Tag: Kathryn Ross Women Writers in History

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Literary Women in Histor

Beatrix Potter: When Trials Pave a Way to Destiny by Kathryn Ross

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you. Mine took me here, where I belong.
― Beatrix Potter

As a child, Beatrix Potter often wondered where she belonged. It would be many years and more than her fair share of trials before her life’s path brought her to where she belonged.

In keeping with the child rearing trends of the upwardly mobile classes in Victorian England, Beatrix’s parents entertained limited interaction with their children until they came of a civilized age. A nurse was tasked with the daily care of Beatrix and her younger brother, Bertram. In her teen years a governess appointed to mold the girl Beatrix into a lady became her companion, while Bertram went off to boarding school in the elementary years, to begin his grooming for the business world.

On any given evening, as a child, Beatrix would sit forlorn in the third-floor nursery of her family’s London townhouse. Nurse delivered dinner. Beatrix ate alone, as usual. After dinner, Beatrix would bathe and dress for bed before saying “goodnight” to Mr. and Mrs. Potter in the drawing room. Perhaps Mother would inquire about her studies under the tutelage of Nurse. The Potters did not approve of sending their daughter to school. It was inappropriate within their social circles. Father might ask if she sketched anything new that day. She would answer their questions with formal politeness, curtsy, and retire to bed. The next day would be much the same, providing little society other than interaction with the servants.

And Peter and Benjamin, of course.

They were rabbits, you know. Young Beatrix kept a virtual zoo of animals in her room—from mice to bats to the beloved pet rabbits who eventually became the inspiration for characters in her series of popular children’s stories. As an adult, these little books made her famous, a household name, and a woman of independent means by 1906.

But until her mid-30s, Beatrix was a woman of her age, living through a time of limited formal educational opportunities for women in all spheres of society. The upper classes were especially protective of daughters whose greatest aspiration was training to marry well and run a household commensurate with her husband’s social profile. However, the Potters were not eager to see their daughter marry once she came of age. Beatrix had become far too important to the smooth running of their household in the wake of an unending stream of chronic maladies. They had no desire to see their daughter live independent of them.

The trials of Beatrix’s repressive, stoic early years and early adulthood, raised in this controlling Victorian parenting regime, might have produced a bitter, unimaginative, rebellious woman. Certainly, by today’s standards, some might go so far as to accuse the Potters of child abuse and neglect.

But Beatrix used what freedoms she did have to escape and explore the glories of the flora and fauna—both in her own backyard, and for three months each year, the country estate grounds where the family took their summers. With an unlimited supply of writing and drawing instruments, Beatrix kept a daily journal of thoughts and observations on her excursions and the daily lives of all her pets. She filled pages with companion pencil and watercolor sketches of garden and wildlife. Her superior attention to detail regarding the flora, was countered with a whimsical capturing of animal life—suiting them up well in gaiters, waistcoats, aprons, and bonnets. Interacting with God’s creation cultivated her imagination, bringing balance to her otherwise dull lifestyle.

She could little imagine, though, how this personal passion and retreat in nature as a child would one day feed the childhood literary thirsts of millions around the world. Beatrix bore the prison of her daily routines with a quiet resolve to find a personal happy place to offset her responsibilities to her parents. In that place of ofttimes trial, a world of story, in word and illustration, birthed that captivated the imaginations of generations.

Beatrix Potter’s whimsical story world of talking animals, toys, and nursery rhymes, set in restful English country villages, remain a staple in children’s literature over a hundred years after they were inked. In her lifetime, she came to possess a substantial amount of farmland real estate in the Lake District of England from her earnings, purchasing dozens of ancient farms and woodland acreage. She rescued the land from corporate development that would have displaced the people and forever destroy the restful, idyllic landscape of the English countryside with industrial sprawl.

Upon her death in 1943, these preserved acres of land became the foundation of conservation in the National Trust, safeguarding their historical value, simple beauty, environmental wildlife, and the farm and village culture of the people whose families had lived there for centuries. In addition, she contributed to scientific journals with detailed illustrations for fungus studies, drawn from nature, and in her later years became a notable sheep farmer.

