In Carmen Maria Machado’s short story, ‘Inventory’ (2017), a solitary woman compiles her life’s list of sexual encounters. ‘Every person I’ve ever loved. Every person who has probably loved me.’ She remembers women of all ages, and men too. From drunken high-school couplings to more risky pleasures: hook-ups with friends or random strangers; melancholy sex on the floor of empty houses, ‘skin reflected silver from the moon’; an abusive wife; one-night-stands who grimly masturbate in solitude after the human coupling has concluded. As the list grows, incidental details gather into narrative. In news reports playing in late night diners, planes are grounded; ‘a list of symptoms of the virus blossoming a state away’; meetings on ‘how to stockpile food and manage outbreaks…should the virus hop the firebreak’; a relationship endured ‘because I was afraid of what the world was catching all round us.’[1] People and places must be abandoned in order to survive. ‘The fucking thing is only passing through physical contact’, one character complains, ‘if people would just stay apart.’ Against a background of death, physical intimacy becomes an increasingly queer remnant of a shockingly-recent past: as an archive of touch, the list fortifies against loneliness. Her final lover is a woman with grey hair and green eyes. But when she symptoms begins to display symptoms ‘there is no time to mourn’ her. Abandoning her coastal home, the woman holes up on an island, gazing back to shore, imagining ‘the virus blooming on the horizon like a sunrise’ and compulsively writing.  Posthuman life becomes matter-of-fact, ‘the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.’[2] A catalogue of the human compulsion to love against the odds, ‘Inventory’ mourns the end of love even as its narrator persists.

Machado’s brief inventory of the lost recalls Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), another hybrid text which gestures at the impact of contagious disease by shifting between bare enumeration, anecdote, and the isolated perspective of its first-person narrator—the quasi-anonymous H.F. Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year also furnished Mary Shelley with an historical template for the ravages of individual alienation. In her 1826 novel, The Last Man, scenes of death accumulate. Shelley’s bills of mortality are unremitting—infants, parents, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters—an impossible calculus of loss. But unlike that eighteenth-century avatar of loneliness, Robinson Crusoe, love is central to these survivors’ stories, even if its purpose seems unclear. Desolate ‘monarchs of the waste’ all may be, but the materials that solitude furnishes are used to very differing effects.[3] These extinction fictions, use the psychological extremities of solitude to quarantine the past in order to mourn it. Under the sign of the secular apocalypse which is extinction, these writers process the labours of love, and the estrangements of self and gender that occur in the wake of its loss.

The Last Man was described by Muriel Spark as ‘a compound of the domestic romance, the Gothic extravaganza, and the sociological novel’.[4] It is also an extinction fiction, a story of the very last remaining human left adrift after accidents of plague, war, or climate has extinguished all others. In this futurist vision a plague sweeps across continents, annihilating civilizations and causing global unrest. A novel that begins as the collective biography of a circle of friends, loosely based on Shelley’s own, gradually gives way to a tale about the inexorable power of disease, until only one individual remains—the solitary narrator, Lionel Verney. Verney’s predicament crystallizes the idea that ‘the condition of the individual is essentially isolated and therefore ultimately tragic’, exploring a ‘metaphysics of alienation…the threat of man’s aloneness in an unintelligible universe.’[5] An extreme version of the Wordsworthian Solitary, Shelley’s work self-consciously percolates her own autobiography. The character of Adrian acts as a literary idealization of her husband Percy Bysshe; the figure of Raymond a part-portrait of Byron. But the last man’s status as a curious compound of Shelley herself and other women (including Clair Clairmont) seems blithely accepted by critics as an unremarkable act of literary transvestism. Shelley’s grief-stricken journal entry following Percy’s death turns her into a universalized cipher for devastation: ‘The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.”[6] I wonder whether extinction fictions ‘scale up’ individual loss that might otherwise be dismissed as essentially ‘female’, amplifying felt magnitudes of pain: the intimate loss of life that is miscarriage; children’s death as the foreclosure of the futurity; the self-reproach of a body that will not reproduce despite the prompts desire; the dissolution of family itself. It seems to me that, in its transexual shift, The Last Man is in part about the gendered crisis that such losses produce. In the ‘last relic’ of humanity, Lionel Verney, the novel generates a curious sense of melancholy: a literary example of ‘extinction debt’, of survival without recovery expressed through something approximating a transgender imaginary.

It is a familiar principle of Shelley criticism that her own anguished familial background contributed to her literary preoccupations. Ellen Moers suggests that Shelley was ‘not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born’ and not a ‘lawful’ mother since she was not married to Percy Bysshe until afterward.[7] Thus Frankenstein is routinely accepted as the Romantic ur-text of maternity, birth, pain, and death. Written after the first of Shelley’s infant losses, the novel is the literary by-product of a teenage pregnancy. Shelley lost several children shortly after birth—the common brutality of that age—and by miscarriage. But she also lost her son, William (she called him ‘Willmouse’), at the age of three: an age when a child’s character comes out in play and chatter. William would die in Italy, where the Shelleys were living a peripatetic life amongst picturesque ruins and real people. In December 1818, with Clair Clairmont, the Shelleys visited the Bay of Baie, and Elysian Fields; in June the following year, William was taken ill, and died at Rome. Disconsolate, and pressurized by her husband to move yet again, the losses of her five years, she wrote, felt like suffering meant ‘to wean me from the world if I were too fond of it.’ Devastating for both parents, for Mary Shelley in particular it caused a profound alienation from human relations. Writing to Irish ex-patriot Emilia Curran, Shelley asked that Curran tend William’s tomb at Rome ‘near which I shall lie one day, and care not, for my own sake, how soon. I never shall recover that blow… the thought never leaves me for a single moment; everything on earth has lost its interest to me.’[8] Maternal desolation is not just personal grief, but complete alienation from the natural world so often conceived as a Romantic source of solace. Percy Bysshe, too, theorized nature as a force for community when human sympathies failed.

In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart…by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes… Sterne says that if he were in a desert he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.[9]

To exist without love is to subsist: to be a ‘living sepulchre’, a relic, condemned to survival without recovery. As Mary Jacobus has shown, Shelley’s writing is ‘suffused with maternal mourning as well as survivor guilt’: a primal ache of anguish and loneliness.[10]

Denatured and dispossessed, Verney’s grief is that of the childless mother. There is no way to call her boy back to life but to witness his absence in the world. In the years leading up to the publication of The Last Man, Shelley was engaged in editing the posthumous poems of her husband. At the last moment, the work was aborted and withdrawn due to her father-in-law’s demands. The novel acts as a creative proxy for the literary memorialization that Posthumous Poems was meant to have performed. As editorial mediator, Shelley acts as a kind of midwife to the dead: bringing forth living memory from the scraps of living memory. In the preface to The Last Man, she makes her role as medium crucial to the vatic scope of the speculative novel. Reworking Shelley’s memories of the Italian landscapes visited before her son’s death, the preface recalls visits to the ‘Sibyl’s Cave’ (5) near Naples, where she and her companion find ‘frail and attenuated leaves’ containing prophetic writing. Deciphering the leaves’ meaning was once their joint labour, but is now a solitary task: an act of creative translation. Shelley’s sibylline framing ‘pointedly refashions British prophecy’s longstanding patriarchal idiom…to accommodate female authors and their perspectives.’[11] Doubly mediated—author as a medium channelling a seer—Shelley’s preface constructs her as an interpreter ‘of real sorrows and endless regrets’ into ‘ideality, which takes the sting from pain’ (7). If mediums in fact were generally female or feminine conduits, genderswitching from the avatar of ‘Mary Shelley’ to ‘Lionel Verney’ might be one way of swerving accusations of excessive sensibility. As she mourned the death of her child, her father William Godwin rebuked her for her failure to rise to her social responsibility. ‘The human species’, he charged her,

may be divided into two great classes: those who lean on others for support, and those who are qualified to support. Of these last, some…can support a world, contributing by their energies to advance their whole species one or more degrees in the scale of perfectibility…You were formed by nature to belong to the best of these classes, but you seem to be shrinking away, and voluntarily enrolling yourself among the worst.[12]

In depicting of the end of humanity, Shelley imaginatively expands her grief to fill the world. Conceiving a (male) survivor whose stoicism cannot change the brute fact of extinction, she instead suggests both the pain and pointlessness of enduring lastness. A character formed for both intellectual service and love, Verney endures an insupportable solitude where the care of elegy is now the only office of love.

Global in its scope and energies, the novel is nonetheless ineluctably drawn to the site of Shelley’s personal apocalypse: as if uncovering a kernel of trauma at the heart of its prophecy of extinction. Fleeing England, the band of plague survivors pursue a final desperate ‘scheme of migration’ to Italy in the hope of salvaging the remnant of humanity. But Shelley is unsparing in her depiction of the limits of individual agency and the fallacy of personal exceptionalism. Each person ‘trusted that their beloved family would be the one preserved’, but the plague demolishes ‘that pertinacious optimism which…characterized our human nature (409).’ The final section of the novel is unremitting. Verney’s son Evelyn, ‘dear even to pain’, like Shelley’s William, dies of typhus. It is his death which turns the remnants on their ‘pilgrimage towards Rome’ (436).  In The Last Man’s crowning catastrophe, Verney’s two remaining friends are drowned in a storm. He finds himself alive on the shore of Italy:

For an instant I compared myself to that monarch of the waste – Robinson Crusoe. We had both been thrown companionless – he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world. (349)

The schemes of material accumulation and improvement that Crusoe finds diverting cannot comfort Shelley’s relic. While Defoe’s desert island is reassuringly temporary, Shelley’s castaway’s predicament is permanent. ‘Shall I wake, and speak to none, pass the interminable hours, my soul, islanded in the world, a solitary point, surrounded by vacuum?’, Verney asks. Such a sublime sense of isolation, both temporal and existential, fuels the vertigo of the final pages of The Last Man. Humanity has receded ‘like a tide…leaving [the individual] blank and bare in the midst.’ Plague is merely Shelley’s pretext for presenting a condition of pathological intensity: the malaise of ‘utter irremediable loneliness’.

The Last Man thus deconstructs the optimistic possibilities of transcendence found elsewhere in Romantic writing. In her novel Mathilda, Shelley was able to imagine a ‘perfect solitude’ where generous stores of self-subsistence meant you ‘wished for no friend’ because your own thoughts were company enough. Verney, wandering disconsolately from one empty town to another, leaves in each a desperate message: ‘Friend, come! I wait for thee!’ The irony of this long novel is that it is narrated without hope of a readership, yet desperately seeks an audience. Caught on the cusp between the need to communicate and consciousness of its futility, this is Beckett without the jokes. Who is Verney in an empty world? The ‘unveiled course of my lone futurity’ (458), demands ‘how could I resign myself? Without love, without communion, without sympathy’ (463). Such stark conditions of a friendless futurity dramatically reframe the philosopher David Hume’s lament, ‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?’

The final pages of the novel answer that question, in a way. They remind me of the plaintive lines of one of her husband’s fragments, inscribed ‘To my Lost William’: ‘With what truth I may say | Roma Roma Roma | non e piu come era prima’.[13] The holy city, a vast storehouse of history and memory, provides a ‘medicine for many and vital wounds’ (462). It is now a vast sepulchre, reverberating with Shelley’s loss. If Rome lies at the heart of Shelley’s solitude it is also the place where Verney comes to terms with his fate, to begin living his solitude in earnest. Both a cause for sorrow, and a condition which is also a kind of strange psychic resource, Rome provides a lesson in resignation—or durance, perhaps. It is where Verney reads and dreams, and starts writing. ‘O, worn and beating heart, may I dissect thy fibres?’ (465), he asks, before embarking on his life’s work. Verney’s heart (like Shelley’s, I suspect) pulsed with maternal affection, its pain an embodied testimony. As one sixteenth-century physician writes, ‘The love of the mother is so strong, though the child be dead and laid in the grave, yet always she hath him quick in her heart.”[14] Such unrecoverable loss, as in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, is the novel’s ‘kernel’: ‘its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s.’[15] Verney, who had hoped to write for posterity, becomes instead a different type of author: one who preserves the loved not just in elegy but through the care of writing.[16] Though he claims to be leaving a ‘sole monument’ of himself as the last man, what he produces is a living testament of love. It is an account of rich lives: political and personal passions—of friends whose ineffectual highmindedness is delineated without the bitterness of personal reproach; of the astonished wonder and love that children prompt; the way that even infant lives can carry the traces of care and anxiety bequeathed by parents to them. By writing, Verney creates a future of sorts: the makeshift form of hope that is creativity. ‘Capricious and childish’ in his despair, he suddenly imagines ‘this world re-peopled’ through ‘the children of a saved pair of lovers’ (466). Shelley’s extinction fiction swiftly rejects the existence of some such ‘tender offspring of the re-born world’ (341): Verney affirms ‘loneliness is my familiar, sorrow my inseparable companion…none shall ever come’ (467). But what is offered in its stead is a mother’s generative rebellion against death: literature committed to keeping the lost alive. Through writing Verney saves what he can of his lost son and feels again, despite it all.

The Last Man is an astonishing but unsparing work. It domesticates the inevitability of nineteenth-century ‘extinction discourse’ through its grim prophecy.[17]  Its vision of the hapless survivor living a kind of posthumous existence resonates with contemporary feelings of climate grief as well as our sense of helplessness as yet another wave of Covid-19 rises. Peter Melville has argued that Verney’s despair becomes ‘a kind of antibody that allows him to live with and confront the devastation and loneliness of his tragic fate’. By the close of the novel, Verney’s persistence makes him a monument to human endurance: ‘a figure whose psychical fortitude sustains and produces an enduring synthesis between contrary mental states—between hope and despair—which in turn embodies … the spectral image of good health.’[18] Framing Shelley’s novel within the current Covid-19 crisis, Eileen Hunt Botting notes that ‘Verney realizes that even if he is the last man on Earth, he must live as though he is not. He must sustain humanity by acting upon his profound sense of the interconnectedness of his fate with other forms of life — human or not.’[19] If the literature of loneliness inoculates against the risks of enforced, unwilled isolation, it does so by reminding us of what we stand to lose if we forget our duty of care to each other.

[1] Carmen Maria Machado, ‘Inventory,’ in Her Body and Other Parties (Profile Books, 2019) p. 35.

[2] Machado, p. 43

[3] Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2008), p. 349. All further references are to this edition.

[4] Muriel Spark, The Child of Light: Mary Shelley (London: Tower Bridge Publications, 1951), p. 2.

[5] Hugh Luke, ‘The Last Man: Mary Shelley’s Myth of the Solitary’, Prairie Schooner Vol. 39, No. 4 (WINTER 1965 / 66), 316-327: 325.

[6] Mary W. Shelley, Journals, May 14 1823.

[7] Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,’ in Literary Woman (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 216-224, p. 217.

[8] Mary W. Shelley, Letters, pp. 249-250.

[9] P.B. Shelley, ‘On Love,’ http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~djb/shelley/1880onlove.html

[10] Mary Jacobus, First Things: Reading the Maternal Imaginary (Routledge, 1995), p. 107.

[11] Ruppert, Timothy. “Time and the Sibyl in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 41 no. 2, 2009, p. 141-156. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sdn.0.0054. See also Mellor, Anne K. “Blake, the Apocalypse, and Romantic Women Writers.” Romanticism and Millenarianism. Ed. Tim Fulford. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 139–52.

[12] Godwin to Mary W. Shelley.

[13] See http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/sc/hu/to_william/#/p1 for image and transcription. ‘It is not as it was before’.

[14] Stephen Greenblatt, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/hamnet-shakespeare-wisewoman-stratford/

[15] Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020), p. 8.

[16] On learning to read and write Verney says ‘I acquired new sympathies and pleasures…Suddenly I became as it were the father of all mankind. Posterity became my heirs’, p. 120.

[17] Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 8.

[18] Peter Melville, ‘The Problem of immunity in The Last Man’, SEL: 1500-1800, 2007, 47:4.

[19] Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Mary Shelley Created ‘Frankenstein,’ and Then a Pandemic’, The New York Times, March 13, 2020.

Rebecca Anne Barr (@R_A_Barr) is Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexualities in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.

The post Extinction rebellion: solitude, love and gender appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

(1)

1960. The psychiatrist Alexander Mezey, himself a refugee, has just published the results of his work running a temporary clinic at the Maudsley hospital in London for Hungarian refugees suffering from psychiatric illness.[1] One 24-year-old teacher who had difficulties finding anything other than labouring work in Britain described a sense of hopelessness and despair at the situation he found himself in: ‘I cannot live in this country, it is affecting my soul…Everything fills me with forebodings.’ Another, a mining recruit, ‘a solitary boy, very attached to his mother’ was so unhappy on his arrival that he wanted to return home and on receiving a letter from his mother advising him not to, experienced symptoms of hysteria and hyperventilation. Mezey suggests that those who had been ‘marginal’ people in Hungary seemed more susceptible to falling victim to the culture of isolation which resulted from their exile.

(2)

1968. The British Council for Aid to Refugees have released the results of their inquiry into the conditions of older refugees in Britain, those who had arrived from Europe’s displaced person camps after the Second World War. It makes for stark reading in the picture of isolation and penury outlined. ‘Where do this group of elderly people turn to for companionship, help and social support, bearing in mind that they have fewer children and close relatives, more ill-health and possibly greater financial difficulties than their British contemporaries?’⁠[2] A higher proportion lived on their own than older British people, especially in London, where many had ended up for work: ‘They often lived in virtual isolation, especially where their rooms were on the top floor of the house, and they were too infirm to climb stairs easily or to go out.’ One elderly refugee who had no knowledge of English was referred to BCAR when her daughter had a breakdown and was hospitalised. ⁠‘She was very distressed that she had not heard from her daughter for some weeks and, as she was unable to write either in English or her own language, it was not possible for her to ask the Hospital Authorities for news.’ ⁠Another woman’s English literacy had declined so significantly that she could not understand when a neighbour was trying to tell her that her kitchen was on fire. Those who were single were described as ‘intensely lonely’. ⁠

(3)

June 1983. The suicide of a thirteen-year-old Vietnamese girl, Nguyen Mau Phung, on a council estate in Lewisham has reached the national press. Her death ‘speaks for 16,000’, according to the Times. Estates like these have been increasingly reported about for the instances of racist attacks taking place, including those targeting Vietnamese refugees, and their connections to the National Front. In this case, it is the shock of Phung’s death which makes the news. Andrew Palmer, a case worker for the British Refugee Council, described how her death ‘raises questions about how many others among the Vietnamese refugees may be feeling so desperate, undetected by anybody.”[3] The ‘disaster’ of dispersal, which has spatially ‘managed’ the housing provided to Vietnamese refugees, a few here, a cluster there, has left many isolated and disconnected from support networks. It has deliberately made it harder for a diasporic community to develop. Language difference is a key barrier. In a later report, Refugee Action will describe the Vietnamese as an ‘unheard’ community.

