‘Extraordinary’ Woman&HomeA Roaring Girl was loud when she should be quiet, disruptive when she should be submissive, sexual when she should be pure, ‘masculine’ when she should be ‘feminine’. Meet the unsung heroines of British history who refused to play by the rules.Roaring Girls tells the game-changing life stories of eight formidable women whose grit, determination and radical unconventionality saw them defy the odds to forge their own paths.From the notorious cross-dressing thief Mary Frith in the seventeenth century to rebel slave Mary Prince and adventurer, industrialist and LGBT trailblazer Anne Lister in the nineteenth, these diverse characters redefined what a woman could be and what she could do in pre-twentieth-century Britain.Bold, inspiring and powerfully written, Roaring Girls tells the electrifying histories of women who, despite every effort to suppress them, dared to be extraordinary.
Оглавление
Holly Kyte. Roaring Girls
Copyright
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
A WOMAN’S LOT
THE OLD RADICALS
IS THIS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE?
THE ROARING GIRL
THE THREE FACES OF MARY
A VERY TOMRIG OR RUMPSCUTTLE
MOLL CUTPURSE
THE ROARING GIRL
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
THE QUEEN REGENT OF MISRULE
FEME COVERT
BEDLAM
THE SINNER’S PENANCE
MAD MADGE
LADY BASHFUL
EXILES IN LOVE
TRAITORS TO THE STATE
LET WRITING BOOKS ALONE
MANY SOBERER PEOPLE IN BEDLAM
VIRGIN VIRAGOS
THE RETURN OF THE KING
THE BLAZING WORLD
ALL THE TOWN-TALK
MARGARET THE FIRST
OLD MAID
O HAPPY SOLITUDE
BROUGHT TO MY LAST SHIFT
LETTERS TO A CLERGYMAN
A SERIOUS PROPOSAL TO THE LADIES
THE MOST INGENIOUS MRS ASTELL
SOME REFLECTIONS UPON MARRIAGE
THE PAMPHLET WARS
A SOCIETY OF WOMEN
THE RECLAIMING OF THE SHREW
EN CAVALIER
AN IMPERTINENT INTRUDER
DOCTOR CHARLOTTE
THE PROVOKED WIFE AND THE CARELESS HUSBAND
WEARING THE BREECHES
MUTINEER
CHARLES BROWN
JACK OF ALL TRADES, MISTRESS OF NONE
A STROLLING PLAYER
THE LAST ACT
THE AMAZON
YOUNG AMAZON SNELL
‘THE REAL SOUL OF A MAN’
SOLDIER, SOLDIER
FIGHTING LIKE A GIRL
‘THE DISAGREEABLE TITLE OF MISS MOLLY GRAY’
FAREWELL, JEMMY GRAY
THE JOVIAL TAR
DOWN AND OUT
MILITARY HONOURS
GOODS AND CHATTELS
FAMILY FOR SALE
THE LICK OF THE COWSKIN
A VERY INDECENT MAN
THE PROMISE OF FREEDOM
FREE IN ENGLAND
THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE
TRIAL BY ORDEAL
AM I NOT A WOMAN AND A SISTER?
GENTLEMAN JACK
‘THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL I EVER SAW’
NEW FRIENDS
BETRAYAL
‘DOES YOUR COCK STAND?’
THREE STEPS IN ONE
LADY OF THE MANOR
‘THE NEXT TENANT OF MY HEART’
NEWLYWEDS
LADY TRAVELLERS
THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC
‘WHAT OLD HALIFAX SCANDAL KNOWS ABOUT MISS LISTER’
A PAINTED WANTON
THE HANDSOMEST FAMILY IN THE WORLD
LOVE, HONOUR AND OBEY
‘IS SHE NOT DAZZLING?’
THE QUARREL
THE UNBLUSHING ONE
CRIMINAL CONVERSATION
A HELPLESS WRETCH
THE HARLOT’S PROGRESS
‘MY LITTLE LOST ONE’
NORTON VERSUS NORTON
ENGLISH LAWS FOR WOMEN
UNTYING THE KNOT
LOST AND SAVED
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
INTRODUCTION
MARY FRITH
MARGARET CAVENDISH
MARY ASTELL
CHARLOTTE CHARKE
HANNAH SNELL
MARY PRINCE
ANNE LISTER
CAROLINE NORTON
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
Spellings, capitalisation and italicisation have been silently modernised throughout for clarity and consistency.
OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
.....
In fact, it makes perfect sense that the theatre world should have embraced a figure like Mary. No doubt Middleton and Dekker spotted the lucrative commercial potential of such a larger-than-life celebrity, but the playhouse also occupied a liminal space on the fringes of society where, within the limits of censorship, misfits were welcomed, boundaries were pushed and the established order challenged. And with young boys in dresses playing the roles denied to women, theatre was an artform that relied on transvestism. This simple act of transformation – deemed wholly immoral off-stage – was so integral to the workings of pre-Restoration theatre that it was self-consciously worked into many of its plots, becoming a legitimate stage convention by which female characters could wrest some power and agency for themselves. These gender games could be exposed and toyed with at will by the playwright to remind audiences just how easily the divisions between masculine and feminine could be questioned and the hierarchies that relied on them overturned.[33] In the safe space of the theatre, the normal rules didn’t apply.
It was in the dramatists’ interests, then, to present cross-dressing as something exciting and titillating, but essentially innocuous, though in the real world it remained a different story. At a time when women were being whipped or sent to prison for cross-dressed misdemeanours, publicly flaunting one’s transvestism on stage was downright dangerous. Yet that’s precisely what Mary Frith now proceeded to do. As Moll recites the Epilogue to The Roaring Girl, she tells the audience that if the play didn’t pass muster:
