Constance Fenimore Woolson: An Interview with Anne Boyd Rioux
Anne Boyd Rioux and I both hang out in a number of places on line where women talk about writing, history, and writing about history. She is a smart, savvy and generous scholar who writes about forgotten women of the past. You will not be surprised to hear that when her newest book, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, showed up on the February list of books to review for Shelf Awareness for Readers, I was quick to call dibs. Once I started reading , I was so engaged that I asked Anne if she would answer some questions here in the Margins.
Before we get to the interview, a little bit about the book:
Nineteenth century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson is one of the lost figures of American fiction. In her lifetime she was recognized as an important writer. today she is generally treated as simply a footnote in the life of Henry James--the woman he feared committed suicide because he did not love her. In Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, literary historian Anne Boyd Rioux reclaims both Woolson's life and her work for a modern audience.
Rioux successfully navigates the balancing act at the heart of any literary biography. She considers Woolson's literary works--six novels and dozens of short stories--within the context of her life, but never reduces Woolson's fiction to mere biographical illustration. The end result is a portrait of a complex woman who chose a literary career over family and domesticity--one of the first women to successfully create such a life. She presents Woolson as a serious writer who strove to portray the pressures of convention on women's lives within the format of the realistic novel. Like her male peers, Woolson traveled extensively in Europe, was a familiar figure in American expatriate circles in England and Italy, and occasionally retreated into solitude when the need to write was strong. Woolson's relationship with Henry James appears less as a story of unrequited love and more as the most important example of her lifelong efforts to find intellectual companionship and respect from her male peers.
Constance Fenimore Woolson is an engaging combination of storytelling and scholarship.
And now please welcome, Anne Boyd Rioux:
What path led you to Woolson?
I found her by accident really. I was browsing the library stacks when I was in graduate school and saw a book with my name on it: ANNE. That was the title of her first novel. So it caught my eye, but it was a recently published collection of her stories nearby--Women Artists, Women Exiles--that really got me interested. I was looking for women writers who had written about what it was like to be a serious artist in the 19th century, and she turned out to be the real deal--someone who wrote about serious women artists and was one herself. The more I read, the more I was drawn to the tensions between ambition and renunciation that were at the heart of her portraits of women.
I ended up writing about her in my dissertation, which became my first book: Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. She was one of four writers I focused on and she always stuck with me as the most ambitious and successful of the group. Then I took a break from scholarship for a bit when my daughter was young, but I found my way back to Woolson when the scholarly group, the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society, asked me to return to their biennial conference. This wonderful group of devoted scholars pulled me back in, and I am grateful for that. I soon discovered, though, that the work they had done bringing Woolson’s work back into print and getting her into the college anthologies was stalling. There weren’t as many new scholars to take the place of the ones who were retiring (because of budget cuts in academia and the slow rate of new hiring). The collection of stories I had loved went out of print, and then Woolson was removed from one of the main anthologies. So I knew we had to do more to make sure she didn’t disappear again.
One of the themes that struck me as I read Constance Fenimore Woolson was the difficulty of a woman being taken seriously as a writer, particularly when dealing with women's emotions and themes related to women's lives. More than a hundred years later, the question of being defined in terms of "women's fiction" is still a vexed one for many writers. Could you tell us a little about the specific challenges Woolson faced, and how they compared to those that women writers face today?
This is such a great question. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. When I first started writing this book, I didn’t make the connection. I was, frankly, living in the 19th century and missing all of the headlines about the VIDA count and Wikipedia taking women writers out of the entry on American writers. My students actually brought them to my attention. We were reading some women writers from the 1850s, who were derided by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a “damned mob of scribbling women.” As we discussed the prejudices they were up against, some of the female students were visibly frustrated and one swore under her breath. I realized this was touching a nerve and asked them about it. “It’s still going on today,” they said and proceeded to tell me about the gender imabalances in the publishing world VIDA was bringing to light, as well some sexist comments a Canadian professor had recently made about women writers. So I went searching online and was shocked at what I found. I had been toiling away on my research on the 19th century, assuming that things had improved considerably for women writers, but I was wrong. Here were women pointing out that Jonathan Franzen was being treated as the second coming for writing essentially domestic novels, while women writers were corralled into a separate category with a lesser status. The same thing happened to Woolson vis-a-vis Henry James in the late-nineteenth century.
