I’d not heard of her before but, looking up details, Edith’s great-grandfather was George Guerrier (1771-1824), my direct ancestor — my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. My grandfather’s grandfather, William George Guerrier (1827-1920) was the cousin of Edith’s father, George.
Edith wrote an autobiography under the title A Little Woman of New England, which was published as An Independent Woman in 1992. It’s about how, from modest beginnings, she set up a series of clubs for girls, largely from Italian and Jewish immigrant families. That leads to a long career with Boston Library, included a nine-year campaign to get a Bill passed into law. She meets various famous people such as Louisa May Alcott (hence the original title of this autobiography) and some US politicians who would later be president. It’s an evocative story and full of great historical detail.
There’s not a lot of detail about her 40-year relationship with Edith Brown, though a couple of things, I think, are telling.
The first meeting with Edith Brown and their setting up home together are described in a chapter titled “A Single Woman”. They’re clearly a close partnership from the off, a duo. In that sense, at least, Edith Guerrier isn’t single. The title is consciously ironic.
Then there’s the following comment towards the end of the book, where Edith Guerrier speaks of her retirement from Boston City Library, mandated when she turns 70:
“In looking ahead, all my plans had been made with regard to the things my dearly beloved comrade and I would do together, but before time came Edith had passed into the next life. After nearly forty years of closest companionship I was left to face retirement alone, never doubting, however, that she still lived vitally and radiantly beyond this bourne of Time and Place.” (p. 127)
Otherwise, there’s not much on the Ediths’ relationship. We hear of their holidays — to Italy, to Amsterdam and Switzerland, an evocative trip to post-war Ypres in 1922 and then England. We learn how these trips inspired their work back in the US, such as in setting up a pottery. But Edith Brown, who went on these trips and led some of the work that followed, is an almost ghostly presence in the text.
Edith Guerrier names lots of different people: her various relatives, the famous people she encountered, a range of people she worked with or who supported her work. But she is discreet about Edith Brown. And she also, notably I think, doesn’t name the female school friends she went to stay with in her teens, or the cowgirl she once ran away with on a “marauding expedition”.
“I had practically no companions and I longed to become acquainted with a girl about my own age who bought our milk from her father’s ranch several miles out on the high prairie … I had made up my mind that it would be a good thing to see the cowgirl’s ranch and I wished nothing to interfere with the plan.” (p. 45)
It is all, I think, suggestive.
Edith Guerrier is much more interested in demonstrating the impact of a little time and investment on those who don’t have much. We see the impact on her of earning six dollars a week rather than three, and of the $300 she is somehow awarded as compensation for the loss of her great-great grandfather’s ship in the War of 1812 (p. 75). Inheritance, patronage and government grants have a transformative impact on her and her community.
There’s something, too, about the indirect impact of this kind of initiative. They hoped, for example, that the pottery would make some money. However,
“We learned many useful facts about pottery making and became convinced that the leisurely product of a studio demands rather than provides a steady income.” (p. 96)
But that doesn’t mean it failed.
Annoyingly for my purposes, editor Mary Matson says in her preface,
“I have made excisions. I have omitted her discursively genealogical ‘Part 1’ on the history of her forbears, while making liberal use of the material in my own introduction.” (p. xx)
According to a written account by Edith’s father, the Guerriers are "of Huguenot descent, one of a body settling on the banks of the Thames about 1685.” (p. xxviii). That matches what I’d learned elsewhere, with the first Guerrier, Jean, arriving at the Huguenot church on Threadneedle Street in London on 6 December 1677.
Again according to Edith’s father, her great-grandfather George (my direct ancestor).
“was a farmer on the Isle of Dogs, and when he died he left considerable property, but [his son, Edith’s grandfather] Samuel Guerrier’s portion of the inheritance was swallowed up in an unsuccessful book publishing enterprise. He pursued clerical occupations, having but a precarious subsistence through many years and finally died in the care of my half-brother Will Guerrier at an advanced age.” (Ibid).
This Will Guerrier (1795-1850) is another of my direct ancestors.
Samuel’s son George (1837-1911), had been a freight clerk when he visited a panorama (presumably in London) showing a rather fanciful view of Mississippi, complete with monkeys. This inspired him to emigrate to the US at the age of 19, in 1856 (pp. 33-35). During the Civil War, he was Second Lieutenant of Coloured Infantry, and fought at Yorktown, Gaines’ Mill and the siege of Fort Wagner.
On 2 September 1867, he married Emma Ricketson, the daughter of an abolitionist, who died of tuberculosis when their daughter Edith was three.
I’d like to read more about Edith and her father’s accounts of their — and my — family history. And I wonder if, when the two Ediths were in London in 1922, they looked up some of her relatives there. Her father’s cousin, William George Guerrier, died in 1920, but his son and nine year-old grandson were there.
That grandson was my grandfather. And I wonder if, just possibly, that man I knew once met Edith.
No comments:
Post a Comment