Good Women: The Tale of a Forgotten Bluebeard, Serial Killer James P. Watson [in search of publication, under revision]
Status: Completed, edited, 89,900 words which includes Bibliography and Image Sources (rights acquired or in public domain); a possible 135 images.
Genre and Format: Nonfiction, Historical True Crime
Blurb: Good Women is about James P. Watson, a con man and killer in turn-of-the-twentieth century America. Posing as Prince Charming he wooed more than 50 female victims through Lonely Hearts ads. Traversing the Pacific Northwest, California and Canada, he lavished them with gifts and expensive meals in high-end hotels before proposing marriage. He duped his wives of everything they owned before taking their lives, abandoning, or selling them into the sex trade. In 1920, his final wife grew suspicious of the black bag that never left his side and his frequent absences. Katherine hired LA’s top private detectives who arrested Watson at their Hollywood home. Detectives found the trophies of his 22 murdered wives in the black bag but this was only the beginning. Dubbing him ‘America’s Bluebeard,’ the press and police exposed his decades-long murder spree. But only three bodies of Watson’s victims were ever recovered — what became of these women? Their families would like to know.
For a detailed look at what the book is about, please see the table of contents, chapter-by-chapter synopses, and the comparative titles section.
Who will read it?
History buffs will appreciate the background and social and geographical context. But the major audience is the legions of true crime fans who exist as readers, podcast listeners, blog followers, and consumers of films and television shows. True crime allows them to indulge in their curiosity about why and how humans murder and prey on others and seek insight into the human psyche. For many the genre is more memorable than fiction. Motivated by fascination and the desire to survive and use knowledge as an anecdote to fear, women compose an estimated 70% of the consumers of true crime. In the last decade, the genre (in the form of books, films, and podcasts) has turned from a focus on charismatic killers to victim-centered narratives. There is also renewed focus on historical crimes and interest in context.
Who is the author—Rebecca Knuth?
A polished public speaker, Dr. Knuth has presented talks at national and international academic conferences, and given interviews and editorials to Cabinet, Smithsonian Magazine, Abe Books, History News Network, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio, and Monocle (an international radio magazine). For the last eight years, she has been a ‘special topics’ lecturer on cruise ships, (Cunard, Azamara, Viking lines) where her audiences vary between 50 to 400 people
Rebecca Knuth has a doctorate (PhD) and three master’s degrees, two in education and, one, most recently, in Creative Nonfiction. She attained Full Professor rank at the University of Hawaii and is now a Professor Emerita. Dr. Knuth chaired several graduate programs and won both university and national teaching awards.
An expert in cultural destruction and censorship, she’s the author of Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (Praeger, 2003) and Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction (Praeger, 2006). Dr. Knuth wrote Children’s Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation (Scarecrow, 2012).
Contact Information:
Dr. Rebecca Knuth
Email: knuth@hawaii.edu
Webpage: rebeccaknuth.com
Comparative Titles:
Historical true crime titles paint a picture of specific times and places, and demonstrate the ability of their authors to tell stories, to illuminate history, culture, region, social mores, the weak spots in the justice system, and to cross genres (biography, for example). The crime books below, like mine, are erected around a scaffolding of author investigation and an obsessive drive to fathom the deadly tango between victims and killer and learn from the past.
James, Bill and Rachel McCarthy James. The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery. Scribner 2017
The authors set out to solve one vicious crime and uncovered a serial killer with possibly 100 victims. Meticulously researched and carefully reasoned, The Man From the Train establishes the links between 14 unsolved multiple-victim murders, presents a list of 33 elements the killings had in common, determines an M.O. and identifies the man responsible. The killer operated in a similar manner to modern serial killers, staging hit-and-run murders of strangers (families) and then immediately jumping a train out of town. Bill and Rachel pile up the facts and describe each incident in detail.
Good Women introduces murders committed at roughly the same time (the first two decades of the twentieth century) and similarly exposes the embryonic state of crime investigation and the roles of the press and private detectives at the time. My book probes the psyche of the killer and his victims, his constant motion (often on trains), and his pattern of acting out romantic scenarios that culminate in violence. I focus on probing the psyche and charisma of a killer who fed off the dreams of his victims, rather than on seeking to identify a killer.