In terms of what Woolson specifically faced, she grew up with the kind of animosity towards women writers expressed in Hawthorne’s remark. It was in the periodicals she was reading, and someone in her family drew a goatee on the picture of woman writer in one of the family’s magazines. When I came across that in the archive, I felt like I understood why she waited so long to begin her career. She was 29 and her father had just died and she needed to support herself and her mother. Only necessity could justify the leap into the public sphere. Her brother apparently still didn’t like her being a writer. The fear was that it would lead to even more radical things, like campaigning for women’s rights and thus unsettling her family and the nation. Although Woolson tried hard all of her life to play down the radical nature of her career and her ability to support herself outside of marriage and male power, the fact remains that simply by publishing and speaking her mind she was participating in the gradual revolution in favor of women’s rights.
As a writer, Woolson was not content to be lumped together with other women writers, however. She knew they were treated as second-class citizens in the literary world, and she wanted the respect of male critics and writers, if she could get it. She did, for the most part, by writing what was perceived as “powerful” and “vigorous” fiction. Yet she had to walk a thin line between writing more like men and being considered unladylike. Throughout her career, really, she was accused of writing too much like a woman and not enough like a woman. She couldn’t win, really.
How difficult was it to write about a woman whose biography has been overshadowed by a famous man, in this case Henry James and to a lesser extent Woolson's great uncle, James Fenimore Cooper?
In some ways, these relationships have kept her name alive. Yet, their reputations, especially James’s, have so overshadowed hers that she has become a minor character in his story, a background figure in the panorama of his life. The challenge was to put her at the center of the frame and not let him overwhelm the picture. Unfortunately, there are far fewer archival materials about the first forty years of her life, before she moved to Europe, which is where she met James. People tended to keep her letters from Europe, so there is more information about that period of her life, but not a whole lot about him. Their friendship, as it became more intimate, also became more private, and they decided to burn their letters to each other. Only four of hers to him have survived. There is so much we will never know about their relationship, as a result. This has led to some fairly wild speculation from his biographers, particularly Leon Edel, who assumed she must have been in love with him. Part of the challenge, then, was dismantling these assumptions without giving them too much space. The biography needed to remain her story. So in many cases I simply took out my responses to previous critics or buried them in the footnotes, allowing Woolson to remain center stage.
Writing about an historical figure like Woolson requires living with her over a period of months or years. What was it like to have her as a constant companion?
The more I learned about her, the more I admired her, which I imagine is not always the biographer’s experience. It felt like I was going on an archaeological dig every day, trying to understand what was under the surface of the mask she wore for the world. I wanted to respect her privacy, but I also decided that she would want to be known for who she was, not as some tragic heroine who threw herself out of her window because of unrequited love for James. (That is another myth I had to tackle.)
What I found under the mask was an extremely generous, empathetic person who wrestled mightily with her feelings, in a day when women were encouraged to present a placid facade to the world. There is so much feeling and desire just lurking under the surface, particularly in her fiction. I couldn’t help but feel with and for her. Ultimately, I felt like it was my great honor to get to know her, as if she were a good friend in life.
With this book you've made the leap from writing for an academic audience to writing scholarly work for a broader audience. What were some of the challenges involved?
The biggest challenge was learning how to cut the manuscript down to size and shape it into a narrative. Academic writing is information- and argument-driven. You throw everything you have in there, either to inform the reader or to convince them. And you don’t think too much about what the reading experience is like. Sure, you want to be clear (at least some of us do), but you aren’t thinking about making your writing a pleasure to read. But one of the main reasons I wanted to write a biography was that it would give me the opportunity to stretch myself as a writer and to create something that was more pleasing to write and to read.
The second challenge was learning to tell the story in my own voice. Once I had the narrative shaped and the manuscript cut down, I still had too many quotations. Both my agent and editor said that all of the quotations pulled the reader out of the story. Academics are used to providing evidence as accurately as possible, so they tend to quote A LOT. The main part of the second round of revisions was to paraphrase and summarize in my own words and to use quotations more judiciously.
Finally, it was simply learning to keep rewriting and rewriting and listening to the sound of the prose. I have never worked so hard at my writing before. It was a great lesson for me that I have brought back to my students. The saying goes that writing is rewriting, but how much time do most academics or students spend reworking their prose until it really flows?
Which of Woolson's novels or short stories would you recommend as an introduction to her work?
