Kate Field: A great important American woman journalist -- and Anthony Trollope's love

[misssylviadrake]

Dear friends and readers,

I've just finished reading Lilian Whiting's Kate Field:  A Record, a thickish book during the day, partly in response to reading Robert Polhemus's essay in the volume I'm reviewing on two stories by Anthony Trollope (Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope), and partly because Kate Field is an important 19th century figure

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Her tone of mind and values

[misssylviadrake]

Here is an excerpt from one of Kate Field's letters where she outlines her basic attitude towards achievement, ambition, and art in life to give a sense of her tone of mind. Someone had written her telling her she should concentrate on one area of knowledge and she should try to write a great work such that people would (at least profess to) admire it and her. She is wasting herself by her different projects and getting involved in all these movements.

So she wrote:

If anybody is clever enough to tell me what is surely lasting I'd like to know out of curiosity. A few beings in this world have written what all the centuries desire to read: Homer, Virgil, Goethe, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, Tasso, and half-a dozen other geniuses [note the lack of women, this in 1890] constitute what to my mind is ' lasting' in literature. What difference does it make whether we are remembered or not? The ambition that thirsts for praise is, in my opinion, beneath contempt. Shakespeare wrote plays for his theatre because he was impelled to write them, and not because of posterity, - an animal I'll wager he never dreamed of. The only noble ambition is the desire to be fully one's self, to act out one's whole nature; and if that nature leads one into more than one path, I see no reason to wail. If by walking a tow-path a man or woman does one thing that is remembered twenty years longer than the varied work of a human being who has had the pleasure of many experiences and the expansion and friendships and loves that come with these experiences, I personally see no gain to the individual, - au contraire. But I deny that versatility must necessarily be shallow. The trouble is not on account of superficiality, but because of the want of time to carry out many ideas. But what of that? Have we not all eternity before us? - if there be another life, as I believe. We learn our lessons here to begin a broad career hereafter, and - the one idea'd person may find him­self obliged to go to school again in another world before taking his degree. My dear friend, Americans are the least tolerant of ' versatility' of any people on earth, and it is probably due to the hardness of life in a new world. It requires so much exhausting work to make a living at one thing that half-educated souls can't believe in the sound­ness of those who turn from one art or profession to another
in sympathy with it. And yet Americans contradict themselves by being a doctor one year and a merchant the next; a banker one day and a diplomatist the day after; a soldier for five years and a lawyer forever after, until the speculator supplants both. The trouble with most critics "­that they are led by early prejudices and not by reason."

A little later: she was accused of being helped in writing (having people write it for her, very common accusation against women) when a piece was particularly eloquent:

As to being helped in writing, I'm almost sure of it. never know in advance what I'm going to say. In fact I approach every subject with fear and trembling, and am always astounded when anything comes. Inspiration means something or nothing. If it means something, it means that a spiritual influence obsesses the mortal intel­lect. It always seems to me idiotic for people to be conceited abont their own achievements, when so much is due to unknown influences ...

(from Lilian Whiting: Kate Field, A Record, pp. 563=64).