THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 N C5D. H. LAWRENCEonce sent his wife, Frieda, a
curious little present — a drawing of Jonah
confronting the whale. He captioned it:
“Who will swallow whom?”
Not the most heartwarming gesture, to
be sure, but you must admire its bluntness.
“Who will swallow whom?” has been the
decisive question of that literary couple.
History is a body count of the acceptable
casualties of genius, chief among them
wives who possessed the touching temerity
to harbor ambitions of their own. What a
grim sorority they make — thwarted artists
turned protectors of the solitude of Great
Men, guardians of the legacy. They kept the
inkwell filled, and creditors and children at
bay. They went mad with startling fre-
quency.
In recent years, a flurry of studies has
paid homage to the hidden lives and talents
of these women — sisters and daughters as
well as spouses: Dorothy Wordsworth,
Jane Carlyle, Zelda Fitzgerald, Lucia Joyce,
Frieda Lawrence herself. A new form of bio-
graphical criticism flourishes in books like
Phyllis Rose’s beloved “Parallel Lives,”
which treat a writer’s work as continuous
with his private life, detecting the mytholo-
gies and political assumptions governing
both.
Diane Johnson’s “The True History of the
First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser
Lives” is a foundational text of the genre.
First published in 1972, the book passed into
obscurity and has been happily reissued
this month, fresh as ever — a seething,
stylish reclamation of a forgotten life.
In life, as in death, Mary Ellen Peacock
Meredith was eclipsed by her father, the
novelist Thomas Love Peacock, and her
husband, the writer George Meredith, au-
thor of the 19th-century feminist novel
“Diana of the Crossways.” She is known, if
at all, as a footnote in their stories. Biogra-
phers have treated her “as if she were
formed for George’s youth by some vaguely
malign spirit seeking to try him,” Johnson
writes. “The Comic Spirit, perhaps, whose
sole interest lay in providing George with
those formative experiences so essential to
a coming great writer.”
Those formative experiences were, in
short order: humiliation, betrayal and scan-
dal. Mary Ellen Peacock was already a
mother and a widow when the pair met and
married in 1849. After nine uninspiring
years together, the vigorous and clever
Mary Ellen took a hard look at her gloomy
husband, their narrow rooms and narrower
prospects. She declared the marriage a fail-
ure and eloped with the painter Henry
Wallis. Three years later, she succumbed to
kidney disease. Her funeral was sparsely
attended.
George Meredith married again, and his
second wife proved a more placid mate.
Arguing with her, he once wrote, was like
“firing broadsides into a mud fort.” But
Mary Ellen haunted his work in the recur-
rent character of a worldly, faithless woman
— she is “Mrs. Mount” or, more kindly,
“Mrs. Lovell.” The year after Mary Ellen
died, George wrote his caustic masterpiece,
the 50-sonnet sequence “Modern Love,” on
marriage as shipwreck.
Johnson depicts Mary Ellen’s betrayal, so
scandalous in its time, as strangely or-
dained. “The ideal Victorian woman was
innocent, unlearned, motherly,” Johnson
writes. “Women then were fascinating in
their indolence. Indeed, they had to be spe-cially trained to endure it.” Mary Ellen, how-
ever, had been raised by a doting, liberal fa-
ther who adored intellectual women. Her
models included fierce 19th-century femi-
nists like Mary Wollstonecraft, and she
grew up educated, resourceful and indiffer-
ent to public opinion (a little of her own
money helped).
In Victorian England, Mary Ellen Pea-
cock Meredith had the gall to believe herself
to be an utterly fantastic creature: a person.
In her suite of novels about Americans
abroad — “Le Mariage,” “Le Divorce,”
“L’Affaire” — Johnson has explored how
culture inflects our romantic expectations.
(Along with Stanley Kubrick, she wrote the
screenplay for the adaptation of Stephen
King’s “The Shining,” perhaps the most viv-
id cautionary tale about taking up with a
writer.) In this book, in telling the story of
the rebellious life of one woman, she maps
the painful, peculiar strictures of the age.
“Common sense urges us to suppose that
beneath the Victorians’ public postures of
rectitude, formality and reserve, beneath
the bustles and beards, lurked beings much
like ourselves,” she writes. “But closer in-
spection (books, letters, statistics) sug-
gests that our sympathy is misplaced. They
were notlike us.”
It was the age of “biological martyrs.”
Women would routinely bear 20 children
and die in the process. Sex — loathed and
feared by many women — was a prelude to
death, and death a constant, capricious
force in their lives.