Of the stories I have collected in Miss Grief and Other Stories, I would recommend “Miss Grief” as a great starting point. It gives you a sense of her skill and power as a writer, as well as what she was up against in a world that valued women as beautiful objects rather than as creative minds. Readers also shouldn’t miss “Rodman the Keeper,” which captures the difficulties of reuniting the nation after the Civil War on such a personal level. It is an immensely moving story. Each story is really so different from the others. Although there are some similar themes, particularly in terms to her showing the reader the humanity of marginalized characters, the stories as a whole capture the great breadth and diversity of her career. She was a master at setting scene and providing revealing details that really make you feel like you are there. So you couldn’t go wrong starting with any of the stories.
As for her novels, Anne, published in 1882, was her most popular. I enjoyed teaching it in a class on the female Bildungsroman last semester, and it was a hit. The students loved it and felt that young women should grow up reading it alongside Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Anne is a wonderful, iconoclastic heroine who learns to stay true to her own mind and sense of morality when the world around her expects her to conform to certain images it has of her. It’s also an adventure story and carries you along on a wave of suspense and emotion. It’s a real page-turner. Some of my students couldn’t resist staying up to finish it long before it was due in class. It is not currently in print in a reliable, edited edition. I’m hoping we can change that!
Is there anything else you wish I had asked you about?
Why should readers know Woolson’s writings? Do they have more than a historical importance? What is their literary value?
Woolson believed that the greatest literature touched our emotions, made us feel for characters who may come from very different backgrounds than ourselves. In this way, she was at odds with Henry James and William Dean Howells, but her editor at Harper’s agreed with her. Today, we tend to agree with Woolson, that literature should convey empathy and make readers understand what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes. This is precisely what her fiction does. Although written a hundred and thirty or so years ago, we can still feel her great empathy for lives lived on the margins, lives her male contemporaries tended to overlook. She wrote with empathy but not sentimentality; the emotions she evokes are never simple. I also believe that it was her great gift to show readers how little they know about others through self-assured characters who discover their own ignorance. She wrote with great subtlety and power, unsettling readers by allowing the silenced to speak.
Anne Boyd Rioux is a professor at the University of New Orleans and the author/editor of four books, including Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist and Miss Grief and Other Stories, both published by W. W. Norton. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, one for Public Scholarship. Rioux also writes reviews and essays for general and academic audiences, specializing in biography and women writers. Her current project is Reading Little Women, which will celebrate and reevaluate the classic novel for its 150th anniversary in 2018.* You can find her on Facebook and Twitter as well as at her website: http://anneboydrioux.com/. If you're interested in forgotten women writers of the past, I strongly recommend that you sign up for her newsletter, The Bluestocking Bulletin
*I'm putting this on my reading calendar now!
Dorothea Dix Volunteers
"Dragon" Dix was a shadowy and controversial figure in the opening scenes of the PBS series, Mercy Street. The historical Miss Dix was just as controversial.
For those of you who don't have the details of the American Civil War at your fingertips: the war began at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, when troops of the two-month-old Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter, in Charleston, South Carolina. Almost before the echoes of the first gun shots died away, President Lincoln called for 75,000 militia volunteers to serve for ninety days, certain that would be enough time to put down what he described as a state of insurrection. The public’s response was immediate and overwhelming. Men thronged the army’s recruiting offices. The first two Massachusetts regiments marched toward Washington and Fort Monroe two days after the president’s call; two more followed within the week. Individual states filled their recruitment quotas and offered more.
Citizen soldiers were not the only volunteers to respond to the president’s call. Even though Lincoln had said nothing about nurses—and had certainly not called for women to come to their nation’s aid—Dorothea Lynde Dix, a fifty-nine-year- old reformer dedicated to improving the treatment of prisoners, paupers, and the mentally ill, set out immediately to volunteer her services to create an army corps of female nurses to care for wounded soldiers.
By the time the Civil War began, Dix had spent twenty years working to change the way people thought about the mentally ill. She traveled almost continuously at a time when not many people traveled more than a few miles from home and women seldom traveled alone. Railroad companies gave her free passes, and freight haulers carried her packages to prisons, hospitals, and asylums at no charge. Most importantly, she had convinced politicians at every level of American government to support prison reform bills and to build insane asylums. She had even worked for reform at the federal level. In 1848, she lobbied for a bill to grant the states more than twelve million acres of public land to be used for the benefit of the insane, deaf, dumb, and blind. The bill passed both houses of Congress. President Franklin Pierce ultimately vetoed the bill, but Dix made important connections in Congress in its pursuit, a fact that meant her proposal for an army nursing corps got a fair hearing.