McDiarmid, Jessica. Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Atria Books, 2019
Highway of Tears is a mixture of true crime, sociology, and expose. McDiarmid records the stories of missing and murdered indigenous women along a 750 kilometer stretch of highway in British Columbia. There is a historical basis in that the murders began in the 1970s, however McDiarmid’s quest for patterns is up to date. She is predicating the existence of a serial killer or multiple killers who take advantage of the isolation and vulnerability of young women and ineffective policing.
I am similarly concerned with the serial disappearance of women, often in isolated areas, and with criminal investigation blind-spots. The lifestyle and social and infrastructural inequities of McDiarmid’s victims put them in harm’s way and they share with the Good Women victims the deadly repercussions of attitudes that women are discountable, prey.
Pompeo, Joe. Blood and Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime. William Morrow, 2022
Pompeo probes the unsolved love story and double murder of a prominent minister and a member of the choir. Their murder, in 1920, fascinated a generation of newspaper readers, as the tabloids fed a public appetite for true stories about crime. Blood and Ink is an award-winning true crime bestseller which adds to communication and media studies, accounts of murder, and the biographies of the rich and famous.
Good Women speaks to a series of love stories, the mutation of romance into murder. Ideas about marriage, the criminal justice system in 1920, the role of newspapers and private detective agencies, and the seductive nature of lurid accounts of murder also factor in.
Miles, Kathryn. Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders. Algonquin Books, 2022.
Miles wrote from an obsession with the unsolved murders of two lovers, free-spirited women camping in the wilderness who were killed in their tent in 1996. Miles linked their murders to those of other women and urged the police to think in terms of a serial killer with a hatred for lesbians. His hunting ground was federal parks and Miles’s agenda is to make the wilderness and rural areas safer for women. This book speaks to how murderers can slip though cracks in the criminal justice system and remain at large. Trailed is a true crime book which also looks at women in history, serial killers, and local history.
I wrote Good Women from a similar commitment to giving voice to thrown away and silenced women. I too wanted to probe how a serial killer could get away murder, over and over again, enabled by social attitudes and environmental conditions.
Green, Elon. Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York. Celadon Books, 2022.
Green writes a high energy account of an elusive serial killer who preyed on gay men in New York in the 1990s. It is victim-oriented and focuses on innocent men who were duped, murdered, and thrown away. He probes forgotten lives, and writes a cultural history of the times.
Good Women resonates with Last Call, as it’s rich in details about time, place, and social ideas. Both books present a subset of victims (marginal because they were female or gay) and clarify why they were susceptible to a smooth-talking predator and how they laid themselves open to annihilation. My book focuses more on the killer than Green’s.
Burnett-Reaugh, Alene. American Bluebeard: Lies and Dead Wives, 2020.
This self-published (45,000 word) book is about the same serial killer, James P. Watson, as mine. She depends heavily on his memoirs. Burnett-Reaugh spent 20 years researching this relatively unknown killer. In Good Women, I build on her materials, and because he is an unreliable narrator, I research in depth, to substantiate his claims and versions of his killings. I expand the context of Watson’s times (late 1800s and early 1900s) and life and discuss current relevance.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
[TOPICS COVERED IN EACH OF THE FIVE PARTS (word count)]
PROLOGUE: WHO WAS THIS MAN? 2332
In this scene, Katherine’s suspicions lead to the arrest of her husband. His black bag contains disturbing evidence of a decades-long crime spree. His attempted suicides kick off an international investigation into bigamous marriages and possible murders.
PART 1: IN PURSUIT OF BELONGING
Chapter 1: A Chaotic Childhood 3304
Born in 1871, Charles Gilliam (who would become the deadly James P. Watson) has a chaotic hard-scrabble childhood: he is passed around by his relatives and lives in an orphanage in early childhood. By age six, his mother, who will become abusive, takes him home to the family farm to live with his equally abusive stepfather. Charles runs away at twelve, filled with a rage that never abates.
Chapter 2: Worthy Citizen or Budding Predator? 3700
In his late teens, Watson becomes a construction worker in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, develops a sense of superiority, and talks his way into exchanging domestic labor for a stipend and an education. He learns the value of dissembling and religious hypocrisy and aspires to social standing. His relationship with a mentor implodes in a violent incident, he develops grievances, and has two girlfriends, one who ends up dead in an early prototype of his future modus operandi. Her body is never found but her fate is recounted in his memoirs.