This was the context in which Mary Ellen
staged her mutiny, all the more astonishing
at a time when divorce was unspeakable
and children remained the property of their
fathers. This is to say nothing of the practi-
cal hindrances of having an affair.
“It must be kept in mind at all times that
the women we are concerned with con-
ducted their lives, had thoughts, went trav-
eling, ate dinner and fell in love while en-
tirely encased beneath their gowns in the
following articles of clothing: a chemise, acorset, a camisole over the corset, up to six
petticoats — beginning with a short, stiff
one, one or two flannel ones for warmth, a
plain one and then some embroidered ones
— a vest or undershirt, stockings, garters
and, depending on the decade, a whalebone
crinoline or bustle,” Johnson writes. “What-
ever we are able to make of Mary Ellen’s
adulterous behavior, we will not be able to
excuse it on the grounds of impulse; there
could hardly have been such a thing as an
impulsive sexual irregularity for women so
encumbered.”
That distinctive voice: fond, amused, out-
raged. Johnson writes as if taking revenge
for her subject. It is not only Mary Ellen’s
daring that so compels us, but her biogra-
pher’s. Johnson discovers new ways to
write her way into history’s silences. “In-
spired conjecture,” in Vivian Gornick’s
phrase from the book’s introduction, is
Johnson’s mode, her tools those helpful ad-
verbs: “perhaps” and “possibly.” Criticism
and biography must learn from the nov-
elist’s practice of imaginative empathy,
Johnson argues. Every passing character
snares her attention, and she rues the
stories she can’t tell. Tracing Meredith’s lin-
eage, she mentions a grandfather, a bank-
rupt tailor who “took up with the servant
girl, Matilda Bucket (how one longs to know
more about Matilda Bucket).” There are no
lesser lives in this tale.
In one eerie scene, Johnson imagines the
ghosts of Mary Ellen’s spiritual godmothers
— Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft
— attending her grave: “They are angry on
Mary Ellen’s behalf. Their impatient feet
tap, they pace over the grave. Must it al-
ways be this way for women? Here was one
they thought might persevere in woman’s
name. She had promise. She had courage.”
A century after her death, she was re-
warded with a biographer who possesses
the same traits in abundance, and who, per-
severing in her name, lifts her from ignomi-
ny into stardom.PARUL SEHGAL BOOKS OF THE TIMESA Woman Rescued From History’s Shadows
Presenting a seething, stylish
reclamation of the rebellious
Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith.
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith
and Other Lesser Lives
By Diane Johnson
Illustrated. 242 pages. New York Review
Books. $17.95.Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.
Roosevelt would be removed because it had
come to be seen as symbolic of a painful leg-
acy of colonial expansion and racial dis-
crimination.
On Monday, the Guggenheim Museum’s
curatorial department in a letter described
a work culture of “racism” and “white su-
premacy.” On Tuesday, current and former
employees accused the San Francisco Mu-
seum of Modern Art of “racist censorship”
and “discrimination.”
And on Friday, the director of the Mu-
seum of Contemporary Art Cleveland for 23
years, Jill Snyder, resigned after apologiz-
ing to the artist Shaun Leonardo for cancel-
ing his exhibition dealing with police
killings of black and Latino boys and men.
Now, Met Museum employees are sound-
ing their own alarm, prompted by a person-
al Instagram posting on Friday by the mu-
seum’s powerful chairman of European
paintings, Keith Christiansen, who has
worked at the Met since 1977.
Below a pen-and-ink image of the French
archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir, who de-
voted himself to saving France’s historic
monuments from the ravages of the French
Revolution, Mr. Christiansen wrote:
“Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolution-
ary zealots bent on destroying the royal
tombs in Saint-Denis. How many great
works of art have been lost to the desire to
rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t ap-
prove.
“And how grateful we are to people like
Lenoir,” Mr. Christiansen continued, “who
realized that their value — both artistic and
historical — extended beyond a defining
moment of social and political upheaval and
change.” While Mr. Christiansen appeared
to be arguing for the preservation of monu-
ments, his remarks also struck some as in-
sensitive and tone deaf.
The post was criticized in a Twitter post
by the advocacy group of arts workers, Art
- Museum Transparency: “Dear @metmu-
seum, one of your most powerful curators
suggested that it’s a shame we’re trying to
‘rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t ap-
prove’ by removing monuments — and,
worse, making a dog whistle of an equation
of #BLM activists with ‘revolutionary zeal-
ots.’ This is not OK.”
Responses to the tweet were similarly
critical. “This is disgusting,” one comment
said, “not acceptable.”
