Bessie Rayner Parkes’s Sisterhoods: A Study of Summer Sketches and Historic Nuns

Abstract

The English writer Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925) was born into a Unitarian family but embraced Catholicism in 1864. Her father, Joseph Parkes, was an election agent and reformer. Her mother, Elizabeth Rayner Priestley, was granddaughter to the eminent scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley. Her paternal uncle, Josiah Parkes, was an influential engineer. Parkes was educated in the Unitarian school of William Field and Mary Wilkins. Her outlook was firstly affected by the several travels she had since adolescence. Secondly, it was shaped by inspiring women figures and friendships. The former included Anna Jameson, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Caroline Norton and Julia Smith. Some of the latter were Barbara Leigh Smith, Marian Evans, Adelaide Procter and Anthony Ashley Cooper. From late 1850s to mid-1860s, she participated in activities of the women’s movement. She was editor of The English Woman’s Journal and a member of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Since her late teens, she devoted to journalistic and literary writing. She contributed to the Hastings and St Leonard News, the Birmingham Journal, the Waverley Journal and The English Woman’s Journal. She is the author of fifteen verse and prose books which were published between 1852 and 1900. In several cases, she provides portraits of female work. This theme was important to the women’s movement which strategically fostered the knowledge and recognition of women’s achievements. On the whole, this thesis begins with an introduction to the authoress in question. Subsequently, it focuses on the autobiographical poem Summer Sketches (1854) and the collective biography Historic Nuns (1898). They respectively provide portraits of artistic and religious sisterhoods. They mirror the collective identity of the women’s movement whose members embraced the ideal of sisterhood in order to develop individual and community potentials.