No single fact can ever define us - two strong women

Another two short stories from Philip Hensher's anthology bit the dust today; both by women whose long lives straddled the turn of 18th and 19th Centuries, both of whom experienced mental breakdown, both of whom survived their traumas to write.

Hannah More by Henry Pickersgill

Hannah Moore was born in 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion.  She wrote plays, poems and short stories such as the morality tale, Betty Bridges, the St. Giles's Orange Girl.  It's too easy to observe that such a one-dimensional tale of the moral improvement made possible through hard work, thrift, respect for God's laws and the beneficent power of the philanthropic middle-classes could not be written today.  But it's just as true that Miss More wrote her short, unmistakably 'Dickensian' fable three years before the great chronicler of London's poor was born.  Hannah was a leader of the Bluestocking group (maybe not proto-feminist but certainly supportive of educated, intellectual, socially-conscious and engaged women).  And when it came to the great cause of her day - the abolition of the slave trade - Hannah More was on the right side of history.

Mary Lamb

Mary Lamb was born twenty years after Hannah More and lived to the middle of the 19th Century.  What sorts of changes must these two women have seen in their lives, each of more than eight decades?  It was an era of enormous change in the structure, economy, society of Great Britain - the great age of the industrial revolution that made Victorian Britain the largest Empire the world had ever known.  Where Hannah More's story centred on the misfortunes of the urban poor and the reforming efficacy of the emergent middle-class, Mary Lamb's nostalgic rumination on childhood, The Farm House, harked back, I think, to fabrications of a lost (perhaps never-existed) agrarian idyll. I was startled, then, to discover that aged 32 Mary Lamb stabbed to death her mother who was sitting at their dinner table.  Mary was convicted of lunacy, spending short periods in institutions throughout the rest of her life.  She and her brother Charles were, however, fully engaged members of London's literary life.