(4)

The early hours of 18 January 1989. The Church of the Ascension in South Manchester is stormed by police and immigration officers. Viraj Mendis had taken sanctuary within the vestry of the church in 1987, as he appealed against a Home Office deportation order to return him to Sri Lanka. Mendis is seized in the church’s sacristy and is carried away in his pyjamas, shouting ‘Murderers, murderers’. He is subsequently held in Pentonville prison and deported. Timothy Renton, then Minister of State at the Home Office, made clear that the concept of sanctuary no longer existed in law: ‘We reserve our right to secure the removal of any immigration offender who has taken refuge in a church or temple, although it has not been thought necessary to do so in any case to date’, he said. As part of the press coverage of Mendis’ deportation, Refugee Forum – an umbrella group of refugee-run organisations – described its own version of ‘the underground railway’, committed to harbouring refugees against what its co-ordinator Ronald Moodley deemed the deliberate techniques of the Home Office to ‘isolate and scare asylum-seekers to make them feel alone and helpless when told they must go’.[4]

(5)

1993. Seventeen-year-old Vesna Maric has been living in Britain for over a year, first in Penrith where the coaches of Bosnian refugees have been brought through the sponsorship of a local charity, and now in Exeter, where she has been reunited with her mother. Each week, a local couple – Jack and Myra – come to visit them in their home, as volunteer refugee ‘befrienders’. Maric and her mother are baffled and bored by these strange yet regular visits, where conversation is tedious at best – ‘the weight of their silence dropping in the room like a bloated carcass.’[5] Through conversation with other Bosnian families, it is discovered that Jack and Myra are forcing their visits on different people every night of the week – except Sunday – not only boring the Bosnians but costing them valuable money as they cater for the couple. Maric’s mother eventually asks the pair if they could return the invitation and visit their home. This is enough for Jack and Myra to strike their family off the visiting list.

***

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the pathologisation of isolation and loneliness for refugees in Britain has been a key concern for refugee charities and organisations. Rather than the numbers and scale presented in press reports of refugee arrivals, either to bolster Britain’s reputation as a country of sanctuary, refuge or tolerance, or to limit further refugees from coming, life for refugees was much more fragmented and atomised than photographs at airports or of resettlement camps suggested. How could someone isolated or lonely be described as ‘(re)settled’? Isolation runs counter to the ‘integration’ project, whether demanding assimilation or multi-cultural ‘acceptance’. Yet it has been structurally enforced through polices of dispersal, of ‘green’ and ‘red’ zones which prevent diasporic connection, to share out the burden on local taxpayers and their tolerance. It is separation, from family and kinship network, left behind or elsewhere. Solitude and isolation have seen refugees ‘fall through the cracks’ of welfare statutory support, lost and impoverished in a bureaucratic web of increasingly restrictive process, unknowing or removed from the resources available to them. It’s been a symptom of Britain’s hostile refuge, the consequence of racism and xenophobia and bordering, bordering at every turn. It is a weapon used by the state, to separate families, to imprison, to detain, to deport, to take away belonging (see also the press). It can be a lack of recognition, of being without status or documents, of indefinite-ness, of lives lived precariously or in poverty.

Lack of connection within a society which sees you as an alien and which is itself alien to you has been seen by those with expertise, both through education and experience, to have an impact on your health and quality of life, on your mind, on your sanity. As Dina Nayeri writes, ‘displacement isn’t mental illness, but it makes visible the daily, hourly, work of staying sane – work that is unconscious in the rooted life. Suddenly, it takes effort to hold on to reason.’[6] ‘Acculturation’, as named by psychologists investigating and developing treatment for exile and mental illness in the 1960s, describes the trauma induced by being transplanted into a new society and culture, of being a stranger not through choice but through circumstance. Refugee charities, refugee community organisations (usually run by refugees and asylum-seekers), faith-based organisations and other non-statutory bodies have frequently been the ‘gap fillers’ within an increasingly hollowed-out welfare state, generating solutions for all manner of problems which trouble claims made for the UK’s ‘proud history of sanctuary.’[7] In my research into the activities of these groups in Britain after 1951, isolation is both a common cause and symptom of all manner of social ills and remains a problem to be solved: the Forum, a migrant and refugee charity, released ‘This is how it feels to be lonely’ in 2014, which revealed that 58% of the refugees and migrants who they interviewed for the research described loneliness and isolation as their biggest challenge in London.[8] What changes is how this problem is ‘cured’, how that sanctuary might be restored.

While the experience of exile has often involved the stripping of social and cultural capital, vulnerability to loneliness exists and intensifies for those least connected to resources, whether working precariously for cash in hand, tied to home caring responsibilities or ageing out of the workforce without kinship networks. As we might anticipate, isolation and loneliness for refugees is shaped by intersecting structures of social position and marginalisation: this is an experience which is gendered, as well as racialised and classed, influenced by age, health, language, education. Black feminist thought and its attention to the lives of migrant (including refugee) women has offered modes of understanding and organising to challenge the hostilities of life in the UK, some of which have been adopted by refugee organisations.[9] From the 1980s onwards, the particular issues facing refugee women were increasingly acknowledged and explored, particularly in humanitarian activity, though often in ways which have further isolated and marginalised this experience. The rise of refugee community organisations, including along gender and feminist lines, have offered opportunities to counter both isolation and the impacts of existing in a racist and patriarchal society.

***

What I want to offer now are some thoughts on how refugee isolation has been responded to and some of the questions this has raised for me in thinking about the interrelationship between charity, sanctuary, hospitality and solidarity.

