Rachel J. Fenton on the Trail of Charlotte Brontë’s Best Friend

Rachel J Fenton is a working-class writer from Yorkshire. She lives in Aotearoa where she is also known as Rae Joyce and received a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant to research, write and draw a graphic biography of Charlotte Brontë’s best friend Mary Taylor. Her recent research trip to New York City inspired her to write a chapbook of poems titled Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York.

CG: So, Rachel Fenton, welcome to my blog!

RF: Kia ora, hello and thank you, Carolyn Gage, thanks so much for having me! I’m a huge fan of your blog and your brilliant work, as you know.

CG: For those of you who may not be familiar with Rachel, she collaborated with me on a charming and dangerous booklet titled “Sexual Textual Tennis” as the “Graphic Poet Rae Joyce.” I encourage everyone in the world to buy this patriarchal atom-splitting work of amazing art. BUT… today I am talking to Rachel about another aspect of her brilliant career. Rachel and I belong to a small but mighty, extremely elite group I like to call “The Lesbian History Detective Agency.” Rachel, perhaps you would like to share with blog readers the subject of your latest investigation…?

RF: I just want to say, first off, “Sexual Textual Tennis” was a champion collaboration and an important one, for me personally it was a pivotal moment in my understanding of what my feminist politics are and what my art can do, so thank you for giving me that wonderful opportunity. And also, “The Lesbian History Detective Agency” would be a great title for a play! OK. I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with a woman named Mary Taylor. For those of your readers who don’t know about her (and five years ago, that was me), she is probably best known as the friend of Charlotte Brontë.

A page from "Sexual Textual Tennis"

CG: Just to set the record straight—so to speak: We don’t really know if Charlotte was lesbian or bisexual. There are mixed opinions on this. Her friendship with Ellen Nussey produced a romantic correspondence in with both women admitted they would marry each other if they could. And if you Google "Jane Eyre" and "lesbian," you will encounter all kinds of essays on the "deep lesbian currents" of the novel. But Charlotte did end up marrying (a man) relatively late in life. The evidence for Mary’s lesbianism appears stronger. For one thing, she wrote, “The first duty – is for every woman to protect herself from the danger of being forced to marry.” And Mary took that duty seriously, emigrating to New Zealand for better prospects of supporting herself. Later, her cousin emigrated to join her and the two women lived together and ran a successful shop for many years. Also, Mary wrote a novel of her own, Miss Miles, or a Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago, about three young women and their struggles to find independence and happiness, and self-published it at the age of 73. She died in 1893, aged 76... never married.

"Rose Yorke" was the character based on Mary in Bronte's novel Shirley.

RF: There are several reasons I became so fascinated with Taylor… Since early 2016, following the launch of Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics (Beatnik) which I’d co-edited, I was looking to reconnect with my Yorkshire roots in a way that would simultaneously anchor me to Aotearoa, where I’d lived for about a decade at this point. I’d had a discussion about the Brontë sisters with my partner who said to me “Didn’t Charlotte have a friend in New Zealand?” And that’s what pushed me down the trail of Mary Taylor. I felt Mary Taylor was a figure who could hold my interest for a large, book-sized project. And I wasn’t mistaken; however, what I wasn’t seeing – wasn’t able to at that point – was why I was really drawn to her; what my psychological drivers were for pursuing her. I need to make that distinction, that my interest in her is only clear in [almost] hindsight, because I was running blind at the time of my research.

CG: I think that can often be part of the process about researching and writing about historical figures. I just finished a play about the geneticist Barbara McClintock. I had been thinking about this play for thirty years, researching it for ten, and then writing it for three years. Weeks after I finished it, I began to understand myself as autistic. After I got the diagnosis, I was doing an internet search to find out who else was autistic… and McClintock’s name turned up over and over again. Maybe on some deep subconscious level I had been searching for my own story in the history of McClintock.