Chapter 3:Looking Good, Acting Bad 5960
Watson moves to Fort Smith, Arkansas, works as a travelling salesman and receives training in becoming a conman. He craves luxury and high-class hotels and impersonates a wealthy man to lure and marry women with money. Watson settles down for five years of, ostensibly, domestic bliss (while maintaining a life on the road), but goes on the run after being charged with mail fraud. He doesn’t handle failure well and begins a cycle of killing. He assumes aliases and his next six years are murky, but may have included arson and business fraud.
Chapter 4: Running Off the Rails 3572
Watson meets his female victims on trains, travelling from St. Louis to Chicago, and marries them. He takes their money and demands that they distance themselves from family friends and community, all the better to kill them. He has begun to play multiple women simultaneously and pass their possessions among his wives. Teenage Alice Freeman survives, when he is arrested for fraud, escapes, and flees to Canada.
PART 2: MIXING BUSINESS AND PLEASURE
Chapter 5: Beginning Again 3050
Watson works as a travelling salesman for a grain company and preys on Canadian women by promising them a prosperous future. After each marriage, he begins to experiment with their disposal: he abandons some and poisons others, immersing their bodies in watery graves in the Spokane, Washington-Coeur D’Alene area. He marries Kate Kruse, a marriage which endures because she doesn’t object to nor question his long absences. In 1917 after his oil business fails, he is hospitalized in Calgary with a nervous breakdown. When he comes out later that year and until his arrest in 1920, he is a killing machine.
Chapter 6: Marriage, Foreplay to Murder 2520
Watson takes advantage of a woman’s desire for a love, promising a model marriage where the husband provides a home and financial security. He packages himself as an irresistible romantic, with solid prospects. He keeps a tally of responses to his Lonely Hearts ads, placed in American newspapers. He corresponds with and courts women in an elaborate game, pressing for a quick wedding before he takes their money, isolates and then kills or abandons them.
Chapter 7: Shifting to the Northwest 3500
Watson begins to focus on the Seattle-Tacoma area in Washington state, with Lake Washington as his favored disposal site. In recounting his marriage to Agnes Wilson, Watson claims that he fell under the influence of killings on impulse. He has become addicted to control and to the release that murder brings him.
Chapter 8: He’s a Serial Killer 5130
His pattern well-established, Watson supplements travelling by train by renting a car, a new sign of affluence and wealth, which proves helpful in wooing women and escorting them to isolated areas where they are murdered. Watson returns again and again for brides from the Spokane area. That some are killed in arguments suggests his control over them may be waning prematurely. As Watson runs frenziedly from woman to woman, he grows sloppy. He is overwhelmed by the need to keep track of their personal belongings, which he sorts, stores, and even passes from one wife to another. He has his brides sign blank sheets of paper. After their deaths, he corresponds with their families, claiming the couple is on an exotic vacation, with the signature proving that his bride is still alive.
PART 3: CALIFORNIA CALLING
Chapter 9: Branching Out 3220
Watson moves to southern California where he begins concentrating his killing. The proximity of Mexico gives him another avenue for disposing of troublesome women—the white slave trade. Watson is in his late forties and L.A. gives him access to younger women. He plays to their dreams too. He picks up would-be starlets in Hollywood and holds out the lure of a movie career.
Chapter 10: Taking Advantage of Lonely Hearts 3710
He continues placing lonely hearts ads and begins marrying older women, often wealthy widows. Some he fleeces and abandons, some he thinks about selling in Mexico, some he kills. He murders more impulsively and this will have consequences.
Chapter 11: One Wife Too Many 2620
He marries thirteen women in 1919 and that’s simply too many to handle well. He becomes careless with those who he kills and doesn’t have time to kill others before his spell wears thin. Wives grow resentful of the locked black bag he carries everywhere and suspicious of his job as a secret service agent, his excuse for long absences. Here we return to Katherine Wombacher, the final wife who goes to a private detective agency and her action leads to his arrest, the opening of the black bag, exposing his wealth of wedding rings and documentation that indicate bigamy and mass murder. The suicide attempts are now understandable because Watson fears that he faces the death penalty. So begins an international investigation.