Concepts of hospitality and welcome have long historical resonances, both in theological and secular contexts, and have found practical application by volunteers and professionals alike in the visiting, befriending and hosting of refugees, contemporaneously demonstrated through the charity, Refugees at Home.[10] Making someone ‘at home’ or visiting them in their ‘home’ suggests both the conviviality of the occasion and the transformation of a place in which one lives into this more meaningful site of habitation. Visitors and ‘friends’ have responded to charities’ calls to act as go-betweens, providing information and local knowledge, practicing English, driving refugees to job interviews. Local support groups of volunteers became increasingly important as the spatial management of ‘dispersal’ policies took hold, a particular practice of the charity Ockenden Venture. These have been seen as a way to counteract local hostilities and to help refugees better navigate the benefits and assistance available to them, often to the chagrin of those volunteering as they witness the statutory support offered to ‘non-belongers’.

The role of host has, most frequently, fallen to women: quasi-mothers to children on holiday in Britain from DP schemes in the 1950s and stalwarts of local refugee committees, which often drew on the existing networks of Women’s Institutes and parish councils. There is the possibility for volunteers to act in ways in which the state could not, providing warmth or facilitating ‘integration’. The extent of these visits as incidents of true hospitality have been questioned; the delicious descriptions of Jack and Myra from Maric’s memoir puncture the ‘do-gooding’ many may have imagined themselves to be undertaking. Paternalism and expectations of gratitude were frequently placed upon refugees for the welcome and hospitality they received from charities and volunteers, as Becky Taylor has demonstrated.[11] More sinister were those befriending schemes with explicit agendas; reports of the Vietnamese resettlement scheme in the 1970s and 80s critiqued Christian organisations for evangelising to those they sought to welcome.

In a blog for the Solitudes project last summer, Jane Shaw wrote about ‘curing solitude’ and the religious retreat, social loneliness, spiritual loneliness, perhaps even trauma. In the act of ‘entering a different community for a time in order to take stock, rest, refresh and reinvigorate oneself’, we can draw parallels to some of the solutions offered by refugee charities to those deemed most vulnerable to the psychological perils of isolation and of acculturation. The provision of communal spaces of shared language or culture, whether in lunchtime social clubs for elderly refugees, often revolving around religious centres, or longer stays in designated hospital wards or halfway houses, was a different kind of retreat: an opportunity to escape the challenges and demands of exile, to return to community, rather than seek a new one. The creation of spaces of belonging for refugees has evolved through refugee community organisations in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to the present.[12] The shift to spaces run by refugees for refugees, to eat together, to read newspapers from home, to have cultural events, tracks a corresponding trajectory to the rise of municipal multiculturalism and the availability of funding, often from individual councils like the GLC, to facilitate more organised group gathering than what might have taken place in private home.

I am interested in how these places where isolation was countered might also develop into networks of solidarity. In her 1970s study of the experience of Chilean exiles in Scotland, Diana Kay indicates the modes through which the Chilean solidarity movement, and affiliate organisations like universities and trade unions, offered opportunities for connection as well as practical or welfare support. However, she also discovered forms of political isolation and disenfranchisement: different ideas about communism in the trade union movement, the fragmentation of the political left in Britain, gender politics and women’s roles. Chilean feminists in Britain writing for feminist magazines expressed the difficulties of finding a space within the women’s movements, as exiles fighting for a cause, as ‘Third-World’ feminists, as refugees.

Within solidarity movements is support for the cause of refugees and their right to remain in Britain as refugees and asylum seekers have fallen under the scope of the hostile environment. The sanctuary movement of the 1980s saw all sorts of anti-racist and anti-fascist, immigrant, feminist, religious and charitable organisations come to support those resisting deportation in religious spaces to varying degrees of success. For Viraj Mendis in Manchester, Rajwinder Singh at the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple, or Pina Manuel at the St Aloysius Roman Catholic Church, these faith centres offered both protection and rallied support around their cause in vigils and media publicity.[13] These moments of solidarity through both public and necessarily hidden sanctuaries were acts of resistance preventing deportations and family separation, and sent out a message of compassion and communal support. The City of Sanctuary movement which began in 2005 has seen the revitalisation of these practices, aiming to build ‘a culture of hospitality’ and create ‘a network of towns and cities throughout the country which are proud to be places of safety, and which include people seeking sanctuary fully in the life of their communities.’[14] This work includes both the settling of newcomers and the unsettling (as Susanna Snyder has identified) of hostile attitudes and policies.[15] In Glasgow, for example, the work of No Evictions, draws the community together to combat Serco’s programme of lock changes targeted at people living in asylum accommodation.[16] Welcome, sanctuary and solidarity are being actively fought for and protected. And it has increasingly meant resisting categories of illegality in supporting those without the ‘right to remain’. We heard it on the streets of Pollokshields when hundreds came out onto the streets to stop a dawn immigration raid on 13 May: these are our neighbours, you can’t take them away like this.

Is it in these acts of solidarity, of resistance to the hostility of an environment designed to isolate and separate, that we can see the cure for loneliness? If refugees are no longer forced to fight every day for their humanity and existence in this country? The structural isolation and poverty of our immigration regime can only ever be ameliorated otherwise. And perhaps we may get to a point where the dignity and possibility of solitude can once more find a place to flourish.

[1] Alexander Mezey, ‘Psychiatric Illness in Hungarian Refugees’, Journal of Mental Science, 106 (1960), pp. 628-637.

[2] British Council for Aid to Refugees, Elderly Refugees. A report on a survey into their circumstances (London, 1969), p. 4.

[3] Neil Lyndon, ‘How a girl’s death spoke for 16,000’, The Times, 27 June 1983.

[4] Brian James, ‘Refugee cause swamped by a tide in search of sanctuary’, The Times, 19 January 1989.

[5] Vesna Maric, Bluebird: A Memoir (London: Granta, 2009).

[6] Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugees (Cannongate, 2019).

[7] Tony Kushner, ‘Truly, madly, deeply… nostalgically? Britain’s on–off love affair with refugees, past and present’, Patterns of Prejudice 52 (2018), pp. 172-194.

[8] The Forum, ‘This is how it feels to be lonely’. https://migrantsorganise.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Loneliness-report_The-Forum_UPDATED.pdf [accessed 29 April 2021]

[9] Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe, The heart of the race: Black women’s lives in Britain (Verso Books, 2018); Amrit Wilson, Finding a voice: Asian women in Britain (Daraja Press, 2018).

[10] Refugees at Home (https://www.refugeesathome.org); Tom Lambert, ‘Hospitality, Protection and Refuge in Early English Law’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 30 (2016).

[11] Becky Taylor, ‘“Their Only Words of English Were ‘Thank You’”: Rights, Gratitude and ‘Deserving’ Hungarian Refugees to Britain in 1956’, Journal of British Studies, 55 (2016), pp. 120-144.  

[12] E.g. the Refugee Café in Lewisham (http://refugeecafe.org.uk).

[13] Paul Weller, Sanctuary – the beginning of a movement? Runnymede Commentary No. 1. (Runnymede Trust: London, 1987).

[14] City of Sanctuary (https://cityofsanctuary.org).

[15] Susanna Snyder, ‘Un/settling Angels: Faith-Based Organizations and Asylum-Seeking in the UK’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 24 (2011), pp. 565-585.

[16] No Evictions (https://no-evictions.wixsite.com/glasgow)

Anna Maguire is a Lecturer in Public History at University College London

The post Welcoming refugees: Solitude, Exile and Gender appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

The perceived benefits of solitude were conflicting and often contradictory for many dissenting and Protestant nonconformist groups in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many, like the Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, and Independents viewed solitude as a positive state because it was a means through which God and Christ could be reached, experienced, and known. This might be in the form of private withdrawal, meditation, silent worship, reading, or spoken prayer. The propensity of many dissenting groups to favour solitude and pious withdrawal from the society that surrounded them became a characteristic trademark of ‘enthusiasm’.[1] From the middle of the seventeenth century, dissenting solitude, sparked intense moral concerns as Anglicans and other mainstream religious groups were concerned about the corruptions and sinful behaviour that might take place behind closed doors. Many also connected the Dissenters’ wish to isolate themselves from the rest of society as a marker of their unsociability and general lack of social decorum. Samuel Parker, for instance, warned of the consequences of a tumultuous imagination, and spoke of the ‘sullen and unsociable Niceness’ of nonconformists, whose ‘morose and surly Principles’ made them the ‘rudest and most barbarous people in the world’.[2]

Even among the nonconformists there was a recognition that too much time spent in private contemplation was damaging and had the potential to encourage sinful behaviour or, at the very least, made it possible for impure desires and thoughts to intrude. It was therefore essential that these godly individuals were able to strike the correct balance in their everyday lives between pious withdrawal that was fulfilling and useful whilst also continuing to interact with their wider circle of acquaintances, many of whom might not share their beliefs. Dissenting men and women therefore had to find a space for themselves, even when in company. This was a theme that ran through much of their writing.

It is the negotiation between being both solitary and social that forms the basis of the following discussion. The case studies I will be drawing upon for the most part focus on the experiences of women from dissenting and nonconformist backgrounds in the aftermath of the 1689 Toleration Act. These were women who had to continually navigate time spent in the company of both coreligionists and those from other religious backgrounds in their daily lives. The experiences of this disparate group of women are of particular interest in this period because their solitude and wish to withdraw from the Establish Church was perceived as a threat to the stability of the church and state. Although the legislation of 1689 brought freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters, its results were highly ambiguous and the subsequent debates surrounding the meaning of the Act caused significant religious and political tension. Many remained concerned about the dangers to the wider social order from these news freedoms for Dissenters.

Gender and Nonconformity

Questioning the impact of solitude on women’s experiences is of particular interest for a number of reasons. In the first place, most contemporary discussions of solitude excluded women from the benefits of solitary retreat. As David Vincent has argued in his recent book on this subject, the display of virtues achieved in solitude were believed to be ‘highly unlikely amongst women’. In addition, women were perceived as lacking the intellectual capacity necessary to counterbalance solitude’s destructive effects.[3]

Women’s time alone was not regarded as solitary. Since women were viewed as the more sociable of the two sexes, their identities were, for the most part, constructed in relation to their relatives and social acquaintances. Especial attention was thus placed on the companionship they needed to provide to their male relatives during times of solitude. This had Scriptural foundation, as Eve had been created to provide companionship to a solitary Adam as a devoted ‘help meet’. There was an expectation that wives were expected to support and sustain their husbands throughout the various trials they might face. It was only when women became widows, after they had lost the companionship of their husbands, that a solitary existence was regarded as a more acceptable and appropriate state.[4]

Even if women were not believed to be capable of solitude and might not deliberately seek solitude, many frequently experienced states of solitariness in their everyday lives. These moments of involuntary solitude were felt at particular times in the lifecycle. Marriage, for example, often brought about significant changes to women’s sociability, as decisions about how they spent their time, and with whom, were frequently out of their control. As Mark Philp has argued in his study of the middling ranks of London society in the 1790s, women’s social networks and social lives were strongly dictated by their husbands’ professional connections and interests. Few women were able maintain the friendships they had cultivated prior to marriage with the same degree of intensity.[5] Moreover, as Katharine Glover has underlined in her study of elite Scottish women, whilst marriage might provide agency and autonomy for some women, it could also be ‘a restrictive and at times lonely experience for those whose married homes were country houses far from their family or other female company’.[6]

Women from Dissenting and Nonconformist backgrounds often experienced the consequences of solitude more acutely than many of their female contemporaries. This is because they came to be regarded as outsiders from their wider communities and often faced social ostracism for their peculiar religious beliefs. Standards of dress, for example, especially among the Quakers, were strict, and contempt for fashion and vanity excluded many female Quakers from an important part of female culture.[7] Patricia Crawford has argued that women from nonconforming backgrounds faced a double exclusion from public life ‘on the grounds of gender and religious affiliation’ in the aftermath of the 1689 Toleration Act.[8] Noting the social ostracism they experienced, she argues that women were aversely penalised for their religious beliefs because women had traditionally depended on the support of members of their own sex in their daily household tasks. The ‘loss of neighbourliness’ thus became a handicap’.[9]

