Did Women Do Things Like That?

Some people have told me that they like my character, Liberty Lane, but doubt whether a young woman would have so much freedom to travel and make her own decisions in the nineteenth century. Although her education has been ladylike on the whole she knows what it's like to go hungry, to have to sell jewellery in a pawn shop or twist stockings round to hide holes in the toes. Is her self-reliance a historical anachronism?

I think that's a question more likely to be asked in Europe than the United States, where the enterprise and toughness of women in building a new nation are accepted as part of the national identity. But even in Britain, the evidence for the existence of strong-minded and independent women of all ages and classes is there in all periods of history. We've maybe been too ready to accept a picture of the nineteenth century young woman as a sheltered flower. Working class women had no choice – they had to earn a living, sometimes in dangerous or unpleasant circumstances. You couldn't walk more than a few hundred yards on the streets of Victorian London without rubbing shoulders with girls going to work in millinery factories, women selling potatoes and pies, keepers of lodging houses whether respectable or otherwise, prostitutes and women pickpockets. In Covent Garden market, some of the porters carrying towers of fruit baskets on their heads were women. In the country, women were as likely as men to be labouring in the fields.

Even those in the higher social classes could find themselves bereaved or deserted, with only their own efforts to rely on. Many became governesses. A lucky few earned livings as novelists and even journalists. Mrs Frances Trollope, saddled with six children and a financial failure of a husband, took herself across the Atlantic and wrote a best-selling book called "The Domestic Manners of the Americans." It offended an entire continent but her children ate. (One of them grew up to be the novelist, Anthony Trollope.) Women sang and danced on the stage and sometimes commanded very high fees. Some women, with no financial needs, pushed the barriers of convention from simple love of adventure or intellectual curiosity. Lady Hester Stanhope acted dutifully as hostess at 10 Downing Street for her uncle the prime minister William Pitt, then spent the rest of her life travelling in the Middle East. A young Scottish naval officer's daughter named Mary Somerville was shown a ladies' magazine at a tea party. Her hostess expected her to take an interest in the engravings of the latest fashions. Instead, she was intrigued by some "strange looking lines mixed with letters" on a puzzle page. "It's a kind of arithmetic", her hostess said. "They call it algebra; but I can tell you nothing about it." So Mary insisted on teaching herself algebra and became one of the most famous mathmeticians and astronomers of the nineteenth century.

My Liberty may have been unusual in her enterprise and self reliance, but she certainly wasn't unique.

An adventure of historic proportions. A Foreign Affair is a featured book in Fictions Readers, a group to discuss contemporary women's fiction, books, women's issues and much more. Click here to join the group.

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