That’s quite a legacy for such a sheltered little Victorian girl. But that repressive soil fertilized her discovery of the only trail available to her from childhood. Trial in her life became a pathway guiding her to her ultimate destiny. Beatrix’s journals and letters leave hints as to how she chose to navigate her life to fulfill her place in the world with contentment, humility, and grace:

  • I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.

Write. Draw. With passion and resolve. Allow the cathartic nature of creativity to heal through your trials.

  • Thank goodness my education was neglected . . .Thank goodness I was never sent top school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Expand the liberating place of self-learning in your life. Own your education. Discover the world around you through self-driven study, observation, critical thought, and experiment to develop original ideas.

  • Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths and picked the old-fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

Cultivate your imagination regarding romantic ideals—perfect models of life, principles, and moral values that celebrate peace, goodness, and beauty (Philippians 4:8). Such things, presented whimsically in Miss Potter style, allow a place of escape for mind and heart in troublesome seasons. It also satisfies, to an extent, the desire to see paradigm ideals manifest in a story of substance. The Christian fiction writer understands this to be the seedbed of a story-world—creating place where the protagonist’s best outcomes might be realized, and readers might find something noble to ponder and relate to in their own lives.

  • Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.
    Live a self-disciplined life knowing that, no matter what, all things work together for good and trials can become the trails that lead you onto God’s purposes for your life.

What many people don’t know is that The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the classic that started it all, was actually a little story Beatrix wrote in a letter to the sick child of her former governess with whom she remained close. It was designed to cheer the little invalid and his siblings with a handful of illustrations and the familiar text we all remember of a very naughty rabbit who squeezes under the gate into Mr. MacGregor’s garden in clear defiance of his mother’s instructions. Encouragement to publish the work moved her to seek out a publisher, only to be turned away multiple times. She was a woman, after all. No matter, she would self-publish!

With some savings of her own, she financed the publication of 500 copies of the book with exact specifications through the Frederick Warne Company—the same company that still holds all the rights to Miss Potter’s work today. It sold out of the bookstore where it was placed in short order, smoothing the pathway for Beatrix to take her place as a shining star in children’s literature and illustration. Her legacy. Her destiny. Precisely where she belonged.

Journal Prompt: Make a list of painful periods in your life when you felt repressed or limited due to circumstances. Write down the life lesson you learned living through each season of trial. How have difficult times in your life informed your writing? How did a personal trial, setback, or disappointment become a pathway to greater things in your life? How have you used negative experiences to add dimension to plot or characters in your stories? Are you where you belong? Journal your answers.

TWEET: [bctt tweet=”#BeatrixPotter and Peter Rabbit, birthed out of repression and sickness. Happy endings to sad stories; how writers thrive in trial and limitations. @misskathypwp” username=”@A3writers @misskathypwp”]

TWEET:[bctt tweet=”#Women Writers in Life and Letters—Beatrix Potter: From Pain to Pen—When Trials Pave the Trail to a Life Destiny @misskathypwp” username=”@a3writers @misskathypwp”]

Recommended Reading: Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, by Linda Lear, © 2016 St. Martin’s Griffin

 Writer-speaker, Kathryn Ross, ignites a love of literature and learning through Pageant Wagon Productions and Publishing. She writes and publishes homeschool enrichment and Christian living books for home, church, and school. Her passion is to equip women and families in developing a Family Literacy Lifestyle, producing readers and thinkers who can engage the world from a biblical worldview. She blogs and podcasts at TheWritersReverie.com and PageantWagonPublishing.com. Connect with Miss Kathy on Facebook.

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Literary Women in Histor

Keen Eyes, Core Values, and Jane Austen’s Pen by Kathryn Ross

It is only a novel . . . or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen, not yet twenty years of age in the late 18th century, penned the novel, Northanger Abbey. The story explored how easily a young mind can be filled with nonsense and ignoble values through the reading of sensationalistic novels. Void of true substance and moral life values, books and stories like this have always been with us. Jane read them—pop literature—and learned early the emptiness of such works. Northanger Abbey’s heroine, Catherine Moreland, walks out in fiction the non-fiction life lessons Jane discovered in her youth regarding the power and value of literature in forming the mind and character.

