How to Live

Helen Rickerby

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781776710461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

A new poetry collection that takes readers among 'the unsilent women', from Hipparchia to J. K. Rowling.'Women who speak have always been monstrous. That twisty sphinx, those tempting sirens; better plug your ears with wax, boys.'Where are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell us how to live? In her fourth collection of poetry, Helen Rickerby takes readers on a journey into women's writing, a quest for philosophical answers, and an investigation of poetic form.The poems in How to Live engage in a conversation with 'the unsilent women' – Hipparchia and George Eliot, Ban Zhao and Mary Shelley. They do so in order to explore philosophical and practical questions: how one could or should live a good life, how to be happy, how to not die, how to live. Rickerby thinks through the ways that poetry can build up and deconstruct a life, how the subtext and layers inherent in poetry can add to the telling of a life story, and how different perspectives can be incorporated into one work – the place where poetry meets essay, where fiction meets non-fiction, where biography meets autobiography, where plain-speaking meets lyricism, where form pushes against digression.The work is witty ('Perhaps I should ban "perhaps".') and self-reflexive ('Am I afraid that if I let the words leak out, they'll mix with oxygen and become prose?') as Rickerby draws on the intensity, symbolism and layering of poetic form, using poetry as a space of exploration of ideas, of thinking, of essaying.