PART 4: INVESTIGATING A HYDRA-HEADED MONSTER
Chapter 12: Getting the Main Players on Board 5030
Los Angeles County had jurisdiction over Watson’s case and its investigators (Cline, Manning, Couts, and Bell) take on the task of tracking down leads and missing women. District Attorney Woolwine must put a case together. The police ask the three living wives to help in their investigation: Katherine Wombacher and Elizabeth Williamson agree, Kate Cruse obstructs. Journalists and agents with the Nick Harris Detective Agency assist in the investigation as do local police in the Western United States and Canada. It is an intense 30 days. The story is extensively covered by the press.
Chapter 13: Identifying the Mystery Man? 3550
Establishing the prisoner’s name is difficult. He has used at least 20 aliases and claims he doesn’t even know his birthname. He makes three official statements to Woolwine. Initially he lies, claiming he doesn’t remember anything, says he has blackouts, and generally stonewalls. But details of victims emerge and journalists dub him “Bluebeard.”
Chapter 14: Those Who Lived 5020
While investigating Watson’s possible other crimes, investigators focus on tracking down the missing women. They access his hoard of documents and the lists of victims and contacts he maintained. These put them on the trail of those he contacted through matrimonial ads. Some survivors step forward to help the police; others, shamed and stunned by the publicity, disappear.
Chapter 15: Tracking Down Bodies 2670
Woolwine concentrates on identifying the mystery man and piecing together his life story. The DA probes Watson for details of victims and is desperate to locate a body so that Watson can be charged with murder, rather than the much lesser crime of bigamy. Investigators concentrate on finding women who went missing in 1919.
Chapter 16: Cutting a Deal 4140
The Washington police link a body found at Plum Station, Washington state, to Watson, but he prefers to be tried in California and takes a plea deal—a life sentence in exchange for a body and confessions. He even leads police to an isolated grave near El Centro, California, and the body of Nina Lee Deloney.
PART 5: JUDGEMENT
Chapter 17: Accounting for His Crimes 4660
Watson slowly admits to killing four, then six, then eight women. Woolwine tries to establish his motives and whether they result from sexual perversity. The judge mandates a psychological assessment to determine whether Watson can be held responsible for his crimes, and alienists (forensic psychologists) evaluate the prisoner and establish his sanity: he knows right from wrong. Watson is sentenced to life in San Quentin prison.
Chapter 18: Bluebeard Goes to Prison 3700
Watson is given five days to wind up his affairs. He has confessed to murdering nine women and is emotionally withdrawn. It is a grim train and ferry trip to prison, as he has to run the gauntlet of lynch mobs. After being processed, photographed, and undergoing a physical exam, Watson is assigned to work in the prison hospital where he comes under the protection of Dr. Leo Stanley.
Chapter 19: Mind Games 3740
Life in the hospital has its advantages for Prisoner 33755. He is protected from the other inmates and can give interviews, write poetry, and sit in the garden. Watson plays mind games with visiting journalists, the victims’ relatives, and prison personnel and claims to have stashes of money from his crimes. In his memoir, which appears in ten editions of True Detective Mysteries, he claims to have killed 22 of his wives.
Chapter 20: A Conundrum of Good and Evil 2040
What kind of man is Watson? Is he a thoughtful poet and timid nurse who gently tends his fellow convicts and feeds the birds in the garden. Or is he an unrepentent killer who enjoys talking about his murders? In their memoirs of San Quentin life, the warden, the warden’s wife, and Dr. Stanley differ as to his character and wrestle with the basic conundrum of good and evil embodied in this frail man. The anxiety of relatives is unabated as they fear Watson will go to his grave without giving him the peace of knowing how their loved ones died and where their bodies might be found.
EPILOGUE: EVER AFTER 4540
The epilogue discusses the fate of Wombacher, Williamson and Cruse, the attitudes of other surviving wives, and gaps left by women lost forever (including Alice Ludvigson). It reviews the subsequent careers of the team that brought him down (Woolwine, Cline, Manning, Couts, Bell, Harris, Armstrong) and Dr. Leo Stanley’s last years. I ponder the methods and persona of James P. Watson, serial killer, his death, burial and true legacy—the betrayal of women who entrusted him with their lives and dreams.
London Sojourn: How to Reinvent Yourself after 65 [in search of publication]
This memoir is for every retiree who wants to reinvent themselves and aspires to write, every Anglophile who wants to live their dream.
Is transformation a young person’s game? What happens when a professor retires and makes London a place to learn to write and live? Learns that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself and ends up a feminist?
