Pam’s Pictorama Post: If yesterday was devoted to a bit of what we’ve been watching here at Deitch Studio, today I will spend some time on what I have been reading. You may remember that as part of a much belated birthday celebration spent wandering around downtown with Kim, I purchased a rather beautifully bound volume by Rosa Mulholland with the intention of reading it. That volume, Our Sister Maisie, turned out to be an interesting sort of a point in her career to stumble onto and, written when she was 66 years old, it seems to have been one of her most popular books.

Her biography is interesting when considering her stories which deal a lot with the position of women in terms of money and livelihood at the time which she documents and considers. The daughter of a prominent doctor she came from a fairly well to do Irish family in Dublin. Other she first dabbled in painting (I have seen no evidence of it) she turned her hand to writing early and began trying to get published in her teens, including a novel at 15. One of the most interesting pieces of the tale is that early publication of her work caught the eye of an elderly Charles Dickens who not only encourage her but published her in one of his magazines and in a compilation with one of his own stories.

He bet on a good horse. She was very prolific with a list of upward of forty publications, mostly novels, to her credit. She wrote under at least three names I can find, Rosa Mulholland, Rosa Gilbert and very early on, Ruth Murray and seem to have published until a few years before her death and there was a healthy reprinting of her work which continues into the 1940’s. Gilbert is her married name – she married at the age of 50 to a well-known historian, Sir Thomas Gilbert, 12 years her senior. By marriage she therefore became Lady Gilbert.

If any of her writing was used for films I cannot find any evidence of it. I want to say that her books while very popular in Ireland and Great Britain they appear to have been less known here in the US. Really though the only evidence I have of that is that used contemporary copies of her books are mostly available in Britain.

Much like some of the other women authors I have written about previously (for starters, the adult novels of Francis Hodgson Burnett which can be found here, one about Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey here and an earlier one on Edna Ferber here) she is writing about the changing values and culture evolving around women’s emerging role in the late 19th and into the 20th century. Of the above mentioned authors, Francis Hodgson Burnett writes a bit about the other side of the Atlantic and especially the influence of the more forward Americans who visit there – generally very wealthy ones at that. Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey also writes about Britain but is poised a bit later.

Mulholland therefore is a bit unique in her entirely Irish perspective and generally a bit earlier than the women above. She recognizes that there is a problem where women’s only option for survival is the money their family could supply in the form of a life-long bit of capital to earn and be spent down and the marriage they make. Therefore nascent attempts to work among them are plot points – smart and ambitious women (much like herself we have to assume) are trying to break the mold either because they have been left with no money or are a simmering genius whose talent must find an outlet.

For all of that and knowing of her own life she can be a bit hard on these women – perhaps as society at the time was and it was the feeling of the day. I have read three of her books to date and in Our Sister Maisie there is a younger sister who yearns to be an architect – much like the young Mulholland she even has some of her designs used when she is teenager. Against all odds she makes it to architecture school and, although it is a bit unclear, drops out just before completion to marry her wealthy and wonderful heart’s desire.

In a later volume, Twin Sisters, An Irish Tale published in 1913 she has a female character who, in charge of her late husband’s estate (it is thought of as her managing it for her son – as if she wasn’t also living off it in the meanwhile) invests aggressively in the stock market and makes but ultimately loses much of the fortune. She is criticized as having had no business trying to do the work of a man. But women like her are frequently left to their own devices and the heroine of the story arrives, along with her twin sister, in Britain from Spain as the wards of a family friend they never met. Penniless, the woman charitably agrees to help launch them into society and make agreeable marriages for them. Our girl Pipa isn’t having it though and takes work in an apple orchard in the country instead. Although she is roundly criticized for this, she is our heroine so needless to say she does the right thing – but of course she will end up with her best mate as well.

Mulholland’s books are a bit harder to track down than what I have enjoyed in recent years where there has been aplenty available online and in inexpensive used volumes. Rosa Muholland’s books tend to be beautifully bound, illustrated, volumes that are being sold at a premium because of that and despite the fact that there is not much demand to read them. Why more are not available electronically I cannot quite figure out. Perhaps she is just a bit early for for most people – or if the basis of those collections is based on American libraries and universities she may just not be in the right purview.

All this to say that while between the acquisition of physical volumes of her books, I grabbed one of her earlier works online and that was interesting and The Late Miss Hollingford was the story of hers, serialized in a magazine, that caught Dickens’s eye. Her descriptive powers were in greater force in her early writing, although her descriptions of the Irish country and seaside are also wonderful in Our Sister Maisie. The descriptions of the farm this young woman goes to live on are just cozy and great. (Yes, another orphaned girl-woman sent off to live with folks she hardly knows – this time her parents, who she barely knew, died of a fever in India leaving her a sufficient income although in reverse this time she is sent to live with people who don’t have money. The father was the perpetrator of a pyramid scheme and those seemed to be rampant at this time – I know the from the de Vaizey books among others!)

I suspect there will be more to come on Ms. Mulholland and her writing as I am wading into the depths. I also suspect that Abe Books and others can expect to be seeing a whole lot of my pocket change in the near future. Stay tuned.