Dix was taking a well-deserved rest with friends in Trenton, New Jersey, when she heard the news that Sumter had fallen. Without hesitation, she packed her bags and left that afternoon for Washington, DC, on a trip that would be marked by troop movements, patriotic crowds, packed trains, wild rumors, and a secessionist riot in Baltimore.
When Dix reached Washington, the city was on high alert. Pickets guarded public buildings and bridges. Soldiers were billeted at the White House in anticipation of a Confederate attack before morning. A less determined woman might have have hesitated, but Dix went directly from the train station to the White House, where she volunteered her services and those of an “army of nurses,” yet to be recruited, to support the Union’s troops.
If any other woman had appeared unannounced at the White House with such a scheme, she might have been turned away. But Dix, soft-spoken and physically fragile but mentally tough, was preceded by her national reputation as a humanitarian, crusader, and lobbyist. She was used to working with powerful politicians, and they were used to working with her. Even with the threat of the Confederate army at the door, she and her proposal received a warm reception.
Dix’s offer to create an army corps of female nurses was revolutionary at the time. She envisioned a nursing corps of respectable women similar to that pioneered by Florence Nightingale but on a much larger scale. She shared Nightingale’s belief that a nurse should not simply be a doctor’s assistant but a patient’s primary advocate within the hospital, similar to the role she played for the mentally ill--an idea that would inevitably put Dix and her nurses in conflict with the doctors they worked with.
Three days later, Secretary of War Simon Cameron accepted Dix's offer, without taking the time to define what her position would entail or how she would fit into the military medical bureaucracy. The Army's Medical Bureau immediately began to attempt to undermine her authority, a process made easier by the fact that she lacked both administrative skills and tact.
Dix had always worked alone. As a lobbyist, she knew how to work the political system. As a reformer, she knew how to inspire action in others. But she had never run an organization, and she didn’t try to run one now. Instead she treated the nursing corps as a web of personal relationships with herself at the center. With no organization to back her up, she handled every detail herself, and was seemingly incapable of distinguishing between the important and unimportant. She had no system in place for finding and approving nurses. George Templeton Strong, definitely not a fan of "Dragon" Dix, summed up her personality accurately as "energetic, benevolent, unselfish and a mild case of monomania; working on her own hook, she does good, but no one can cooperate with her for [she] belongs to the class of comets, and can be subdued into relations with no system whatever.”
Despite her personal limitations and all attempts by the Army's medical bureau, hostile surgeons or independent nurses to undermine or sidestep her authority, over the course of the war Dorothea Dix appointed more than three thousand nurses, roughly 15 percent of the total who served with the Union army, and more than any other person or organization involved with nursing in the Civil War.
Interested in learning more about Miss Dix, including her role in stopping an attempt to assassinate Lincoln on his way to Washington? I recommend Thomas J Brown's Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer or, of course, Heroines of Mercy Street.
Marie von Clausewitz: An Interview with Vanya Eftimova Bellinger
As long-time readers here at the Margins know, I'm a fan of the Pritzker Military Library. I attend several of their programs each year and listen to more through their live-streaming feature.*
Back in January, I attended a presentation at the Priztker in which Vanya Eftimova Bellinger spoke about her new book, Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War. I was fascinated. Bellinger not only introduced me to an engaging historical figure about whom I knew absolutely nothing, but she also discussed important questions about the difficulties of writing about historical women, a subject that I'm deeply interested in. (No surprise there to regular readers of History in the Margins!)
Bellinger kindly agreed to answer questions about the book, her research, and writing about historical women. (Or as we like to say here at the Margins, history, writing, and writing about history.) Please welcome Vanya Eftimova Bellinger:
What path led you to writing about Marie von Clausewitz?
I am a journalist and I always wanted to write a book. Some years ago I married a US soldier but my first years in the United States were very difficult because I did not know what to do with myself. I did not speak English well enough to work for American media and I did not have many friends. I decided to get a MA degree in something that would require a lot of writing, as a way to improve my English. But, like every other military family, we move to a new duty station every two to three years. It was a complicated situation. Norwich University’s Military History program offered me enough mobility.
