.

The duo lived a bit of a bohemian life and when they were together, Smart would prioritize Barker’s writing time over her own such that her own creative pursuits would fall to the wayside in a manner that was depicted in Lives of the Wives.

Nonetheless, Smart did produce one great masterpiece as a result of this relationship: the prose poetry novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down.****** She worked on the novel while pregnant with her first child and though the novel was not a success upon publication it slowly gained a cult following and is considered a masterpiece.

I really want to read her book and then, even though the Internet says Barker was a bit of an uneven writer, I want to read his version of the story which he published as a novel called The Dead Seagull.

*Not monetized
**The book literally came out in 2022… Relax.
***Other than cause a lot of pain and suffering…
****I do need to add that Charlotte would go onto find some romantic fulfillment with her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. However, she would die, with her unborn child, three weeks shy of her 39th birthday.
*****We plan, God laughs.
******After some false starts, Smart would become one of the highest paid copy writers in advertising in London. She would then return to creative writing towards the end of her life. Also, Morrissey is obsessed with Smart.