1666
So we approach the last weeks of the calendar, and by now you have surely noticed that my list of great ladies from the first three-quarters of the last millennium is almost entirely French - why even the two Italians who appeared on June 22 became French when they were still children. So, to try to prove that female intellectual culture before this millennium was not totally restricted to France, or even to southern France plus a salon or two in Paris, or in the case of Aengland to those people whom Aliénor d'Aquitània brought with her when she crossed the Channel, there is...
Her route to them was probably the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, who she petitioned “to help an impoverished gentlewoman”. He responded with both cash and a mailing list, and it must have been significant on both counts because she thanked him later with a dedication on a volume of her poems. Lady Catherine Jones became her closest friend as well as patron, and she too was thanked with a dedication, in her case in the frontispiece to “The Christian Religion”.
That was her route in, to give the thinking-creative brain a real opportunity, which is pure biography; much more significant is the route out again for the thinking-creative products, and that is about enduring intellectual impact, post-biography. Alas, though she managed the in-route herself through the saftey-net of her aristocratic circle, she was not able to convince the world that a woman should be allowed to earn a living as a professional person, writer or otherwise, while still maintaining her social respectability, and even her own name: “By A Lady”, Currer Bell, George Sand and George Eliot, to name but four, were still fighting that battle a full two centuries later. But she fuelled the aspiration, and not just for women to be allowed to go unsilenced by their own family let alone the broader society (see my pieces on Nannerl Mozart and Fanny Mendelssohn for that), but for women to obtain all the same rights as men.
Among the early Blue Stockings listed above was Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu, who read “A Serious Proposal” when she was still young, and went on breathing it for the remainder of her life, a statement I can make because how else would her grand-daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, have been able to write of Mary Astell in her latter years:
“This fair and elegant lady of quality...of learned memory, the Madonella of the Tatler, a very pious, exemplary woman, and a profound scholar, but as far from fair and elegant as any old school-master of her time: in outward form, indeed, rather ill-favoured and forbidding, and of a humour to have repulsed the compliment roughly, had it been paid to her while she lived.”
And so to the thinking-creative output. Pamphlets were quick and relatively easy money-makers as well as idea-spreaders, but she was mostly interested in writing books, and in giving them titles that were not much shorter than their content:
“A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II. Wherein a Method is offer’d for the Improvement of their Minds” came out in 1694, and then enlarged and revised in 1697.
“Letters Concerning the Love of God Between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris: Wherein his late Discourse, shewing That it ought to be intire and exclusive of all other Loves, is further cleared and justified” is dated 1695.
“Some Reflections upon Marriage, Occasion’d by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine’s Case; which is also considered” in 1700, and yes, the same Mazarin(e), Hortense Mancini, who you wondered why I mentioned those Italian sisters at the start of this essay.
“The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter Of the Church of England” in 1705.
Today she is best known for her theories on the education of women, and for her critiques of John Norris and John Locke.
https://plato.stanford.edu/Entries/astell/ has an absolutely massive piece on her philosophy, far too long to copy here
The Mary Astell Academy in Newcastle-upon-Tyne has a website here; honouring her values and aspirations through the naming of a school.
She died, in Chelsea, on May 11 1731.
Auguste Rodin, sculptor, born today in 1840 - and perhaps I'll tell the story of the struggle to make that remarkable statue of Balzac, which Zola commissioned when he was President of the Société des Gens des Lettres...
Roland Barthes, critic and semiotician, born today in 1915. Did he ever write on Rodin? (Update, 2024: No, not directly, but this article has him commenting on Balzac's stort "Sarrasine", in which "the Marquise remained pensive", and which was apprently the starting-point for Rodin's "Thinker" as well as for his statue of Balzac, pictured above.)
Neil Young, completely helpless but harvesting the gold rush, as of today in 1945 (his debut with CS&N is ambered for ambering on July 25, though whether a piece about the crazy horse will end up here or there is still to be determined)
Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Saturn, today in 1980
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