Lady Florence Dixie, the First Woman War Correspondent. Sort of.
For the next two months, as the launch date for The Dragon From Chicago (1) hurdles toward me, it’s going to be women journalists all the time here on the Margins. (It is perhaps not surprising that I “met” a number of them over the last four years.)
First up, Scottish writer, traveler and feminist Lady Florence Dixie (1855-1905)
Lady Florence Dixie first came to my attention while I was reading Candice Millard’s Hero of the Empire. Millard mentioned in passing that Dixie was the first woman war correspondent. I had a “wait, what?” moment. But I was deep in the throes of writing The Dragon From Chicago and I resisted the temptation to go down the research rabbit hole. (2)
Once I had a moment to circle back I learned that Dixie’s stint as a war correspondent was only a small incident in an event-filled life.
After a tumultuous childhood, (3) the 19-year-old Lady Florence married Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, known as “Sir A.B.C.D.” or Beau. They shared a love of adventure and the outdoors. Their travels together provided Dixie with material for several of her books. (4)
Although Dixie wrote popular novels for adults and children, many of which dealt with women and girls and their positions in society, she is best known for her bestselling travel books, Across Patagonia (1880) and In the Land of Misfortune (1882). Like her better known counterparts, Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley, she presented herself as the protagonist of the stories in which documented her travels. (5)
In Across Patagonia, she told the story of her 1878 trip to Patagonia, with her husband, her brothers, and their friend Julius Beerbohm. They traveled some 1000 kilometers on horseback over a period of 60 days. In her account of the expedition, Dixie appears as a heroic adventurer, who meets the trials of the road with resilience: as she describes it she (and her companions) were “nearly starved…almost smothered in a pampas fire, badly shaken by earthquakes, forced to wade knee deep through rivers and sleep in the open with a saddle for a pillow.” She not only holds her own with her male companions in physical terms, she also takes on Charles Darwin on the intellectual plan. Darwin had claimed that the Tuco-tuco of Patagonia were nocturnal animals that lived almost entirely underground. Lady Florence had observed the small rodents in daylight hours, and wrote Darwin to tell him so. She later sent Darwin a copy of her book, in which she described her observations.
Dixie’s account of her Patagonia adventures, inspired Algernon Borthwick, the editor and owner of the Morning Post of London to hire her in 1881 to report on the First Boer War. When she landed in Cape Town, she learned that the war was over. Her first dispatch reported details of the peace treaty.
Dixie spent the next six months traveling through South Africa with Beau and reporting on the causes and consequences of the conflict. She described later her experiences in Africa in In the Land of Misfortune and A Defence of Zululand and its King.
In addition to her work as an author, Dixie was an active proponent of women’s equality. She advocated not only for women’s suffrage but for changes in marriage and divorce laws and the rules governing succession to the British crown. An enthusiastic sportswoman, she was the first president and an active promoter of the British Ladies Football Club
(1) You’ve heard it before: The Dragon from Chicago is available for pre-order wherever you buy your books. Unless you buy books solely at used bookstores and library sales. (No judgement. I’ve been known to come away with armloads of books from both.) If you want a signed copy, you can get one from my local independent bookstore: https://www.semcoop.com/dragon-chicago-untold-story-american-reporter-nazi-germany . Be sure to requested a signed copy, with details about how you want it signed, in the special instructions box. (Because several people have asked: they ship.)
(2) Something I seldom manage. In this case, I trusted that Candice Millard knew whereof she spoke and that Lady Florence would be available when I had more time.
(3) Among other things, she and two of her siblings were the subject of a child custody case between her mother, who was the widow of the 9th Marquess of Queensbury, and the children’s legal guardians after Lady Queensbury converted to Catholicism.
(4) Due to Beau’s drinking and gambling problems, the couple were sometimes referred to as “Sir Always and Lady Sometimes Tipsy.” Despite the lightheartedness of the nickname, Beau’s gambling added an element of financial insecurity to their lives that may have made her writing more than an engrossing hobby.