Of course when you study military history, you have to deal with Carl von Clausewitz because On War, by and large, is at the center of this discipline. I already spoke German and had lived in Germany for many years. This gave me clear edge in the discussions but also led me to read more and I became a bit obsessed with Clausewitz. I learned that the military theorist never finished On War and it was his wife, Marie, who edited and published the treatise after his untimely death. It was such an interesting story but no one has written extensively on the subject.
Half jokingly, I wrote in an email to my professor, John T.Kuehn, saying that I could study Marie’s life and influence one day. He was very supportive. This is one of the things I love about America - people don’t try to put you in a box or tell you about your limitations. Back in Europe, I would probably have heard skeptical comments about my bravado and all of the possible obstacles. But in America you are allowed and even encouraged to run with an idea and if you fail, people would still give you credit for trying.
You said something in your program at the Pritzker Military library that struck my imagination as a historian: that sometimes the primary sources dealing with women are not lost, they are just forgotten. Could you tell us about your experience finding primary sources related to Marie von Clausewitz?
I was very lucky. In 2012 I began my work on Marie’s biography. We went back to Europe that summer on vacation and I contacted several archives in Berlin. Everyone was very nice and the archivists brought me everything they had in their vaults. It wasn’t much. I think the archivists felt a bit sorry for me—I had come all the way from the United States—so they offered me to write down my email address. It is a standard practice, the archives promise to contact you if new documents were to appear or another scholar researched the subject. If truth to be told, I thought I should give up on this project…. By that point only 16 of Marie’s letters to her husband, shortened at that, were known. The correspondence, together with the majority of Clausewitz’s papers, was thought to have been lost during WWII.
Then in December 2012, just couple of months later, I received an email from the Prussian State Privy Archives asking me whether I were still working on Marie von Clausewitz. They had received as a deposit the family papers of an old aristocratic family and among them was the Clausewitz couple’s complete correspondence. Can you imagine - 283 letters written by Marie? So the correspondence was never lost, but none, and I include myself in this, thought about researching the family tree and contacting the descendants.
I have to admit that after the initial excitement I went into panic mode. The Prussian Privy Archives offered to make e-copies of the letters, so I didn’t need to travel and stay for months in Berlin, but it was up to me to decipher and read them. And if you have ever seen nineteenth century handwriting, you know how impenetrable the text appears. I sat on that email from the Prussian Privy Archives for about two months. I did not know what to do because I realized that this would be a huge project, an enormous challenge and would take years from my life. And I am this little Eastern European woman, an immigrant, always one check away from financial troubles, I still make stupid errors in English… How on earth could I pull this off???
Yet I also felt responsibility. Someone—call it God, fate, nature, chance—had given me this opportunity and I had to make the best of it. I learned to read Marie’s handwriting. People started taking me seriously. Other archives and private collections learned about my project and contacted me. Suddenly there were more primary sources I could ever include in one book.
This is my advice to scholars, especially if their topic is on the margins. Look harder, think outside the box, leave your business card everywhere, build a network, knock on every door, and ask everyone.
Beyond the question of sources, did you run into other challenges in writing about a woman whose biography is overshadowed by a famous man, in this case her husband Carl von Clausewitz?
When it comes to women’s history, so much context and details are lost. Few people thought necessary to write down their daily life; or consider the influence informal gatherings, like literary salons, had over the process of crafting groundbreaking ideas; how back-room conversations and personal connections influenced political processes; or the way grass-root movements and charitable initiatives shaped social tissue. And, as we know, these were realms mostly dominated by women. Often enough, women themselves did not think their own lives worthy enough to leave extensive writings behind.
Marie actually did not have this problem. She knew that hers and Clausewitz’s lives, love and partnership were unusual. Marie indeed left extensive notes about her childhood, their courtship, and the early years of marriage. She kept all their correspondence and every other scrap of paper. But then life got in the way and she wrote down only short notes, to be reminded about dates and events later when one day she or Clausewitz would compose an extensive narrative. He died untimely, and after that, busy with editing and publishing On War, and her day job at the royal court, Marie had no time to work on this project. Then she passed away unexpectedly too.
Compared to the challenges other scholars of women’s history face, I had an enormous amount of primary sources to explore and quote. Often it felt, however, like playing Jeopardy! What did the short remark mean here, why did Marie feel compelled to write down this seemingly unimportant detail, why she never said a word about that earth-shuttering or widely known event, why did she recorded these particular four lines from a famous novel in her notebook? Sometimes it took me weeks and months to untangle the clues….
