This is a brief biography of Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936), an Anglo-Indian writer who achieved fame at the start of the age of mass-market fiction. She was part of a community of women working in and around Bloomsbury

McClain, Molly

English

University of San Diego

University of San Diego Digital USD History: Faculty Scholarship Department of History 2024 Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936) Molly McClain University of San Diego, mmcclain@sandiego.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digital.sandiego.edu/history_facpub  Part of the Modern Literature Commons, Theatre History Commons, Women's History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Digital USD Citation “Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936),” Women for Women, Pascal Theatre Company, 2024, https://www.pascal-theatre.com/project/authors/ This Website is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at Digital USD. It has been accepted for inclusion in History: Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Digital USD. For more information, please contact digital@sandiego.edu. Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936) Abstract This is a brief biography of Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936), an Anglo-Indian writer who achieved fame at the start of the age of mass-market fiction. She was part of a community of women working in and around Bloomsbury. Keywords England, literature, health tourism, suffrage movement Disciplines History | Modern Literature | Theatre History | Women's History | Women's Studies Notes https://www.pascal-theatre.com/biographies/beatrice-harraden/ This website is available at Digital USD: https://digital.sandiego.edu/history_facpub/52 2/16/24, 6:35 AMBeatrice Harraden - Pascal Theatre CompanyPage 2 of 9https://www.pascal-theatre.com/biographies/beatrice-harraden/Beatrice HarradenNovelist, campaigner for women’s rights and suffrage.24 January 1864 – 5 May 1936Portrait of Beatrice Harraden no later than 1895 Publicdomain, via Wikimedia CommonsA tribute by Molly McClainBeatrice Harradan was an Anglo-Indian writer who achieved fame at the start of the age of mass-market fiction.She wrote a bestselling novel, Ships that Pass in the Night (1893), a tragic romance between two strangers whomeet in Swiss sanitarium that treats tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis, among other illnesses, had reachedepidemic proportions by the 1890s. Harraden’s candid appraisal of the emotional and psychological challenges2/16/24, 6:35 AMBeatrice Harraden - Pascal Theatre CompanyPage 3 of 9https://www.pascal-theatre.com/biographies/beatrice-harraden/faced by invalids and their caretakers touched a nerve in late Victorian readers. The book went into eleveneditions and was later translated into numerous languages, including Japanese.Harraden began her writing career in the 1880s, encouraged by the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton and a circle offemale writers working in and around Bloomsbury. A graduate of the University of London, Harraden was areader at the British Museum Reading Room. She sat under the great domed ceiling and penned children’s books,novels, and short stories. Physically slight, she had a deep, low voice, cropped black hair, and spectacles thatgave her a scholarly air.Harraden was supported in her work by well-to-do, middle-class parents who lived in St. John’s Wood. Her fatherSamuel Harraden was a Cambridge-educated musician and entrepreneur who exported musical instruments toBritish India, including one of the first phonographs exhibited in Calcutta. Her mother Rosalie Lindstedt was born inIndia. She was the daughter of a Swedish man and a Kashmiri woman. The couple raised their three daughtersand two sons with ‘the liberty to shape a career for themselves,’ in Harraden’s words.Like many of her contemporaries, Harraden suffered chronic illness. She had damaged her ulnar nerve by playingthe violoncello, leading to occasional paralysis in her right arm. She also may have suffered from neurasthenia, anervous disorder that caused fatigue, anxiety, headache, and depression. One contemporary described her as‘one of those small, slight women who are consumed by their own intense nervous and mental force.’Harraden regularly encountered doctors who believed that her troubles stemmed from the fact that she pursued aprofessional life as a writer. ‘If I could be like a cabbage, I might recover quicker,’ she wrote drily. In the early1890s, she took a prescribed ‘rest cure’ at a kurhaus in Davos, Switzerland, where she lay in the cold air, bundledin blankets. She tried hydrotherapy, or the water cure, at a health spa in Harrogate. She also went to a healthresort on Lake Geneva where she spent her days in bed consuming a fatty, milk-based diet designed to increaseher supply of red blood cells.In 1894, Harraden took up an invitation to visit British friends who had moved to San Diego, California, for the‘climate cure.’ By this time, it was recognised that tuberculosis was not the product of miasma or foul air but theresult of infection by the tubercule bacillus. The germ theory of disease, however, had yet to produce cures. Somephysicians argued that a healthful climate remained the best form of palliative care available. Southern California,which encompassed six distinct climate zones, made it possible for the health seeker to travel to the region bestsuited for their ailment in a matter of hours. Moreover, there was little seasonal change in temperature.Harraden had intended to rest, as her doctors had recommended but she found herself deeply involved in life onthe lemon ranch owned by John and Agnes Kendall. She pruned trees and gathered fruit. She learned to build afence, harness a horse, and undertake the kind of household chores typically done by servants in England. Moreimportantly, she pursued her writing. She later recalled, ‘I never remember any period of my life when I had moreideas, more