Foiled Creative Fire

A study of remarkable women with breast cancer

Heather Goodare

• Publisher: Ashwood Publishing
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780987411167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: General Health

After her own experience of breast cancer, Heather Goodare began to explore the connection between traumatic life events, depression and anxiety, and breast cancer in the lives of famous women in history.

From Anne of Austria (1601-1666) to Audre Lourde (1934-1992), the author found repeated instances of this same pattern of trauma, followed by depression, followed by cancer.

The book includes stories of women who experienced breast cancer at times when modern medicine was not available to help: in spite of this, several of the women recovered well and went on to live productive lives. One was the novelist Fanny Burney, whose mastectomy was performed by Napoleon's best surgeon; the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell was another. In these two cases their creative fire was not foiled: they both went on to do more admirable work. The feminist theme of restrictions on women's use of their talents is another major theme in the book. The author argues that there is a connection between foiled creative expression and poor health outcomes and advocates strongly for a holistic approach to breast cancer treatment.

This book will be of interest to members of the general public who have experienced cancer, together with their doctors and nurses, and academics working in the field of cancer and the mind. It is unique in its approach to the subject.

Joan Eardley

Like Kathleen Ferrier, Joan Eardley died at the height of a creative career. She was the first child of Captain William Eardley, who was billeted in Glasgow during his army service in the First World War, and met his Scottish wife there: Irena Morrison. Joan was born in 1921, not in Scotland but on a dairy farm in Warnham, near Horsham in West Sussex, where her parents struggled to make ends meet and finally gave up. Her father gained employment in the Ministry of Agriculture in Lincoln, but was still suffering from the late effects of being gassed in the trenches, and in deep depression committed suicide in 1929.

When this happened Joan was only eight, her sister Patricia six. (Joan too was to experience depression in later life.) Her mother had already moved the family to Blackheath, near Greenwich Park in London, to join her own mother and her sister Sybil, a leading light in the women’s rights movement. Great aunts visited, and Joan went to a private school, paid for by the aunts, where her growing talent for art was encouraged. On leaving school she spent two terms at an art school in Blackheath, and then another two at Goldsmith’s College of Art. Late in 1939, to avoid the threatened London bombing, the family moved again to Glasgow, and Joan continued her education at the Glasgow School of Art, where the staff were few owing to the war, and materials were in short supply.

Joan made a special friend of a fellow student, Margot Sandeman. She was lucky to have Hugh Adam Crawford as her teacher of drawing and painting. Interestingly, he talks about an artist needing to break down the typical Scottish inhibition:

If you want to be a good painter, and I mean one who matters beyond the ordinary kind of success with people around you, you have to be prepared to break down some kind of barrier within yourself. In Scotland we are all born with a constraint of this kind — we get it with our mother’s milk. Somehow we have to enter into another plane of living, to break through, or away from, Scottish morality — the vulgar idea of Godliness. There can’t be any ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘yes’ or ‘no’. You have to accept that there’s a kind of necessity before which everything has to go down.¹

Little of Joan’s work from this period survives, an exception being her diploma self-portrait, which was actually bought by Crawford himself. The work also won her the Sir James Guthrie Prize for portraiture.

Her home was in the Bearsden district of Glasgow, near the countryside, and she explored the West Highland Way, the Isle of Arran, and Loch Lomond, with Margot Sandeman. During the Second World War young women were required either to train as teachers or to be called up for the services. Although Joan did enrol at Jordanhill Teacher Training College, she decided to quit teaching in favour of a ‘reserved’ occupation as a joiner’s labourer in a boat-building yard. At the same time she continued painting. Works from this period include The Mixer Men: two workmen with a cement mixer. Her ‘war work’ included painting camouflage on boat hulls. She was also sending paintings to exhibitions in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Margot moved to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire to work as a code-breaker during the war, and Joan visited her there.

After the war Joan moved to London, where she was very short of money, but managed somehow. Although London was exciting in many ways, Joan was also homesick, and had depressive episodes. She wrote: ‘…a terrible helpless hopeless feeling has come upon me — everything seems to be such a dreadful unending struggle.’² But she showed paintings in various exhibitions, including a West of Scotland show of young artists. She was elected a member of the Scottish Artists in 1948, and the Glasgow Herald wrote:

Among the West of Scotland painters Joan Eardley, with two large interiors, hinting at both Gilman and the Colquhoun-MacBride [MacBryde] school, is noteworthy. There is a certain dusky confusion about both works but the colour is bold and the drawing strong and personal.³

But Joan herself, when she saw this, commented to Margot:

It’s really a terrific joke the funny things that are about you in the paper — you a pseudo classical & me with works hinting at Gilman & Colquhoun & McBride [MacBryde] — people I have never even thought of when I’ve been painting. If they said Gauguin they might have been a bit nearer!⁴

Joan was encouraged by her mother to apply for a place at the Hospitalfield School of Art, in a large house near Arbroath, which ran a post-graduate summer school. She made many drawings and paintings locally, especially of Arbroath Harbour, but was not allowed to paint the interior of the magnificent house with its stock of antique treasures. While at Hospitalfield Joan made friends with Angus Neil, a joiner-cum-painter: the relationship grew into something like that between an older sister and younger brother (he was three years younger). He was lonely (as was she) and had mental problems: to some extent Joan looked after him, though he also modelled for her a good deal.

The warden of Hospitalfield, James Cowie RSA, had a very prescriptive view of art that cut across Joan’s perspective, but they managed to work together all the same, and she was offered a post-graduate year at the Glasgow School of Art, after which she won two scholarships that enabled her to work for several months in France and Italy.

While abroad Joan wrote to her friend Margot and her mother about her experiences in Italy, with great enthusiasm but also recounting periods of depression. These were to recur during the rest of her life. In Italy she reflected on the difference in the effect of sunlight between south and north:

…here, in this southern climate, the brilliant sun shining down upon the dusty white earth is reflected back so that t...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Anne of Austria, Queen of France (1601–1666: 1664)
• Soeur Marie Barbier de l’Assomption (1640–1739: 1700)
• Fanny Burney (1752–1840: 1810)
• Christina Rossetti (1830–1894: 1892)
• Princess Victoria, the Empress Friedrich III (1840–1901: 1898)
• Kate Greenaway (1846–1901: 1899)
• Vanessa Bell (1879–1961: 1944)
• Rachel Carson (1907–1964: 1960)
• Kathleen Ferrier (1912–1953: 1951)
• Joan Eardley (1921–1963: 1963)
• Susan Sontag (1933–2004: 1975)
• Audre Lorde (1934–1992: 1980)
• Conclusions
• Heather Goodare: biographical note
• Picture Credits