Writing about a historical figure like Marie requires living with her over a period of months or years. By your own account, Marie could be a bit "pushy". What was it like to have her as a constant companion?
Funny but I constantly had Clausewitz in my head: “You better write this good. So much has been written about me but nothing about Marie. My wife deserves a good book! And would haunt you forever if you screw this up!”
I don’t think Marie and I are similar personalities — I neither have her pedigree, nor political connections, even less high social status, my French is terrible. But we are women in similar situations. We are both army wives. We both felt one time or the other that we had very little control over the course of our own lives. We had to push against circumstances that limit us. So Marie became a good friend for me, someone I don’t always agree with, but I really like. There were several occasions when I wished she would say or do something else. Sometimes she obsessed about things that really did not matter and I wish I could tell her to move on.
Mostly I felt privileged to study someone so up-close, to read her most intimate thoughts, without any restrictions and concealment. I know more about Marie than about my own mother…. And that’s alright with me because I don’t want to know all of my parents’ secrets.
Have you experienced any pushback on your argument that Marie was central to shaping the final form of Clausewitz's On War?
The crucial role Marie played in editing and publishing Clausewitz’s seminal treatise is well-known. Her “Preface” is on page one of On War and everyone who opens the book usually reads it. We also know that Clausewitz never considered leaving the manuscript to anyone else but Marie. Throughout the centuries scholars studying his drafts have also observed that many of them are written with her handwriting. In this sense, it’s hard to dispute that Marie was the person closest to Clausewitz.
Still, I paid enormous attention to citations, prior scholarship, context and translation, in order to make every one of my arguments irrefutable. So far, indeed, none has criticized my explanations and interpretations (I cross my fingers).
Oddly enough, some readers tell me that I should have included more details, adventures and stories about Marie. Yet when you are the first author working with new material you have to extensively defend all of your groundbreaking arguments. It is a tough balance to find between scholarship and storytelling. There is simply not enough space because we all work with a pre-determined word count. In my case the publishing house even increased it later by around 15,000 words.
I also believe that readers, when finishing a book they really like, always wish for fifty more pages. However, I am not sure that initially they would have picked a work from a new author if it were, say, 500 pages. But maybe this is a good criticism to have, it means that readers like my style and storytelling and would read the next book I write.
Is there anything else you wish I had asked you about?
Why the life of a nineteenth century noble woman matters to us? Of course in the case of Marie, she played a crucial role in the creation of one of the most influential books ever written, On War, and unraveling her story brings us closer to understanding Clausewitz and his ideas.
Yet I think there is a universal reason why women’s lives and voices matter and why works on women’s history are suddenly so popular. It’s not because they negate great men’s lives and achievements. I would argue, in fact, that my book is not revisionist. Clausewitz actually comes better off. The more you read about Clausewitz, the husband, the more you appreciate Clausewitz, the scholar, and sympathize with Clausewitz, the soldier.
Humanity has made enormous progress in so many areas but there are still things we don’t understand about the world we are living in and the forces which shaped it. How could good ideas do so much harm in real life; how could decent people end up on the wrong side of history and advocate horrible things; why seemingly irrational concepts take hold of so many minds? In order to understand these complexities we have to change the perspective, we have to go to the nitty-gritty of social, political and military processes, and open up the narrative. Women’s history could be one of these vehicle of comprehension. It brings forward stories previously ignored, it confront long-held believes, it creates a fuller picture. Last but not least, often these heroines had incredibly interesting and exciting lives and it is pure pleasure to read about them.
*It's a great deal. You don't have to miss out just because you don't live in Chicago. I don't have to miss out just because the weather is nasty.
Vanya Eftimova Bellinger is the author of Marie von Clausewitz. The Woman Behind the Making of On War, recently published by Oxford University Press-USA. () Born in Bulgaria, she is a veteran reporter and has worked for major Bulgarian and German media.
Vanya Eftimova Bellinger is the winner of the 2016 Society for Military History Moncado Prize for her article "The Other Clausewitz: Findings from the Newly Discovered Correspondence between Marie and Carl von Clausewitz,” The Journal of Military History 79 (April 2015). Her book is available at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190225432 or through your local bookseller.