Reliance, Illinois
Page 30
Most of all, thank you to my husband, Chris Jones, whose quiet support has been worth ten thousand words of encouragement.
Notes
Reliance, Illinois, has never existed, nor have any but a few historical f igures who appear in the novel. The rest of the characters, though f ictitious, have been informed by real people and by a wealth of sources, some of which I cite below. A longer list of sources can be found on my website: www.maryvolmer.com.
In Chapter 2, Madelyn reads from Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter ( John P. Jewett and Company, 1854) and later reads to Old Man Werner from a 1771 English edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth. In Chapter 6, William quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” Samuel Clemens’s thoughts on Henry Ward Beecher, voting rights, and the proper way to write an autobiography have been taken from a variety of sources, including The Autobiography of Mark Twain (University of California Press, 2010) and Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (Simon & Schuster, 1991).
Miss Rose quotes Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” in Chapter 24. Her impressions of Hamlet’s sanity are paraphrased from Sarah Bernhardt’s The Art of the Theater (B. Blom, 1969); her assessment of her own unjust persecution are from Bernhardt’s memoir, My Double Life (State University of New York Press, 1999). Miss Rose’s sentiments on voting rights closely resemble those of Elizabeth Cady Stanton after the passage of the 15th Amendment. A number of her arguments about the prevention of pregnancy are akin to those of Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger (who would have been Madelyn’s contemporaries). Miss Rose’s dramatic recitation of Charles Baudelaire’s “The Mask” is a liberal adaption taken from two published translations (by Jacques LeClercq and Richard Howard) and from the casual translations of two generous friends (Koko Petitt and Catherine Marachi). Her f inal thoughts on history and romance are courtesy of Walt Whitman.
Mrs. French’s greeting, “Oh, you dear Big Livermore!” in Chapter 29 echoes Julia Ward Howe’s greeting of that physically formidable woman in Wendy Venet’s A Strong Minded Woman: The Life of Mary A. Livermore (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). (Please don’t trust Miss Rose’s unfavorable assessment of Mary Livermore. Read Venet’s book and discover this remarkable woman for yourself.) “Mr. Knowlton’s text,” in Chapter 29, refers to Charles Knowlton’s The Fruits of Philosophy (though Mrs. French might well have used a number of other controversial books and pamphlets on reproduction, sexuality, and physiology). To ease Madelyn’s fears in Chapter 30, Mrs. French quotes one of my favorite poems, Rumi’s “A Small Green Island.” Her insights on the slow pace of social change in Chapter 34 mirror those of 19th century Universalist minister Olympia Brown, who said, “Reformers are often deceived by a kind of mirage. They suppose victory at hand when . . . generations are yet to pass before it can be realized.” And, of course, the work is not yet done.