George Eliot: a life

A deconstructed biography

1.	The year of her birth, and the other
1.1.	Towards the end of 1819 – on the 22nd of November – Mary Anne Evans was born. 1819 is a very satisfying year, the most satisfying of the century; synonymous with orderly progress, like 1516, for example, or 2021. Others who were born in this illustrious year included art critic John Ruskin, composer Clara Schumann, poet Walt Whitman, novelist and sometime whaler Herman Melville; and, towering over them all, casting a shadow across the whole era with her name, was Princess Alexandrina: better known as Queen Victoria. Also in this year an English trading settlement was established in Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles, who we now know of only thanks to his eponymous hotel. Spain ceded Florida to the United States, and Alabama became the twenty-second state. Fifteen people were killed and more than 600 injured in the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, when cavalry charged at a crowd of more than 60,000 who had gathered to demand reform of parliamentary representation. The year is immortalised by Percy Bysshe Shelley in a political sonnet ‘England in 1819’ (unpublished until 1839, after his death), which paints a rather unflattering picture of the time: with a mad, dying, leech-like king, a corrupt army and Christless religion. John Keats gives up medicine for poetry, meets Fanny Brawne, the love of his life, and has his most poetically productive year. The Burlington Arcade, a shopping complex, opens in London (in which, in a tiny bookshop many years hence, our heroine will meet her match).
1.2.	1880 was a leap year. A general election is held in the United Kingdom; the Liberals beat the Conservatives and William Gladstone becomes prime minister for a second time. The Great Fog engulfs London for months. The University of London awards the first degrees to women in England. Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance opens. The first electric streetlights are installed in Indiana. France annexes Tahiti. The First Boer War begins in Transvaal; the second Anglo–Afghan war rolls on. Cologne Cathedral is finally completed, 632 years after construction began. Greenwich Mean Time is adopted throughout Great Britain. Sixty-two coal miners die in a firedamp explosion in North Staffordshire, another 120 die in Monmouthshire, 164 in County Durham, 100 in Penygraig. Bushranger and folk hero Ned Kelly is hanged in Melbourne. In May, Marian Evans, writer, married John Cross, banker. On the 22nd of December George Eliot dies.
2.	On her names
2.1.	She started life as Mary Anne Evans, as christened by her father, one Robert Evans, land agent, and his wife, Christiana.
2.2.	At some point before 1837 she dropped an ‘e’ from her name, becoming instead Mary Ann Evans. It is possible the extra ‘e’ on Anne seemed to her an unnecessary flourish; she was, at that time, going through a particularly puritan phase. This version of her name first appears on the register for her sister’s wedding, and so perhaps marks a new period of her life.
2.3.	In letters to certain friends she signed herself ‘Polly’, the name by which they knew her. Apparently Polly is a diminutive of Mary, which seems rather ridiculous until you learn it is by way of Molly. Her close friend Sara Hennell began calling her ‘Pollian’ – a play on Apollyon, the name of the monster in Revelations (in Greek anyway – in Hebrew it’s Abaddon), who also appears in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Why a friend would want to compare her to a ‘foul fiend’ I am not quite sure, and whether in jest or cruelty; but, by all reports, she was very badly dressed for most of her life, especially during her puritan years.
2.4.	She was known to call herself ‘Medusa’. I guess that’s OK, in the way it’s OK for you to insult your own home town, but are upset when anyone else does.
2.5.	Another name she used for letter-writing purposes – in those days between school and marriage, when letters are the lifeline of a young woman smothered by the duties of home and family – was ‘Clematis’, which, in the language of flowers, means mental beauty. Her former teacher, Miss Lewis, was dubbed ‘Veronica’, for fidelity in friendship; while another friend, Martha, got to be ‘Ivy’, for constancy. I may be wrong in assuming that it was Mary Ann who got to assign the flower names, but it has her fingerprints all over it.
2.6.	After her father died, Mary Ann lived for a time in Geneva with the D’Albert Durade family. She came to address Mme D’Albert Durade as ‘Maman’, Mamma, and became like one of the family: ‘and I am baby enough to find that a great addition to my happiness’. The D’Albert Durades called her ‘Minie’.
2.7.	In 1851, when she left provincial Warwickshire for London, she marked the transition by again altering her name – this time to Marian, which seems to me a bit sterner than Mary Ann, and perhaps sterner stuff is what she needed for this new city.
2.8.	In the unlikely – OK, impossible – event that we should ever meet, not only would I be flummoxed about what name to use to address her, I am not at all sure we would get along. (I fear she would think me too frivolous, and I might find her a condescending know-it-all.) I have long suspected that might be the case with all my literary heroes: Sylvia Plath, Katherine Mansfield, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, to name just a few. Perhaps this is why, when I had an opportunity to meet, and have my books signed by, Margaret Atwood, to whom I devoted several years of my life and a master’s thesis, I decided to not join the queue.
2.9.	When she started living with George Lewes, despite the fact that they did not and could not marry, not in a legal sense anyway, Marian began signing herself as ‘Marian Evans Lewes’. As far as she was concerned, they were married in the ways that mattered, and, besides, it helped enormously with landladies.
2.10.	Marian isn’t just a more plain spelling of Mary Ann (and Mary Anne), it also denotes being of or related to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, the mother of Christ, the Madonna (as opposed to the other). Marian, surrounded by (almost always only male) admirers at the Sunday afternoon salons she and Lewes held in their home, did apparently rather resemble the Queen of Heaven; and perhaps that is why Lewes took to sometimes calling her ‘Madonna’. (We can safely assume that it had nothing to do with the never-aging pop star of our own time.)
2.11.	But mainly he seems to have called her ‘Polly’ (refer 2.3. above).
2.12.	We know her by the name we know her because we really only know her because of her words. But she didn’t take it up immediately. Her first published fiction, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’, was published anonymously, and her publisher John Blackwood, who did not yet know the author’s identity, resorted to calling her ‘the Author of Amos Barton’.
2.13.	She knew, given her circumstances – a woman living with a man who was not her husband (and in fact was, legally at any rate, someone else’s) – she must not write as herself, or at least not under her own name. We also shouldn’t underestimate the advantage one can gain when wearing not only a mask, but a male mask. She told John Cross she chose it because ‘George was Mr Lewes’s Christian name, and Eliot was a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.’ It has been suggested that the surname, as well as the first, honours her beloved partner: ‘To L---- I owe it.’
2.14.	Despite ‘Marian’, despite ‘George’, she still had some need for Mary Ann, because in his will George Lewes left everything (except the copyright of his works, which he left to his surviving son) to ‘Mary Ann Evans, spinster’.
2.15.	Following Lewes’s death she was finally able to, or rather had to, take his name – cha...