Dissenting experiences of solitude

Although women were understood by some contemporaries to be innately more pious than men, they were also considered to be unable to devote lengthy periods of time to examination of religious principles.[10] This meant that they were continually forced to negotiate the extreme impulse towards pious retreat with wider expectations of politeness. This is evident throughout the diary of Cheshire Presbyterian, Sarah Savage, who kept a regular journal for the majority of her adult life. Diary-keeping was an important part of her religious observance and was thus full of spiritual self-examination and observations of the merits and flaws of her social acquaintances. Her sociability and solitude were thus central preoccupations of her writing and show how her faith played a large role in how she perceived and described her social encounters. The pressure to be polite when confronted with uncomfortable social situations is encapsulated in an entry from January 1717, when she recorded that:

we dined at Wrenbury Hall with Mr Voice, a splendid entertainment – I envy not ye great mans’ state more inward satisfaction with a good Book in my own Closet than with all ye visits, modes & forms &c. yet think it duty to be friendly and respectful to those who are so to us.[11]

As a nonconformist, Savage’s competing impulses to retreat from company and to appear outwardly friendly continually permeate her writing. The pages of her diary demonstrate her commitment to solitude and quiet retirement above any kind of activity that involved social interaction. She believed it was books that taught her how to live an exemplary Christian life rather than ministers or other social acquaintances, and hours of her time were spent pouring over religious texts in the belief that they might offer her paradigms for living an exemplary Godly lifestyle. On 10 February 1717, she recorded that ‘I should have had my heart more rais’d & warm’d with a good book in my own closet, yet think it my duty when I can to attend Publick worship’.[12] Reading, as Carys Brown has recently argued, had a significant place in the puritan culture from which Presbyterianism and Independency emerged. Yet, as Brown notes, the preference of dissenting women like Sarah Savage to spend significant amounts of time reading religious texts rather than in engaging in other social activities could be damaging to their reputations and ‘undermine inclusion within wider social communities’.[13]

Undoubtedly, Savage relied on the connections and friendships she forged with those both within and outside her religious community. Yet one particularly striking feature of her writing was her active decision to eschew company altogether, preferring to devote herself to religious books and to writing in her diary. As Amanda Herbert has noted, the benefits of sociability for Savage, ‘were rendered better in a ritual of the mind rather than that of the body’.[14] Indeed, imagining conversations with deceased friends and relatives often had a stronger hold over her sense of Christian duty than physical encounters with friends, relatives, neighbours, and other members of her religious community. She recounted various scenarios where her memories of past conversations acted as comforts and spiritual guides.[15] In September 1715, she wrote that she had decided to remain at home with her Sister Tylston, while her husband and children took the sacrament at the local church. During her time alone, she read Richard Baxter’s Converse with God in Solitude, taking comfort from the fact that he believed conversing with friends in heaven was more profitable than transitory encounters in this life.[16] Interestingly, in choosing to retreat from public employment and duties to engage with the wider world, Savage was directly contravening Baxter’s recommendations. It suggests how she was able to appropriate his ideas for her own edification, at once finding his emphasis on heavenly rather than physical friendship uplifting, whilst also disregarding his emphasis on the selfishness of those who actively sought solitude over public service.[17] But it also may hint at the different ways in which men and women approached and encountered solitude, since public employment carried with it very different connotations for Baxter’s male and female readers.

Savage’s piety was central to her conception of solitude, and so was her sense of friendship. As a dissenting woman living in an Anglican town, Savage and her family frequently experienced hostility and even periodical violence. Yet rather than conveying her intense sense of social isolation, she instead documents her active decision to retreat from the unwelcome and unprofitable company of her neighbours. Many of the entries in her early diary recount the many hours she spent reading the letters and other personal papers of her deceased friend, Jane Hunt, who died in January 1716. This was made all the more poignant by the fact that Savage continued to write letters to Hunt after her death, as if the two women were still engaged in a continual conversation during her solitude.[18] As Herbert has noted, Savage’s dialogues with Hunt were unusual, especially since Hunt’s voice was given emphasis in the layout of the diary, as her phrases and expressions were separated from Savage’s punctuation forms like spaces and quotation marks.[19] Savage also wrote of her companion as if speaking in the present tense. For example, on 24 March 1717, Savage remarked how she had spent the whole afternoon alone, ‘yet not alone I read in dear Mrs H’s papers – s[ai]th she “How w[oul]d my Conscience startle at playing or idling away ye Lords day before others” … elsewhere s[ai]th she, “I do truly in judgment & Affection account it my chiefest Happiness to enjoy God”’.[20]

Savage’s imagined conversations with Hunt, which included spiritual, domestic, political, neighbourly, and family matters, gave meaning to her solitude and gave her opportunities to engage in self-examination. At other times, however, Savage’s imaginary conversations with Hunt instilled a profound sense of longing for the sociability that she had lost. In one entry, Savage explained that ‘in my sleep I oft converse with her [Hunt]’, and then ‘wake with a sad heart’.[21] Her regular interactions with her deceased friend nevertheless offer an important example of how time alone might be regarded by women as more profitable than time in company. As an outsider, facing social ostracism for her beliefs, she found strategies to pursue sociability that was compatible with her own spiritual and world outlook.

The tension between sociability and solitude was therefore present in every public (and private) activity that Savage performed. This was characteristic of a Calvinistic impulse for the individual believer to elevate themselves above the company they kept. This enabled Savage to distinguish herself from the corrupt and sinful practices taking place around them. The Rochester Presbyterian Anne Dawson viewed her sociability and solitude in similar ways to Savage. She placed great emphasis throughout her diary, which was penned between August 1721 and August 1722, on her own piety and how that compared to the company that surrounded her. She often lamented the time that she spent in company rather than at home. There were even occasions when she lamented the consequences of spending too much time alone rather than in company. On 2 June 1722, for instance, she recounted how acquaintances from Chowbent had spent the week staying at the family home. Although she regarded their company as ‘very agreable because of their parts and piety’, she lamented that she had been unable to profit from their visit because she had spent too much of her time ‘conversing with my self’.[22]

The delicate balance between sociability and solitude is especially evident in the writings of Quaker women. In their troubled early and more radical years, solitude came to epitomise the zeal of those who identified as ‘Friends’. The value Quakers placed on silence as a form of worship, and on waiting on the spirit, gave ascendance to a faith that centred on withdrawal, retreat, and quiet contemplation. According to Quaker beliefs, Christ was present in the person he inhabited. Group meetings were thus conducted in silence, where believers entered into their own internal dialogue with the divine. Withdrawal also came to symbolise the isolation that many Quakers felt and experienced.

