Mary Taylor (1) (1817–1893)
Auteur de Miss Miles: or, A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago
Pour les autres auteurs qui s'appellent Mary Taylor, voyez la page de désambigüisation.
Œuvres de Mary Taylor
Swiss Notes by Five Ladies 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1817-02-26
- Date de décès
- 1893-03-01
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- UK
- Lieu de naissance
- Birstall, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Lieu du décès
- Gomersal, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Lieux de résidence
- Wellington, New Zealand
Gomersal, Yorkshire, England, UK
Wanganui, New Zealand - Études
- Roe Head, Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Professions
- shop owner
novelist - Relations
- Bronte, Charlotte (friend)
- Courte biographie
- Mary Taylor was born in Birstall, in West Yorkshire, England and raised in Gomersal. With her younger sister Martha, she was sent as a boarder to Roe Head School, Mirfield, a few miles from home, where she met fellow pupil Charlotte Brontë in 1831. She was a year younger than Charlotte, but more daring and confident, and the girls became lifelong friends and correspondents. Charlotte Brontë portrayed Mary's family in her 1849 novel Shirley, and based the character of Rose Yorke on her friend. Mary's father died in 1840, leaving extensive debts, and she decided to emigrate to New Zealand. She spent a few years studying music, French and German, and teaching in Germany and Belgium, before joining her brother William in New Zealand in 1845. She and her cousin Ellen Taylor, who went out to New Zealand to be with her, started a draper's shop, and also traded in wool and cattle. When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, Mary sent Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend and biographer, a long, lively account of their friendship, which Mrs. Gaskell relied on for her book The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). In 1860, Mary returned to England, living in Yorkshire for the rest of her life. It was during this period of her life that she became a writer. Between 1865 and 1870, she published a series of articles in the Victoria Magazine, which were collected into a book, The First Duty of Women (1870). With four other women, she wrote Swiss Notes by Five Ladies (1875). Her novel Miss Miles or a Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago (1890), about several young women who struggle to find independence and happiness, was self-published when she was 73 years old.
Membres
Critiques
Interesting piece of Brontëana but not recommended unless you know a good bit of Charlotte Brontë's biography. Mary Taylor was (with Ellen Nussey) one of Charlotte's two BFFs from Roe Head (Charlotte's second boarding school, not to be confused with Cowan Bridge, the model for Jane Eyre's Lowood Institute). The Taylor family was memorialized as the Yorke family in Shirley, with Mary as Rose Yorke.
Interesting . . . in the way that Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is interesting, though I personally find Taylor's First Duty a more readable book than Wollstonecraft's Vindication.
Mary Taylor, best known as (along with Ellen Nussey) one of Charlotte Bronte's two BFFs from school days, was the adventuresome among the three, having emigrated to New Zealand, earned sufficient wealth from a general store to become financially independent, and then having returned to England to take up feminist causes. The "first duty of women"? To earn money, which would secure the woman's financial independence from family and from men – a realistic goal in the pre-suffragist period.
The First Duty of Women was published as a series of essays from 1865 to 1870 in Emily Faithfull's "Victoria Magazine" and then reprinted by Faithfull in book form in 1870. First read Taylor's novel, Miss Miles (personally, I think, a far better read than George Gissing's similarly-themed The Odd Women), but then, as a matter of curiosity, read The First Duty of Women for its parallel-track to the themes of Miss Miles.
Taylor wouldn't be read today were it not for her far more famous BFF, Charlotte Bronte, but Taylor's novel Miss Miles is an interesting piece of Bronteana and The First Duty of Women is an interesting follow-up to Miss Miles.
The First Duty of Women is available in "publish on demand" format, but you can find it for free on Google Books and the POD publications seem just to be a copying of the Google Books PDF.
And see also
Mary Taylor, best known as (along with Ellen Nussey) one of Charlotte Bronte's two BFFs from school days, was the adventuresome among the three, having emigrated to New Zealand, earned sufficient wealth from a general store to become financially independent, and then having returned to England to take up feminist causes. The "first duty of women"? To earn money, which would secure the woman's financial independence from family and from men – a realistic goal in the pre-suffragist period.
The First Duty of Women was published as a series of essays from 1865 to 1870 in Emily Faithfull's "Victoria Magazine" and then reprinted by Faithfull in book form in 1870. First read Taylor's novel, Miss Miles (personally, I think, a far better read than George Gissing's similarly-themed The Odd Women), but then, as a matter of curiosity, read The First Duty of Women for its parallel-track to the themes of Miss Miles.
Taylor wouldn't be read today were it not for her far more famous BFF, Charlotte Bronte, but Taylor's novel Miss Miles is an interesting piece of Bronteana and The First Duty of Women is an interesting follow-up to Miss Miles.
The First Duty of Women is available in "publish on demand" format, but you can find it for free on Google Books and the POD publications seem just to be a copying of the Google Books PDF.
And see also
- Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Bronte: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere
- and Taylor's Swiss Notes by Five Ladies.
1 
CurrerBell | Nov 18, 2015 |
CurrerBell | Nov 18, 2015 | Mary Taylor was, with Ellen Nussey, one of Charlotte Brontë's two BFFs from boarding school days at Margaret Wooler's school at Roe Head (which is not to be confused with Charlotte's earlier boarding school, the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, which is the model for Jane Eyre's Lowood Institute). Mary Taylor was also the model for the character of Rose Yorke in Charlotte's novel Shirley.