Jane’s keen eye to identify the noble and ridiculous in her sphere of society and the culture of her day was a foundational asset to her writing life, and the ultimate contribution she made to classic literature. How was she groomed to hold this esteemed place among women writers in the world of Western prose?

Born in 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire in the English countryside, her lively Christian home of six brothers and one older sister filled her youth with creative stimulation and activity. Informed by academic and biblical faith habits, honed under the tutelage of her father, the parish rector of Steventon and headmaster of a boys school, her gifts for clever insight, wit, and writing were enjoyed and encouraged by her family. Many a night found them gathered to hear her read from one of her essays or short stories, sparking approving laughter and engaging conversation.

Eventually, with the aid of her older brother Henry, her novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published under an anonymous byline to national acclaim. Pride and Prejudice followed, surpassing S&S as her most famous work.

In her short life, Jane left six complete novels and was eleven chapters into her final work at the time of her death at age 42 in 1817. Modern doctors, reviewing the scant clues in her letters and journals detailing the symptoms of her debilitating illness have pointed to Addison’s disease as the culprit. Even so, the legacy of her small body of work to contemporary women writers is easy to distill into a handful of tips. The above quote from Northanger Abbey lays the foundation of her work and best practices for writers today:

  • Greatest Powers of the Mind Displayed: Write intelligent, truthful words, telling stories well layered in depth and substance.
  • Thorough Knowledge of Human Nature: Study the underlying truth in people, the inward workings of the human heart, and the effects and consequences of choices in life.
  • Happiest Delineation of Its [human nature] Varieties: Celebrate the most noble core values in humanity that are good, true, and worthy to be praised and imitated.
  • Liveliest Effusions of Wit and Humor: Use winsome words to craft entertaining scenes and engaging characters that compellingly illustrate truth.
  • Best-Chosen Language: Employ proper technical language skills with a rich vocabulary and word usage.

This tip list was employed in every one of Jane’s classic novels, which also included Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. Each one gave us a host of memorable, complex characters, timeless storylines involving family relationships and the quest for true love, and idyllic country settings providing an escape and refreshment to mind and heart.

But the most captivating aspect of Jane’s writing for me as a reader and writer, is her ability to present the working out of biblical truth and principles within real life scenes, characters, and plot elements. Without the need to preach, Jane’s works teach God’s Word in her illustrations of life and living within the constraints of her era and society. When I read an Austen novel, I easily recognize Scriptures coming to life through the life of the story. Sticky stories—that entertain and educate me in the way of truth.

 It is one of life’s great pleasures to finish a book and feel the satisfaction of not only having read a well-crafted story, but of learning a valuable life lesson about God and human nature.

Steffany Woolsey
A Jane Austen Devotional

 Imagine my delight when I came into possession of A Jane Austen Devotional, by Steffany Woolsey. Ms. Woolsey saw in Jane’s work what had always inspired me, both as a Christian and a writer: Jane Austen’s Christian faith core values were the compass steering her stories and character development.

To that end, there are a host of examples to be gleaned from Jane’s novels that, when pondered, clearly illustrate biblical truth. Woolsey discusses this in the Introduction to her devotional:

Austen’s writing is newly illuminated when held up to Scripture. In probing her novels for biblical insights on living and loving, we are reminded of humanity’s innate desire for relationship with the Creator. Through Austen’s varied and colorful characters, we learn not only about true love but meaningful character. We strive for the humility, wisdom, wit, and grace of a Jane Austen protagonist while learning to recognize the superficial vanity and worldliness of so many other characters who concern themselves only with their own gain.

 Illustrations of the biblical principles of generosity, unconditional love, vanity, faithfulness appearing religious, kindness, contentment, endurance, self-control, setting emotional boundaries, disciplining children, hope in God, servanthood, wise counsel, jealousy, pure motives, tongue taming, noble actions, gossip, forgiveness, poor judgement, teachable spirit, repentance, and more—over a hundred in total—take the reader of this devotional to deeper places within familiar novels. Each devotional includes a theme title, Scripture, excerpt from one of the novels, and a short essay relating them.