RF: Taylor had found herself adrift of her family and in need of financial security and she wanted better for herself but also, crucially, for all women. Unlike Taylor, I’m working-class – a group she admired because she saw working-class women as having achieved something like equality with their men through the division of labour and their ability to earn, whereas middle-class women eschewed work because it was considered degrading for women to work in Victorian society. Of course, it wasn’t so much degrading as a means for women to escape patriarchal control at that time… If women could not be controlled by the church or by the financial hold of husbands, they were a threat to the patriarchy. Mary wasn’t just a trailblazer, she was a danger to society. I had been labelled a “rabble-rouser” by one of my co-editors on the anthology in the first interview we gave. It irked. It’s a form of class discrimination in the UK. Working-class people are frequently given such labels as angry, aggressive, intimidating, because middle-class people are afraid of poverty, afraid of people who have touched poverty. I wrote in the story that won the University of Plymouth Short Fiction Prize that perhaps middle-class people think they can catch poverty by association with working-class people. Certainly, that’s been my experience. The label stuck.

CG: That brings to mind Jane Goodall's quotation: "It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman. That's why there are so many of us." So, let's get back to your "beerstorming..." Tell us where you went on the trail of Mary Taylor...

RF: I had intended to visit Te Whanganui a Tara first, then New York’s Public Library Berg Collection, and finally the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Library in my native Yorkshire. I was overjoyed when I was awarded a $20,000NZ grant that meant I could do the research.

CG: Ah...New York...

RF: I spent two days researching without breaks in New York Public Library’s Berg collection, and another in The Morgan Library and Museum’s Sherman Fairchild Room. Reading Bronte’s rough slant in contrast to Taylor’s immaculately controlled handwriting was an experience I will never forget. Taylor’s hand was like fine ironwork in a continental city until her beloved sister Martha’s death, when the line tremors and the first sign of emotional weakness shows like the ink on a Richter scale. I thought I felt her pain because I was in pain. I carried this knowledge to my illustrations. When Taylor tells Brontë she is leaving England for New Zealand, I allowed my emotions to bleed into my pen, distorting the line with real as opposed to imagined feeling. On the fourth day, I met up with my online friend Lori. Throughout the previous decade, she had been a constant support to me. Never judgemental, though always truthful. Blunt, even, at times. Loyal. She accepted me for myself. Her letters to me are written in the finest wrought iron cursive, back-leaning, whereas mine to her are a roughshod gallop. Just like the poems I wrote in New York. My friendship with Lori gave me some insight into the importance of Taylor’s friendship, a friendship that was predominantly epistolary

Mary Taylor on the left, with a group of women mountaineering in Switzerland, 1874

CG: That whole subject of literary women’s friendships is fascinating. I remember how much I enjoyed reading A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. I sometimes think with regret about how many of these friendships today will be lost from history, because nobody writes long, thoughtful letters anymore. It’s all internet tweets and facebook posts. And I include myself in that. I do write blogs… that’s where I’m thoughtful, but a blog post is not personal. But back to the beerstorming... What would you like to tell us about Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York?

RF: I think you’ve as much as said it with your observation about the future documentation, or lack of it, of women’s friendships, and the need, still, to actively keep our herstories from being erased. Beerstorming with Charlotte Bronte in New York is a sequence of 18 poems structured around the archive of Taylor and Bronte’s correspondence that helped me access their friendship in a way that felt immediate and relevant, and in such a way that I was able to carry that research modality into Betweenity, my graphic biography of Taylor. My friendship with Lori mightn’t be of the likes of Taylor’s and Brontë’s, we are not landed gentry or genteel parsons’ daughters, we may not “astonish” with our antics as Mary and her cousin Ellen did, but in Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York, I found a way into the archive. I guess all history is like this; we put in as much as we take out, right?

CG: I very much look forward to the publication of your graphic biography of Mary Taylor. Can you share with us a page from it?

A page from Betweenity.