An Independent Woman, The Autobiography of Edith Guerrier

An archivist pal asked if I was any relation of Edith Guerrier (1870-1958), the subject of Tirzah Frank’s fascinating “The ‘Boston Marriage’ of Edith Guerrier and Edith Brown”.

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 and the siege of Fort Wagner, and was,

“wounded at Gaines Mill and captured. For six weeks he had lain in Libby Prison, an experience he refused to talk about.” (p. 81)

Edith is sure that this, and other aspects of his war service, ruined his health. Even so, on 2 September 1867, he married Emma Ricketson, the daughter of an abolitionist, who died of tuberculosis when their daughter Edith was three.

Edith says her father was keen that she learn French (but that she never had much success). 

“It may have been because of our French ancestry, and because our name, which according to the family legend was given by a French king to a distant ancestor for prowess on the battlefield.” (p. 59)

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.

Slave I

The Dr and I went to see Amazing Grace last night, the biopic of William Wilberforce. The performances are excellent, there are some good gags, and it looks sumptuous and real. I was especially impressed with shots of a Thames clogged with 18th century shipping.

It is, though, a bit chocolate-boxy, with the very perfect Wilber not merely giving his all for the slaves, but also inventing the GCSE, women’s suffrage and modern geology. He talks at one point of the healing waters from a spring having “waited for a million years”. Er, surely his own religious convictions would have stopped him from so brilliantly pre-empting Lyell (who was only born the same year as the film opens on).

The film packs in the historical figures who knew and influenced Wilbur: John Newton, Pitt the Younger, Thomas Clarkson, Lords Grenville and Fox and (the only black speaking part in the film) Olaudah Equiano. The script also works hard to explain the context: that many working class people lived brutal and impoverished lives; that there was no money for war veterans or other social causes; that whole cities had been built on slavery; that with America and France in revolution, a “popular” movement could be seen as seditious.

Much of this is described rather than seen, so apart from a few city street scenes the film always looks immaculate and tidy. Evidence of the horrors of slavery is also kept to descriptions of witnesses, rather than being enacted on screen. Wilberforce sees a few opiate visions, but mostly it’s what people say.

This is, of course, as was with the case the abolitionists made to Parliament. Yet I felt the film was somehow pulling its punches. The Roots TV series, which we’ve also been watching, is much more explicitly graphic, and I think more effective.

Yet it’s not as if there are loads of films made on the subject, and it’s not a bad film by any means. Though it certainly doesn’t suggest it was easy for Wilberforce to get the slave trade abolished in the British Empire (on 25 March 1807), it does rather simplify the story.

Slavery itself was not banned in the Empire until 1834 (after Wilberforce was dead). In the independent United States it continued until after their vicious civil war. No mention is made of that – indeed, the US is spoken of only with whispered excitement as a contagious hotbed of freedom and liberty.

The banning of the trade did eventually lead to the banning of slavery itself, and because existing slaves could not be replaced it can be argued that they were better treated in the intervening period. Yet indenture remained as slavery in all but name well into the twentieth century, and slavery continued in many countries until the end of the nineteenth. Slavery in various forms still exists today.

There’s a whole heap of events and stuff commemorating abolition this year, and I’ve had fun going through all the links there to glean yet more top facts:

“The surgeon on HMS Sybille , Robert McKinnal, took drastic action when a seaman went down with yellow fever, to convince his fellows that it was not contagious. One of the symptoms of yellow fever is black vomit, and McKinnal, on deck and in sight of the crew, drank off a glassful.”

Royal Navy, “Boredom, boat service and the black vomit”.

ETA: No sooner have I posted than I notice this feature on the emphasis of the commemoration on the BBC news site. Ng. Always behind the tide, me. Get there eventually.