Mr. Christiansen subsequently took
down the post and removed his Instagram
account.
Asked to respond to the uproar over the
post on Wednesday, Max Hollein, the Met’s
director, said in a statement to The New
York Times: “There is no doubt that the Met
and its development is also connected with
a logic of what is defined as white suprema-
cy. Our ongoing efforts to not only diversify
our collection but also our programs, narra-
tives, contexts and staff will be further ac-
celerated and will benefit in urgency and
impact from this time.”
A day earlier, he had apologized directly
to the European paintings department in an
email, calling the Instagram post “not only
not appropriate and misguided in its judg-
ment but simply wrong.”
“Keith is a very valued member of our
community and while this post was on Kei-
th’s personal Instagram account, it is cer-
tainly also part of our institutional conver-
sation and we need to reflect on that,” Mr.
Hollein added.
It was Mr. Hollein’s second apology this
month; he also conveyed one to the artist
Glenn Ligon, about the Met’s use of one of
his works in a social media post, at the start
of the protests over George Floyd’s killing.
Mr. Ligon said on Instagram: “I know it’s
#nationalreachouttoblackfolksweek but
could y’all just stop... Or ask me first?”
On June 12, Mr. Hollein and Daniel H.
Weiss, the museum’s president and chief
executive, sent an email to the staff that dis-
cussed how “we are moving the museum
forward in our work to address issues of di-
versity and racism within our institution.”
The measures included convening a se-
ries of discussions on racial justice; aiming
to further diversify the staff; hiring a chief
diversity officer; instituting mandatory
anti-racism training; and declaring June 24
as a Museum Day of Reflection. Their email
also added, “we will continue to explore
themes of representation and diversity
through our programming.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Christiansen issued his
own apology in an email to the entire staff.
“I will make no excuses except to say that
I had in mind one thing and lacked the
awareness to self-reflect on how my post
could go in a very different direction, on a
very important day... and would cause fur-
ther hurt to those experiencing so much
pain right now,” he wrote. “I want to be clear
on my view that monuments of those who
promoted racist ideologies and systems
should never be glorified or in a location
where they can cause further harm.”
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Chris-
tiansen further elaborated that he had in-
tended to address “the losses that occur to a
fuller understanding of a complicated and
sometimes ugly past” when major works of
art are destroyed by “war, iconoclasm, revo-
lution and intolerance.” He added, “I very
stupidly pulled out of my image bank the
figure of Alexandre Lenoir intervening in
Saint-Denis to save the royal tombs in 1791.”
But the Instagram post had touched a
nerve. A group of staff members at the Met
followed up with a letter to Mr. Hollein and
Mr. Weiss. “All of us were angered that the
post seemed to equate Black Lives Matter
protesters with ‘revolutionary zealots’ — a
position made crueler by its posting on
Juneteenth,” said the letter, which was
signed by the 15 “ERG Co-Convenors,” a ref-
erence to the museum’s employee re-
sources groups, an outgrowth of the Met’s
diversity efforts.
Questioning how many other managers
might share such views, the letter said:
“While we understand that a private Insta-
gram account does not necessarily reflect
the views of the institution for which Chris-
tensen works — our Met — his position of
power within it, and the decision-making he
affects as a department head and senior cu-
rator with regard to programming, staff hir-
ing, and institutional direction, is more to
our point.”
In his response to the letter’s authors, Mr.
Weiss acknowledged that “we have moved
too slowly in building an institution that
more honestly reflects the communities we
serve or that honors our aspirations.”
Citing the additional complications of the
“toxic and polarizing language of our na-
tional political leadership” and the Met’s
large staff of more than 2,000, Mr. Weiss
added, “Sometimes, mistakes will be made
— including by us.”
Mr. Hollein and Mr. Weiss plan to meet
with the employee resources group on Tues-
day. Whether such efforts by the Met —
which just announced that it would reopen
on Aug. 29 — will succeed in calming the
waters remains to be seen.
“The path forward will be challenging,”
Mr. Weiss said in his statement, “but for the
first time in many years there is a collective
will to build a better community, one that
works for all.”Met Museum Grapples With Protests
‘Monuments of those who promoted racist ideologies and systems should
never be glorified or in a location where they can cause further harm.’
KEITH CHRISTIANSEN
CHAIRMAN OF EUROPEAN PAINTINGS,
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ARTCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESVIA BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
An Instagram post by Keith Christiansen, top, a Met museum curator, included an image of Alexandre Lenoir, above, who tried to save
monuments during the French Revolution. It drew criticism from museum staff members; Mr. Christiansen promptly apologized.