Desert Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

Humphrey Ward, the well-known novelist; Mrs. Green, widow of the historian; Anne Ritchie, the daughter of William Thackeray; Richmond Ritchie, her husband and an influential diplomat; Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano; Fanny Kemble, the actress and, later, Henry James and the poet Robert Browning.
    At other times, when Florence was very critical, Gertrude dipped her pen in anger. After receiving three excoriating pages, she wrote back to tell Florence they were “quite horrid,” and announced gleefully that she had avenged herself by promptly burning them. Her mother constantly reprimanded her for spelling errors and grammatical shortcuts, and after one particularly critical letter, Gertrude complained about Florence’s “priggish” style. “Would you have me say when talking of the sovereign, ‘The Queen of England, Scotland, Ireland, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith’?” the sixteen-year-old asked. “My life is not long enough to give everything its full title.” Another time she complained, “You’ve told me all those things so often that I know them by heart.… I don’t think it’s any use your telling me over again. Generally, I think I could write out your letters before I open them and come pretty close to the original withal!” How different were her comments to her father. “You don’t scold me nearly enough,” she told him, “but I’m much sorrier when you don’t scold me than when you do.”
    In her letters to Hugh, Gertrude solicited his help on freeing her from the dreaded piano lessons Florence insisted she have; she asked his advice on schoolwork, offered her views on history and sought her father’s opinions on free trade, Home Rule for the Irish, the fate of Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Liberal Party. She divided her writing between Florence’s interests in literature, fashion and the arts and Hugh’s interests in politics and world affairs. But slowly her own interests were developing in all of these areas. She wrote to Hugh that history might become her career (at least, although she did not say so, until she married), and in her last semester, at the suggestion of her teacher, she approached her father gingerly and asked permission to continue her studies at Oxford. If Hugh agreed to send her to university, it would be another radical step. Instead of a world of domesticity, she would be entering the realm of the elite and the powerful, a world ruled and peopled almost completely by men. “My only fear,” she wrote to her father, “is if I once go there you will never be able to get me away!”

C HAPTER T WO
    A Man’s World

    G ray stone walls enclosed the University of Oxford, barriers warding off the prosaic and welcoming the privileged to its rarefied air. An assemblage of chosen people lived within, the intellectuals and the high-born, supporting one another’s sense of superiority, reinforcing each other’s sense of distinction. Gertrude’s acceptance bolstered her already strong self-esteem. As unhappy as she had been at Queen’s College, confined to a middling female world, she had proven herself an outstanding scholar. Now, in a far more appealing atmosphere, with the Bells’ drive and determination, she would rise to the highest levels.
    Since the twelfth century, clergymen, kings, prime ministers, diplomats, philosophers, scientists and academics had secluded themselves behind the Oxford walls to breathe the fresh air of thoughts and sample a feast of ideas. Each college hall, each cobbled path, echoed with the footsteps of powerful leaders and pioneer thinkers. Men like Roger Bacon argued in the thirteenth century for experimental methods of inquiry. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More defended the Catholic Church over the will of Henry VIII, and in the seventeenth century Oliver Cromwell, the country’s leader, served as Chancellor. There were scientists like Edmund Halley, who discovered a new comet, and, in the nineteenth century,