Excerpts from the proposal:
The book in detail: At age 65, Rebecca Knuth is chafing at the constraints of being a professor. In search of a new identity, she retires with a plan: bored with academic writing, she will search out stories and experiment with her voice. Go back to graduate school to become a creative writer and a tour guide. She will join the prestigious private London Library and the Biographers’ Club, live an Anglophile’s dream, in London, and test the waters of expatriatism. This will involve negotiating between her affinity for all things English and the comfort of her birth identity—American.
It becomes a quest. With London as a place of transformation, she shoulders a backpack, and retools as a writer of creative nonfiction and a different kind of educator. Rebecca channels her love of teaching into a guiding course and becomes a storyteller at North London’s venerated Highgate Cemetery. She experiments with a new style, finding a creative, personal, human-oriented and very unacademic voice.
Rebecca also discovers her resilience when her elderly mother’s health begins to fail, when she herself ends up in intensive care, gets groped on the London underground, her project gets stuck, she’s chronically exhausted, her former academic department does fine without her, and a classmate hates her. Yet, she experiences joy in London working for good causes, communing with fellow writers, and forging a new sense of herself.
As she sorts through what to jettison and what to embrace, her sloughing off of academia becomes inseparable from her reprogramming as a woman. She begins to see parallels between both roles: they are reinforced by rigorous training, arbiters and gatekeepers, and involve internalized rules. Her pursuit of authenticity leaves her leery of social systems and willing to explore her beliefs about power. In writing about the struggles of women writers to make their voices heard, she becomes, to her surprise, a committed feminist.
In her memoir, London Sojourn, Rebecca confronts whether her constant striving and need for stimulation is sustainable and whether London—an imaginative space nurtured by her lifetime of reading about the city—ultimately feels like home.
This memoir is for every retiree who wants to express themselves differently, explore their curiosity, and integrate interests and service. To step out from behind a position of authority to embrace a more creative and fluid identity. To reckon with life. It answers the questions of what it takes to reinvent oneself as a creative writer, guide, expatriate, and woman.
Status: Completed, edited, 86,000 words
Genre: Travel Memoir; Memoir of an older woman
Chapter Summaries
Prologue: Standing Up to a Beefeater
An awkward twelve-year old girl finds joy and transformation in a London previously encountered in books. At the Tower of London, she confronts a Beefeater over his account of the murder of two Plantagenet boy princes (using her reading as evidence) and begins to define herself. Fifty years later, that girl returns to the city she loves, battered and seeking a place to reinvent herself. I hope to revive that shiny girl who wanted joy and a larger life and got a little lost over the years.
Chapter 1: Northchurch Road
As I explore the neighborhood and nest into my tidy flat in a nineteenth century house, I compare it with ramshackle, atmospheric previous lodgings. Review the London I know through reading and move mindfully through the city’s arteries, on its buses and on the underground. I’m learning that in order to maintain my rosy picture of England, I will need to focus my eyes narrowly in some ways and broaden my heart in others.
Chapter 2: Being Social
I immerse myself in the neighborhood, listening to the Second World War stories of elders, and serve cakes at a garden fair in the local church. I engage in meetups, mudlarking, day tripping, and excursions with my best friend and fellow professor Tony. I think back to my path from conservative Southern California to London in the swinging sixties when I hitchhiked to Dover, went to a Janis Joplin concert, and tasted independence. I am still reckoning with men and sex, both available in London.
Chapter 3: Getting Personal
London is where I fell in love with ideas and wanted to express them more popularly, Now, I want to write about what it means to be human. That writing involves personal exposure becomes a take-away from my creative nonfiction classes, where my classmates and I begin to reveal ourselves. It’s emotional and I open up, fall in love with memoir writing, and think about my life.
Chapter 4: Storytelling
Every Wednesday speakers discuss storytelling, the core concept in writing. We learn about narratives, turning points, character transformation, and the importance of characters getting what they need rather than want. I begin to transform my life into a narrative and grasp for that very unacademic thing—a voice. London gives me space to try a different voice and collect stories.
Chapter 5: Intelligent Entertainment
I pursue stories in tours and decide to learn how to be a guide. Become one of those unconventional intellectuals, like creative nonfiction writers and cruise ship lecturers (another role I am testing out). Guiding is highly skills based, the course is demanding, and I must challenge my tendency to be too serious and to overwork, which leaves me moving through London without feeling London.