(5) I am shocked to realize that I have never written about the phenomenon of Victorian women travel writers. It is a fascinating and complicated subject. As a group, their works reject Victorian mores as applied to themselves but fail to examine the underlying racist and imperialist ideas of their times. With any luck I’ll circle back to this subject come the fall.
From the Archives: Daughters of Chivalry
In Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Princesses of King Edward Longshanks, historian Kelcey Wilson-Lee tells the stories of the five daughters of Edward I of England and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, who survived into adulthood: Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth.
I’ve got to say the book has a shaky start. Wilson-Lee sets up a questionable and unnecessary straw woman in her introduction: a “popular” vision of medieval princesses as powerless and passive that she describes as built on “an empire of fairy stories, Hollywood films, theme parks and cheaply produced ball gowns.” Personally, I’m not sure anyone believes in the powerless princesses she describes–not the little girls who wear those ball gowns with attitude* and certainly not anyone who would chose to read a book titled Daughters of Chivalry. Maybe that version of princesses existed once upon a time, but my own memory of fairy tales includes a fair number of princesses who used every ounce of power they held to control who they married–something only one of the real-life medieval princesses in Daughters of Chivalry managed to control.
That quibble aside, Daughters of Chivalry is an excellent book.
Like even the most elite medieval women, Wilson-Lee’s princesses left a spotty trail in the historical record, most often appearing in official chronicles in the context of their relationship with one of the men in their lives. She fleshes out the picture of their lives using a variety of sources—most notably the account records for the various royal households**—plus a certain amount of informed speculation.
Wilson-Lee uses her sources to good effect. She creates portraits of five clearly defined individuals. Joanna, for instance, frequently defied her father and took full advantage of the opportunities accorded to a young, wealthy widow in medieval society. Mary, who entered the convent of Amesbury at the age of six, had a taste for luxury and a gambling habit at odds with her vow of poverty. She also places the sisters within the larger context of royal women in the late medieval period, exploring questions of education, marriages (political and otherwise), widowhood, property, travel, and the role of royal women as political intercessors. Like the women she describes, Wilson-Lee never loses sight of the fact that what power these women enjoyed was derived from their relationship to the king, but she fully explores the nature of that power and how they used it.
*A year or two ago, I saw a little girl stomping through the aisles of my local grocery store wearing hiking books with a princess gown and carrying a sword. I’m pretty sure she didn’t share Wilson-Lee’s “popular” vision of princesses.
**The nature of her sources means there is a lot of description of real-life princess dresses. This is not a complaint. Just an observation.
From the Archives: Nancy Marie Brown and the Real Valkyrie
If you’ve been hanging out here in the Margins for a while, you know that I am fascinated by the continuing archaeological discoveries of ancient women warriors. Sometimes they are genuinely new discoveries. Sometimes they are a result of someone taking a closer look or asking new questions about existing. remains. This trend started in 2017, when Swedish bioarcheaologists released their findings that an iconic Viking warrior known as the Birka man was in fact the Birka woman. Their results raised a huge flap in the world of Viking studies.
In the intervening years, scholars have begun to ask more complicated, or at least different, questions about sex, gender and remains. These questions, and the Birka woman herself, are at the heart of Nancy Marie Brown’s The Real Valkyrie.
Brown takes the reader on a deeply researched and richly imagined exploration of the possible life of the Birka woman, whom she names Hervor. She interweaves a narrative of what Hervor’s life might have been like with the research on which she bases that narrative. She looks closely at the assumptions at the root of many of those long-held beliefs.* She asks new questions of sagas, chronicles, and archeological sources—and leads the reader through what those sources can tell us. She introduces us to a broader version of the Viking world, and to many powerful Viking women who have been previously dismissed as fiction. In the process she upends much of what we have traditionally believed about Viking women. The end result is a complex and important addition to women’s history.
It is also a fast-paced, delightful read, with lots of “wow!” moments along the way.
If you’re interested in Vikings, women warriors, women’s history, or how historians work with evidence, this one’s for you.
*Medieval Christianity, Victorian ideas about women and a historical novel written by a Swedish writer during World War II all helped shape our popular conceptions about Vikings.