Currently, reading comprehension levels in America are at an all-time low because the threshold for reading and literature is, I believe, set low. Literacy is more than just reading words and sentences. Literacy is being able to think critically about what has been read and relate it to the world around you. Reading deep requires approaching each book like a detective seeking clues to discover the hidden substance tucked between the lines, scenes, characters, and plot layers. As I set out upon the journey with the protagonist of a story, I want to grow with them. I want the time I invest in a story to move me closer to truth. God’s truth comprehended.

Jane Austen intuitively wrote her stories layered with eternal truths regarding the human heart. Her books aren’t listed in bookstores on the Christian fiction shelves. She didn’t write Christian fiction, manipulating a storyline to teach some sort of Bible lesson. She just wrote true to the biblical worldview within which she was raised, within the historical time, society, and culture she lived.

When we write what’s true to our core values, employing the highest levels of literary skill and storytelling prowess, like Jane Austen, our tales become pregnant with the potential of a timeless classic.

Explore the following journal prompts to discern the compass settings of your core values to better inform your writing:

Journal Prompt: What is the most important underlying principle that informs your thinking and writing—your worldview? List some of the core values in life that are most important to you. What kind of themes do these core values suggest for possible storytelling? How does keenly observing the inner and outer workings of the human heart affect your ability to create believable characters? If something is true—does that mean it is good? Why or why not? How does writing truth, be it good or evil, persuade the mind of others? What is the measure of truth, and judge of good and evil? Why is it necessary to have both represented in a story? How can you layer core value truths within a story using the tools of plot, setting, and characters?

TWEET: [bctt tweet=”#JaneAusten had a secret to writing timeless tales! How core values separate the chaff from the wheat in crafting stories that stick. ” username=”@A3Authors @misskathypwp”]

TWEET:[bctt tweet=”#Women Writers in Life and Letters—Keen Eyes, Core Values, and Jane Austen’s Pen ” username=”@A3Authors @misskathypwp”]

Reference: A Jane Austen Devotional, by Steffany Woolsey, © 2012 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Nashville, Tennessee, ARR

 

Writer-speaker, Kathryn Ross, ignites a love of literature and learning through Pageant Wagon Productions and Publishing. She writes and publishes homeschool enrichment and Christian living books for home, church, and school. Her passion is to equip women and families in developing a Family Literacy Lifestyle, producing readers and thinkers who can engage the world from a biblical worldview. She blogs and podcasts at TheWritersReverie.com and PageantWagonPublishing.com. Connect with Miss Kathy on Facebook.

 

 

 

 

Categories
Literary Women in Histor

The Power of Place by Kathryn Ross

“… a hermitage, which is about an acre of ground—an island, planted with all variety of trees, shrubs and flowers that will grow in this country, abundance of little winding walks, differently embellished with little seats and banks; in the midst is placed a hermit’s cell, made of the roots of trees, the floor is paved with pebbles, there is a couch made of matting, and little wooden stools, a table with a manuscript on it, a pair of spectacles, a leathern bottle; and hung up in different parts, an hourglass, a weatherglass and several mathematical instruments, a shelf of books, another of wood platters and bowls, another of earthen ones, in short everything that you might imagine necessary for a recluse.”

Mary Delany, Artist and Bluestocking, 1748

Continue reading “The Power of Place by Kathryn Ross”
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Literary Women in Histor

Writing the Vision – by Kathryn Ross

 

Then the Lord answered me and said: “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.

Habakkuk 2:2 NKJV

 For I am not instructed in the vision to write as the learned write, and the words in the vision are not as words sounding from a human mouth, but as flashing flame and as a cloud moving in clear air.

Hildegard of Bingen

Letter to Guilbert Gembloux

Henry Osborne Taylor translation

Most writers can attest to some level of visionary experience in the crafting of a novel or the development of a writing project. It might be called inspiration. Modern women writers follow up their vision with the scholarship of research to the purpose, and Christian women dare not venture to put pen to paper apart from prayer.