Chapter 6: Things Come Apart
My mother is in a nursing home in Colorado. I fly back every few months and even while my body is in London, part of me remains with her. I confront the guilt of being an intermittent caregiver, her frailty, the sadness and inevitability of death, and how much I love my brother. I wanted to open up emotionally in London, but this has a scouring effect on my spirit. After being hospitalized for strep, when Mom hardly knows me when I visit, and with living in London requiring such effort, I decide to go back to the US when my visa expires.
Chapter 7: Writing My Way to Feminism
My emerging book, Censoring Lives, explores women writers’ struggles with concepts of femininity which denied them voice. They were censored and self-censored while alive and were given anodyne images after death. Second-wave feminists rewrote their stories. I go on location—to Winchester for Jane Austen, to Yorkshire for Charlotte Bronte, to the Charing Cross Hotel in London where Edith Wharton found sexual fulfilment. Virginia Woolf dominates my thinking and is pursued in London, Oxford, and her country home. She helps me sort through separating from my father and mother and reinforces my proclivity for having a room of my own. I come to identify as a feminist.
Chapter 8: Flaneuring in London
With fewer classes, I am all over London, visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Gallery, British Museum, the Morris Museum in Hammersmith, and Carlisle’s House in Chelsea. I attend exhibits, take tours, and listen to lectures. I join the London Library. At the London Review Bookshop, Lauren Elkin’s discussion of her book Flaneuse, about women writers who soak up urban lives through walking, rivets me. I realize that I am a flaneuse of sorts and frame my absorption with London through that lens. Flaneusing is what writers do.
Chapter 9: Finding My True Self
Volunteering in North London’s Highgate Cemetery, a Victorian Angkor Wat, brings joy. I am part guide, part hostess, part security guard and totally engaged. It is the perfect place to integrate my interests and research and I track down George Eliot’s grave and Radclyffe Hall’s mausoleum and the stories behind them. Walking down the Thames, visiting gardens, and tending semi-wild and overgrown Highgate Cemetery restores me.
Chapter 10: Coming to Terms with Englishness
Searching for a glow—Christmas in England. Visiting the countryside, Oxford, Rye and tranquil spots in London and learning that I have an affinity for Middle England, appreciate its internationalism, and yet cannot grieve over the Brexit referendum. England and Englishness is not essential to my happiness while being a writer is.
Chapter 11: Returning Home
I chose sustainability over stimulation, peace, family, and roots, and prepare for a move to Portland Oregon. But reality knocks and I need a biopsy, my daughter in law has cancer, and Mom is failing. I say my good-byes, do some final reckoning, and head for the airport laden with memories and stories—a rich trove to draw upon for writing. And, as well, the embryo of a memoir.
Emily Dickinson Had to Have Curls: The Feminine Masks Forced on Women Writers. Amazon KDP, 2024
WHAT IF WHAT YOU WANTED TO DO MOST
~ WRITE ~
WAS FORBIDDEN OR DANGEROUS SOCIALLY?
Emily Dickinson Had to Have Curls tells the story of 18 women writers who struggled with beliefs about femininity that curtailed their voices and required masks.
After death their papers were tampered with, portraits doctored, and images refashioned to downplay the unfeminine chutzpah involved in writing.
Feminist biographers stripped off these masks and revealed them as fighters.
Chapter Summaries
- MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, Vindicator (1757-1797): Wollstonecraft was crucified for her public voice, sexuality, and rebellion against proper womanhood. As a result of backlash from her husband’s tell-all biography, nineteenth century women writers had to live with the utmost discretion and undergo posthumous censorship.
- MARY SHELLEY, Author of Frankenstein (1797-1851): A Romantic wild-child and teenage runaway wrote Frankenstein and survived her poet-husband’s death. Mary transformed herself into a professional writer and editor while sheltering under cover as an exemplary Victorian woman.
- JANE AUSTEN, Lovely Jane (1775-1817): Austen evaded marriage and childbirth and wrote. After her death, the Austen family set out to rescue her from the routine denigration meted out to women writers by putting in place an innocuous, idealized image. Her social criticism and personal edginess were ignored or denied.
