Fredrika & Mary (new title coming soon…)

Ten or more years ago, before I got totally absorbed by my Aunt Norah’s diaries, I was immersed in the lives of two C19th writers: Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) and her English translator, the poet and writer Mary Howitt (1799-1888). Both women were travellers — Fredrika, most famously, to America in the mid-C19th, and later through Europe to Syria, Turkey and Greece; and Mary to Germany, Switzerland and Italy, where she and her husband William settled in the late 1870s.

Fredrika and Mary were also what we might call ‘seekers’, i.e. women who were actively looking to discover truths — spiritual and otherwise — with the intention of living richer and more meaningful lives (and enabling others to do the same). Mary Howitt especially made fascinating ‘faith journeys’, from the Society of Friends of her childhood and early married life, through Unitarianism and (in response to the death of her young son Claude) Spiritualism, finally converting to Roman Catholicism in her final decade.

While I have written about Fredrika Bremer and Mary Howitt in academic journals, their lives and their discussion of ‘big life questions’ — about the liberating (or otherwise) aspects of travel and what we might learn from being ‘on the road’, and about how women might live well and free, with and without faith or husbands or children — deserve so much more attention. I hope to give them that attention with this project.