But medieval women writers of devotional literature possessed precious little ability for scholarly research. They relied chiefly on prayer and a passionate love of God according to whatever religious teaching they had been allowed by the church. The writing lives of medieval women remained relegated to the noble-born classes and the convent, but their level of education was not level with the men of the time. Women submitted to the authority of men in every sphere of living. Though they felt the deficit, few chaffed at the misapplied subjugation of women as second-class citizens. The emancipation of women and balanced interpretation of biblical principles on the subject have come a long way in the last millennium. Even so, the controversial topic remans a hotly debated.

True in both contemporary and medieval times, writing and speaking from a place of authority is necessary. Latin, the language of the church and scholarship in the 12th century, was enjoyed by men as a complete education in literacy, be they noblemen or clergy. But, not so with women, who might understand Latin, but not be able to speak or write in it. Those who possessed even more limited literacy skills dictated their works to scribes. Women were acutely aware of their limitations in authority, but due to the rapt nature of their visions, meditations, and prayer life, they were compelled to write in the authority of the vision. They used whatever abilities they had to the fullest obeying their call to write His vision.

The ascetic women of the medieval age lived a monastic life, wholly devoted to God, in convents free of the cares of home and family. The intensity of their works became a force of change in their own soul and spirit, transforming them into selfless servants seeking the ways and means to help the afflicted in their communities. The ultimate purpose of the vision was to change their lives, so they might be agents of change in the lives of others.

The middle ages leave a plethora of devotional writings by Christian women, autobiographical in nature, that are memoirs of intense moments experienced in the secret place of prayer and meditation. These visionaries and mystics, though their words may give the biblically astute modern reader pause, must be judged by the era in which they lived and the language they were able to fully experience in a living relationship with God.

Visions and dialogue between God and man are regularly recorded in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. So, too, in the subsequent generations of Christian writers over the past 2000 years. This was the major element in the written works of medieval women:

The most obvious single narrative unit of [medieval] women’s writing is the retelling of a vision, and that vision has two mnemonic structural elements: visual iconography and dialogue. Visions are creative acts, and they seem to have been experienced by medieval women as direct seeing and hearing, not as reading. To have a vision was more like seeing a film than it was like writing or reading. Visions were images, texts, and glosses on a woman’s spiritual growth; there spiritual insights found visible form, which could be further explored and meditated on.

Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff

Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature

There is something striking in the words and life experiences left to us by visionary medieval women writers. Those—male or female—seeking greater vision as a 21st century writer might want to take note and be encouraged:

  • If God has called you to write, you will hear Him plainly—therein is your authority.
  • Seek God in prayer to His purposes in calling you to write, and meditate on the vision He has placed in your heart and mind until it is fully grown, and you are transformed.
  • Do not allow your lack of skill to impede your obedience to write.
  • Use whatever tools are available to follow through on your call to write your vision, be it opportunities for higher education, mentors, writers conferences, online tutorials, and all the extensive research at your fingertips on the internet or in the stacks at the library. We have more to accomplish the task of writing today than our ancient sisters.

Journal Prompt: Are you a visionary writer? Compare the meanings of vision and inspiration—where do they come from? How do you experience the inspiration to write? Do you see pictures? Do you hear words or phrases? Is there a recurring imagery that draws you into meditation or the day-dream of story? How do you describe what you are thinking, sensing? What part does prayer have in the perfecting of the vision, the inspiration, and the call to write what you see and hear? Where does your confidence and authority come from to write your vision?

[bctt tweet=”How Hildegarde wrote from #vision “as flashing flame and as a cloud moving in clear air.” How does #vision inform your #writing? ” username=”@A3writers @misskathypwp”]

[bctt tweet=”#Women Writers in Life and Letters— #Medieval Women Ascetics: #Writing the #Vision ” username=”@A3writers @misskathypwp”]

Reference: Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, by Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Copyright © 1986 by Oxford Univertiy Press, Inc.

Writer-speaker, Kathryn Ross, ignites a love of literature and learning through Pageant Wagon Productions and Publishing. She writes and publishes homeschool enrichment and Christian living books for home, church, and school. Her passion is to equip women and families in developing a Family Literacy Lifestyle, producing readers and thinkers who can engage the world from a biblical worldview. She blogs and podcasts at TheWritersReverie.com and PageantWagonPublishing.com. Connect with Miss Kathy on Facebook.