Quaker silent worship at once epitomised the need to separate themselves from the corrupt and sinful world that surrounded them, whilst also underscoring the social ostracism of many individual believers following their conversion to the movement. Alice Hayes, for instance, ruminated on her urge for silence and private contemplation following her first attendance at a Quaker meeting:

I kept close and constant, as Opportunity permitted, in going to the publick Worship, and very often got alone into private Places to pray, and greatly delighted to read the Scriptures, and to get good Passages by Heart; and when my Hand has been in my Labour, my Heart was meditating on good Matter, and very glad that I was from my Father’s House, because of the Quietness I enjoy’d.[23]

On another occasion she described how ‘I spent all my spare Time either in reading, or in getting alone, or in some Religious Performance’.[24] Hayes’s solitary pursuits thus perfectly matched the ostracism she encountered from her family and former friends. Her husband, for instance, was so outraged that she had joined the movement that he threatened to leave her and went to the extremes of hiding her clothes before she went to meetings.[25] Mary Penington, who converted to Quakerism in later life and became an influential member of the community, similarly described how her intense zeal and desire to retreat into private prayer at least three times a day separated her from her wider household. She noted how she ‘sought remote places to pray in, such as the fields, gardens, or out-houses, when I could not be private in the house’.[26]

Shunning society was characteristic of early Quaker conversion narratives, as was eschewing many of the activities accepted as part of mainstream sociability, such as playing card games, drinking, dancing, and attending theatres and pleasure gardens. However, as Quakerism evolved and became more established, the intensely communal nature of Quaker life served as a crucial lifeline for members of the community. As I have argued elsewhere, the practice of friendship among early Quakers was strongly shaped by their faith.[27] Worship for Quaker men and women was intensely social and communal in its structure. Indeed, they found a form of worship that managed to seamlessly blend the sociability of attending meetings for worship whilst also facilitating individual introspection. In their daily lives too, the Quakers were exhorted to wait in silence for ‘renewal of strength’ when in company. Not only did Quaker meetings provide a safe environment for like-minded men and women to physically meet, but it also offered them an opportunity to share in spiritual communion.

Although not comprehensive, this discussion has sought to underscore the complex place of solitude in English nonconformist and dissenting culture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. While acknowledging the ways in which their peculiar patterns of faith might have created moments of intense isolation, it has stressed the important ways in which many female dissenters sought to balance sociability and solitude in their daily lives. In doing so, it suggests a number of ways in which there may have been a distinctive culture of solitude for women from the religious sects, whose intense piety often put them at odds with their wider circle of acquaintances. This does not mean that they fully secluded themselves from the society that surrounded them, or indeed that they shunned all occasions for sociability, but it does underscore that solitude was not only a necessary counterbalance to their social activities, but also an essential part of their world outlook. It therefore shows that women from this period were not only capable of achieving solitude, but that they actively found time for solitary pursuits in their everyday lives. This sometimes came at the expense of their personal relationships. Above all, I want to suggest that greater recognition is needed of how women’s experiences of sociability and solitude were shaped by cultures of nonconformity and how these shifted as the landscape of religion in early modern England became more pluralistic.

Notes

[1] On the perils of solitude and enthusiasm see Lawrence Klein, ‘Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 60, No. 1/2, ‘Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850’ (1997), pp. 153–177.

[2] Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670), pp. 65, 74.

[3] David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Polity, 2020), p. 25.

[4] A telling comparison of expectations of solitude for men and women can be seen in early modern conduct books, such as The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed in Such Principles of Politeness (1747) and N.H., The Ladies Dictionary; Being a General Entertainment for the Fair-Sex (London, 1694).

[5] Mark Philp, Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London 1789–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: forthcoming, 2020), pp. 93–122, esp. pp. 100–101

[6] Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), p. 22.

[7] I have explored this issue in more depth in Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 200–251.

[8] Patricia Crawford, ‘Anglicans, Catholics, and Nonconformists after the Restoration, 1660‒1720’ in Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers (eds), Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 163.

[9] Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London, 1993), p. 191.

[10] See Carys Brown, ‘Women and Religious Coexistence in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Naomi Pullin and Kathryn Woods (eds), Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1550–1800 (Routledge 2021), pp. 68–87.

[11] Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.misc.e.331, Sarah Savage Diary, 31 May 1714 to 25 December 1723, p. 123, entry for 9 November 1716. [hereafter Sarah Savage Diary]

[12] Ibid., p. 138, entry for 10 February 1717.

[13] Brown, ‘Women and Religious Coexistence’, p. 74.

[14] Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 169.

[15] One such scenario is cited by Herbert, Female Alliances, p. 182. In 1717, she wrote that she had spent the day alone, but had ‘call[ed] to mind some discurse I had with my dear mother lately …. [on] an excellent minister’.

[16] Sarah Savage Diary, 31 May 1714 to 25 December 1723, p. 65, entry for 25 September 1715.

[17] Richard Baxter, Converse with God in Solitude: Or, The Christian Improving the Insufficiency and Uncertainty of Human Friendship (2nd edition, 1774), esp. pp. 29–34.

[18] Sarah Savage Diary, p. 65, entry for 25 September 1715, e.g. pp. 87, 88 , 90, 92, 96, 106, 116, entries from 12, 14 and 26 February 1716, 25 March 1716 and 10 April 1716, 1 July 1716, and 22 September 1716.

[19] Amanda E. Herbert, ‘Queer Intimacy: Speaking with the Dead in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History, vol. 31, no. 1 (2018), p. 7.

[20] Sarah Savage Diary, 31 May 1714 to 25 December 1723, p. 144, entry for.  24 March 1717

[21] Sarah Savage Diary, p. 86, entry for 5 February 1716.

[22] Ibid., entry for 2 June 1722.

[23] Alice Hayes, A Legacy, or Widow’s Mite, Left by Alice Hayes, To Her Children and Others: Being a Brief Relation of Her Life (London, 1786), p. 17.

[24] Ibid., p. 19.

[25] Ibid., pp. 39–41.

[26] Mary Penington, A Brief Account of Some of my Exercise From My Childhood, in David Booy (ed.), Autobiographical Writings by Early Quaker Women (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 83.

[27] Pullin, Female Friends, pp. 152–199.

Naomi Pullin (@naomipullin) is Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick.

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