The adventuresome one of the three friends, Mary Taylor traveled through Europe (and was responsible for encouraging Charlotte's trip to study French in Brussels, the basis for Villette). Subsequently, Taylor emigrated to New Zealand, where she "earned her fortune" operating a general store so that she was able to return to England and pursue feminist causes and writing.
Swiss Notes by Five Ladies is a travel story of a tour of the Swiss Alps by the older Mary Taylor and by four younger women who accompany her in the early 1870s. The book was published in Leeds by Inchbold & Beck and is available in PDF download from Google Books and has also been reprinted (presumably from the PDF file) in publish-on-demand available from various publishers on AbeBooks.
It's a pity that Virago Press has not republished this lost-and-forgotten classic of women's travel literature. Though Mary Taylor would not be remembered today were it not for the Brontë connection, her novel, Miss Miles, is in my opinion a better novel than George Gissing's better-known and similarly themed The Odd Women. Swiss Notes, a more light-hearted work, is a charming piece (apparently multiply authored by Taylor and her four companions) and might well be worth a Virago republication, perhaps in a twofer volume accompanied by Taylor's similarly unavailable (except in Google Books and publish-on-demand) collection of feminist essays The First Duty of Women.… (plus d'informations)
The adventuresome one of the three friends, Mary Taylor traveled through Europe (and was responsible for encouraging Charlotte's trip to study French in Brussels, the basis for Villette). Subsequently, Taylor emigrated to New Zealand, where she "earned her fortune" operating a general store so that she was able to return to England and pursue feminist causes and writing.
Swiss Notes by Five Ladies is a travel story of a tour of the Swiss Alps by the older Mary Taylor and by four younger women who accompany her in the early 1870s. The book was published in Leeds by Inchbold & Beck and is available in PDF download from Google Books and has also been reprinted (presumably from the PDF file) in publish-on-demand available from various publishers on AbeBooks.
It's a pity that Virago Press has not republished this lost-and-forgotten classic of women's travel literature. Though Mary Taylor would not be remembered today were it not for the Brontë connection, her novel, Miss Miles, is in my opinion a better novel than George Gissing's better-known and similarly themed The Odd Women. Swiss Notes, a more light-hearted work, is a charming piece (apparently multiply authored by Taylor and her four companions) and might well be worth a Virago republication, perhaps in a twofer volume accompanied by Taylor's similarly unavailable (except in Google Books and publish-on-demand) collection of feminist essays The First Duty of Women.… (plus d'informations)
1 CurrerBell | Sep 25, 2015 |
CurrerBell | Sep 25, 2015 | Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 4
- Membres
- 59
- Popularité
- #280,813
- Évaluation
- 3.4
- Critiques
- 6
- ISBN
- 29
What would they do?
This book explores that question by telling the stories of several women in the vicinity of one Yorkshire village. One of them, the eponymous Miss Miles (Sarah), is working-class and spends her entire youth wondering what it is that enables "ladies" to have so much money and a better life. She's just sure that there must be something they've learned or something they know how to do, that lets them earn their way into that life. She can't understand the doctrine of helpless subordination being enough to get you the good life, because it doesn't really make sense. At least not to her "upright and downright" mind.
Others, like Dora Wells and Maria Bell, struggle with the weight of how to live in a socially acceptable way when they have no male protector. They are told time and again, in a crushing repetition, to wait, not to take any action, but wait, wait, wait, because something will surely turn up. This theme is repeated in variations with other characters too.
Well, I'm pretty sure these women would accept "something" if it turned up, but it doesn't. So what else can they do but act?
This book is a spirited defense of a woman's right to provide for herself honestly, to know her own business affairs, and to be taken seriously by men as a fellow creature... not, for all practical purposes, an infant.
The theme of the novel can be seen in one climactic exchange of letters. When Maria is desperate to find some way to help a friend in need, her suitor worries that she will harm her own reputation. He calls her his dove, his flower, and tells her, like everyone else is saying to these women all the time, to Just. Wait.
Maria, who has no one else to turn to, weeps over his reaction and tells him, "Your white dove and white flower are merely decorations to hide fetters too heavy for me to bear. Offer me them no more, for I refuse to be helped on such terms."
This is a thought-provoking read. It feels innovative for its time, but it also feels sad that it was innovative, when you realize that Maria, and Dora, and Sarah, and others, are not propounding anything radical. They just want to be able to live. That's all. But they are trying to do it in a world that acknowledges that, yes, they have no other options, but still, they should... Wait.
______________________________
The book has some shortcomings... It has a few too many characters and you never quite get a grip on some of them. And the transcribed Yorkshire dialect of Sarah's storyline can be hard to follow, especially when important moments are happening.
It's interesting to read this with the Brontes in mind, as Mary Taylor was so close to them. She apparently had a lot of concern about what would become of Charlotte if she didn't get away from life at Haworth.
Knowing some of those biographical details drives home the point that women of this time were in a very real struggle for economic survival. It's why the classics (like Austen) are much more than romances. A lot was depending on their yes or no to a marriage proposal. So I would say this book helped to add a new layer of understanding to my reading of other 19th century works.… (plus d'informations)