ambitious and broader, stronger and more eager ideas and interests.’Energised by her experience, Harraden co-authored Two Health Seekers in Southern California (1897) with Dr.William A. Edwards, the house physician at the luxurious Hotel del Coronado, at that time the single largest hotel2/16/24, 6:35 AMBeatrice Harraden - Pascal Theatre CompanyPage 4 of 9https://www.pascal-theatre.com/biographies/beatrice-harraden/in the world. Her contribution consisted of two chapters in which she recommended the ‘nature cure’ to women, inparticular. Climate could help alleviate symptoms but, in her view, it was regular physical activity in the out-of-doors that was necessary to conquer disease, at least in its early stages.Physical activity was not a unique suggestion to the problem of poor health but it was rarely prescribed forwomen. Social Darwinism promoted the idea that physical struggle was necessary to the survival of the race. Menwere encouraged to overcome illness through strenuous activity and immersion in nature. Women, however, wereoften advised to rest and avoid physical and intellectual work.In the 1890s, however, there was a new appreciation for women’s capacity for work. If women could sweepcarpets, they could row boats; if they could work in laboratories, they could perform experiments. Harraden wasin the vanguard of what later would be described as ‘feminism,’ the belief that women could achieve as much asmen given the same opportunities.Harraden did not settle permanently in California but returned to London where she began to fight for women’srights and suffrage. For a time, her fiction writing became less important than her political activism. She wrote andgave speeches on behalf of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the Women Writers’ SuffrageLeague, among other organisations. She participated in marches, sold campaign literature, and produced a one-act suffrage play, ‘Lady Geraldine’s Speech.’ In 1913, she joined other members of the Woman’s Tax ResistanceLeague in refusing to pay tax on the same grounds as the former American colonists: no taxation withoutrepresentation.During the First World War, Harraden volunteered to provide food, shelter, and clothing for Belgian refugees. Shealso worked as a librarian at the Endell Street Hospital for Soldiers, the only British army hospital staffed entirelyby women. There, she made sure that wounded soldiers were not subject to ‘improving’ literature but allowed tochoose books for themselves.In her novels and short stories, Harraden addressed issues faced by modern women. These included restrictivemarriages; emotional entanglements; gendered expectations of how women should look, dress, and behave;efforts at self-realisation; and the burden of independence. Many of her novels have remarkably unhappyendings, suggesting that Harraden was deeply aware of the social conventions that kept women from achievingpersonal autonomy. She expressed this sentiment in a novel, Katharine Frensham (1903), in which the titlecharacter says, ‘I begin to see why life is far easier to men than to women. The fight with the outer world bracesmen up. They go forth, and pass on strengthened. But women are chained to circumstance—or chain themselves.’Harraden chose an unconventional path. She never married or had children but surrounded herself with otherambitious women. While she continued to experience periods of debilitating illness, she did not allow ‘the worldof suffering’ to define her life. A friend described her as a person with ‘more vitality than others, more scorn ofconvention, more ardour to initiate and to save.’Harraden never recaptured the critical praise or fame that accompanied her first novel, Ships that Pass in theNight, but she continued to work. Over the course of her lifetime, she produced seventeen novels, short stories,2/16/24, 6:35 AMBeatrice Harraden - Pascal Theatre CompanyPage 5 of 9https://www.pascal-theatre.com/biographies/beatrice-harraden/non-fiction pieces, newspaper articles, and a play. She died in a nursing home at Barton on Sea, a village inHampshire, at the age of 72, having constructed a life of art and activism as her ‘bridge between life and death’:‘We shall go on building our bridge between life and death, eachone for himself. When we see that it is not strong enough, weshall break it down and build another. We shall watch otherpeople building their bridges. We shall imitate, or criticise, orcondemn. But as time goes on, we shall learn not to interfere,we shall know that one bridge is probably as good as the other;and that the greatest value of them all has been in the buildingof them. It does not matter what we build, but build we must:you, and I, and everyone.’Ships  That  Pass  in  The Night .Molly McClain is Professor of History at the University of San Diego. She is the author of three books andnumerous articles in British and U.S. history, including Ellen Browning Scripps: New Money and AmericanPhilanthropy (2017).Further Reading:Harraden, Beatrice. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present.https://orlando.cambridge.org/profiles/harrbeHarraden, Beatrice (1864-1936). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://www.oxforddnb.comHarraden, Beatrice. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_HarradenMcClain, Molly. A British Health Seeker in Southern California: Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936). The Journal ofSan Diego History, vol.67, no. 1, Spring 2021, 23-46. https://sandiegohistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/SDHC-JOSDH-Spring-2021.pdfSunderland, Katherine. Beatrice Harraden. Late Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists, ed. George M.Johnson, Gale, 1995, 100-105.Tankard, Alex. Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018,

Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936)

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Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936)

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