- CHARLOTTE BRONTE, Ragged Edges (1816-1855): Brontё hid her anger, passion, and ambition behind masks. A serious writer with a penchant for truth, Brontё died a suspect writer of coarse material. She was redeemed by a biographer who portrayed her as admirable and tragic.
- EMILY BRONTE, Neutralized (1818-1848): Emily’s Wuthering Heights was powerful, violent, and seriously strange. The author’s early death put her works and image in the hands of a defensive sister who partially erased her.
- EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN, Heavenly Maiden (1805-1848): Pious De Guerin found writing an unholy temptation, so she denied her literary talent and confined herself to penning a diary and letters. Her expurgated texts were co-opted by conservative Catholics who promoted her as a model of perfect womanhood well into the twentieth century.
- CHARLOTTE YONGE, Socializer (1823-1901): Yonge wrote under male supervision with all earnings going to the Church. The novelist firmed up the feminine equivalent of the male quest story: men have adventures and grow up, women undergo soul-searching, make mistakes, learn to accept male authority, and efface themselves in the interest of family life. She socialized generations of women.
- QUEEN VICTORIA, Icon (1819-1901): She may have been a Queen, but as a woman and writer, she had the same problems as everyone else. Posthumous censorship worked to preserve her spotless, dignified image as an icon of English womanhood. Victoria mirrored middle class norms of femininity and hardened them.
- EMILY DICKENSON, Recluse (1830-1886): The white-clad eccentric chose seclusion at home as a path towards writing thousands of original poems. Editors expurgated her poems and letters, and biographers sited her creativity in myths of male-oriented womanhood while covering up female-female relationships.
- MABEL LOOMIS TODD, Dickinson’s Editor (1856-1932): Mabel used her position as Dickinson’s editor to elevate herself and claim possession of the poet’s life and works. She expurgated and excised lines from Dickinson’s poems and letters to destroy evidence of the truly significant figure in the poet’s life, her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson.
- GEORGE ELIOT, Professional (1819-1880): Eliot’s epic struggles with being a woman with an out-sized brain lasted her entire life. After an exemplary performance as a dutiful daughter, she took off for London and a professional life. There, she lived against the grain of Victorianism and yet was mired in its assumptions. She was marginalized by a sanctimonious biography.
- EDITH WHARTON, A Long Time Coming (1862-1937): Wharton, failing to flourish as a Victorian woman, came to terms with marriage and sexuality and developed into a woman in full and an award-winning writer. False-friend executors led to a dip in posthumous reputation.
- HELGA ESTBY, Writer Denied (1860-1942): Estby stepped out of the home to salvage her family’s fortunes. This poverty-stricken immigrant lacked money, education, position, and support and was ultimately silenced by family members who burned her chronicles and scrapbooks. Her dreams of writing fell victim to poverty and repressive social codes.
- RADCLYFFE HALL, An Eagle of a Woman (1880-1943): Though defining herself as an invert (a lesbian), Hall took on the characteristics of a dominating Edwardian male. Hall showed great talent for writing, and after outing lesbianism, stood fast as her book was banned. Hall’s lover launched a posthumous campaign to possess her and align Hall’s image with the ideology they both embraced.
- VIRGINIA WOOLF, Killing the Angel (1882-1941): Woolf took on Victorian mores in her fiction and nonfiction, articulated the systemic constraints of being feminine, and identified the conditions necessary for a woman to write: her own money, room and privacy, and detachment from worshipping men—through killing the Angel within. While posthumously patronized as a neurotic, she is now lauded as a social revolutionary.
- ZELDA FITZGERALD, Lost in the Glitz (1900-1948):
Zelda was a Southern belle and then a famous Jazz Era Flapper and celebrity wife. She flunked domesticity, but was haunted by traditional notions of marriage. She wanted desperately to write, but her husband plagiarized her words and claimed her life as his material. Zelda is remembered as a drag on Scott Fitzgerald whereas he has been revealed as a dead weight on her.
- SYLVIA PLATH, Breaking Up with the Angel (1932-1963): Plath was a victim of mental instability and a toxic 1950s femininity in which a successful writing career and a good home life (matrimony and children) were held to be mutually exclusive lifestyles. After her suicide, Ted Hughes denied access to her diaries, letters, and poems in the interest of preserving his own face. He claimed entitlement as her husband and as a superior talent.
- ZORA NEALE HURSTON, No Angel at All (1891-1960): Zora was the most prolific black woman writer of her era. Robust, sexual, and psychologically intact, she lacked the Angel instinct of deferring to men. She had everything Woolf identified as necessary to writing, except secure funds, and was gloriously herself until muted by poverty and buried in an unmarked grave.
Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century
Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction
Children’s Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation
Scarecrow Press – Publication Date: April 12, 2012 For more than 250 years, English children’s literature has transmitted values to the next generation. The stories convey to children what they should identify with and aspire to, even as notions of “goodness” change over time. Through reading, children absorb an ethos of Englishness that grounds personal identity and underpins national consciousness. Such authors as Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien, and J. K. Rowling have entertained, motivated, confronted social wrongs, and transmitted cultural mores in their works—functions previously associated with folklore. Their stories form a new folklore tradition that provides social glue and supports a love of England and English values. In Children’s Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation, Rebecca Knuth follows the development of the genre, focusing on how stories inspire children to adhere to the morals of society. This book examines how this tradition came to fruition Evaluating the connection between children’s literature and the dissemination and formation of identity, this book will appeal to both general readers and academics who are interested in librarianship, English culture, and children’s literature.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Creating “Good” Children
- Socialization: Loyalty, Duty, and Self-Sacrifice
- Creating Manliness and the Boy Hero
- Romanticizing Childhood and England
- Being Playful and Emotionally Alive
- Small Adventures and Happiness
- Autonomy and Affirmation
- Into the Story-Pot: Harry and Heroism
- A Modern English Folklore
Reviews
This valuable text deserves a place in large public and university libraries and on the departmental reference shelves of young adult literature and ethics curricula. – American Reference Books Annual
The key to this book lies… in its structure. First and foremost, this is a potted history of British children’s literature, identifying the dominant concerns of each era, also managing to be thematic… As a primer on the history of children’s literature, Knuth’s book does have its appeal – it is succinct and perceptive in its analysis of the chosen authors and books… Knuth is seeking to identify the values and attitudes that have underpinned British children’s literature, and show how these changed over time, absorbing new ideas which reflected the evolving national consciousness. – Children’s Books History Society
This is an informative, readable survey of the best-known literary works in English written for children from the mid-18th century to the present. Throughout, Knuth (library and information science, Univ. of Hawai’i) engages the issue of nomenclature, noting the distinction between “Britishness” and “Englishness,” the latter term being more atmospheric, perhaps affectionate, and (despite the book’s title) more widely suggested by the works discussed. Major shifts in the depiction of childhood and youth are treated, especially as they shaped national character. One example is the impact of WW I on young men trained in the “ethos of prewar Englishness (the logical extension of Romantic patriotism was dying for England),” which boys absorbed through reading Victorian and Edwardian school and adventure stories that “set them up to serve as cannon fodder.” Especially useful is Knuth’s discussion of the development of picture books and their illustrators, in particular Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway, who profoundly influenced public taste. Summing Up: Recommended. – Choice
Analyzing the works of a myriad British authors including J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, and J.K Rowling, Knuth (LIS professor at the University of Hawaii) explores the impact of children’s literature on the shaping of a national identity and how children’s books act to normalize social mores and foster national unity. Her research covers nearly two and half centuries of British literature and history, from the beginnings of books published especially for young people in the eighteenth century to modern Harry Potter phenomenon. An extensive bibliography and index are both provided. – The Bulletin
Knuth doesn’t hesitate to write poetically about her topic, declaring for instance, that “Folklore carries truth about what makes us human; it is distilled wisdom, rife with motifs and characters that have survived the crucible of time”(2). Later in the book, she proposes, “The cauldron of children’s literature holds a hearty brew that is instrumental in building characters and shaping identity” (160). Clearly, this is a book by an author who is very passionate about children’s literature and about the cultural work it has done and continues to do. This passion is Knuth’s most notable strength.- Bookbird
…I did find myself enjoying the book; the prose was clear and error free, and Knuth’s ideas were well informed. There is no jargon, critical or otherwise. For the most part, I absolutely agree with her assessments, even if I think that children’s reading and identities are rather more complicated than the reader is led to believe. I found the book affirming and comfortable; it told me what I already thought to be true… This text is, despite its claim to something greater, really a lovely little history of children’s literature in England. – Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Page last updated: 06/22/24
Page created: 03/15/18