Seminar Series 1 - Biddy Early, Herbal Healers, and Women of Botany

Today I am discussing a fascinating research seminar I attended last month, led by Holly Walker-Dunseith, whose recently-published article explores the influence of Biddy Early on the works of Lady Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats. A nineteenth-century folk-healer in Galway, Biddy Early’s almost mythic status has become global despite her somewhat obscure life. Some scholars attribute her survival in the cultural imagination to the Irish diaspora and the subsequent “production and reproduction of an Irish historical imaginary” (Jenkins 171), but Walker-Dunseith is interested in Early’s presence in the “imaginations” of Yeats and Gregory. Her aim throughout this talk and article, was to “reposition this non-elite woman as one of the culture-givers of the Revival period” (340).

Focusing on Early’s famous moss cure, which she harvested between Ballylee’s two mill-wheels, Walker-Dunseith highlighted her influence on Yeats’ poem, “The Well of All-Healing”, and his fascination with the healing-woman’s panacea. Early’s moss remedy was thought to cure anything fairy-induced but not common ailments (345). Not having much knowledge of Yeats, I was interested to learn that Early represents a talismanic spiritual healing for Yeats, one that bridges “medicine, but also a distinct otherworld that crosses over into the everyday world, and thus forms a connection between the two” (346). This is especially interesting considering moss’s connections to skin – another barrier and bridge. As a preserver and recovery aid, moss is useful to health in many guises from cosmetic to anti-bacterial to curative – all denoting skin (348).

Early was also known for collecting early morning dew, which Walker-Dunseith links to John Rainsford’s research on alchemists who believed dew was a dawn secretion, and component of the Philosopher’s Stone (345). But what I found especially interesting were the aspects of medical anxiety that filtered into literature, most notably the fixation with miasmas, which as Walker-Dunseith explains, was the forerunning hypothesis to germ theory in the 1890s (343). This stale, noxious air was thought to carry infection, and influenced a trend in countering trips to the wholesome seaside. Soon becoming commercialised as a health cure, this fashion naturally permeated contemporary literature, as exemplified in Jane Austen’s Sanditon, where an entire town is built for this type of therapeutic tourism. It was similarly fascinating to consider how Early’s natural methods became inscribed by Lady Gregory, thus bringing her into the realm of ‘high culture’ through publication. As another scholar illuminates, this was part of a “project of enchantment that transformed relatively vernacular narratives into a national and international romantic image of a vanishing Gaelic Ireland” (Jenkins 169).

In his research article on Early’s life, Richard Jenkins asserts that there is a growing literature of alternative healers built on the evidence of “oral narratives, legal records, newspaper accounts, and eye-witness testimony about a heterogeneous spectrum of practitioners” (165). In the Irish tradition these “unofficial ritual specialists” were ascribed various names historically, from fairy doctors - doctúirí na síofraí - to wise women - mná feasa (165). Alongside the talk on Biddy Early, this reminded me of Hannah Kent’s novel, The Good People. Published in 2016, this narrative adapts a real-life tragedy of infanticide and viscerally explores the hardships and healing practices of herbal women in rural Ireland in the 1800s, where mental health issues and neurodiversity were considered changeling substitutions or curses cast by the titular good folk/fairies.

Set prior to the famine, from 1825-6, each chapter is named after a plant traditionally used for medicinal purposes, including the familiar dock, bramble, and nettle, to the lesser-spotted Devil’s-bit scabious. Intertwined with poverty, hunger, and elemental hardship, Kent fuses holistic folk-belief and fairy lore with everyday survival, reflecting the syncretic reality of nineteenth-century life which she calls “a deeply complex, ambiguous system” with “little that is twee or childish about it” (384). Her research lists Lady Gregory’s fairy stories amongst a bibliography of other texts on Irish myths, legends, and healing practices.

While I am fascinated by the world of plants, early medicine, and herbalism, Walker-Dunseith’s talk made me immediately think of another novel of the same era, but based in a vastly different world. Those narratives, testimonies, articles and accounts that Jenkins listed, also inspired the author Elizabeth Gilbert, whose novel, The Signature of All Things (2013), is based on journals and letters of women working in an overwhelmingly masculine field. In an interview, Gilbert cites her fictional protagonist’s real-life origins as an amalgamation of such pioneering women as “Elizabeth Gertrude Knight Britton, a great Victorian moss lady; Mrs. Mary Treat, whom Darwin turned to for help in understanding carnivorous plants; Marianne North, who has an entire gallery dedicated to her at Kew Gardens; [and] Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, Louis Agassiz’s wife, one of the early presidents of Radcliffe College” (Dreifus).

Centring the unconventional life of Alma Whittaker, whose life begins in 1800, spans eighty years of the 19th century, and becomes devoted to the study of moss, Gilbert’s novel departs radically from Kent’s by traversing Philadelphia, Tahiti, London, and South America. Alma is presented as the fictional contemporary and competitor of Charles Darwin who publishes On the Origin of Species before she finishes her magnum opus, The Theory of Competitive Alteration. With her similar arguments on natural selection now rendered obsolete, Gilbert further suggests that it was Alma’s female tendency for empathy and perfectionism which prevented her from publishing. As she explicitly states in the same interview; “what holds women from putting their work forward is a fear that it is not immaculate, not beyond reproach and that it may not be taken seriously” (Dreifus).

But what interested me most in Gilbert’s sweeping epic, were her descriptions of Alma’s moss specimens, which quickly become an absorbing passion and obsessional consolation for her unlucky romantic life. Under a microscope, moss becomes alive to her with “diminutive fjords … warm estuaries, miniature cathedrals” (Gilbert 162), so that it “appear[s] to have its own weather” (161) – it is “the entire world” in microcosm (162). A review of Gilbert’s novel highlights Alma’s realisation that moss not only exists in its own timeframe, and therefore will outlive her, but her life’s work will not even begin to approach the kernel of its ontology. Moss is not restricted to human lifespans or conceptions of fixed linear time; “its incredibly slow growth patterns render its study largely unsuited to the human lifespan” (Boyt). As Barbara Kingsolver observes, “[o]ver decades [Alma] measures their conquests in millimeters, and is thrilled.” This is the kind of inventive writing that can deconstruct inherited human scales of perception and transvalue traditional, anthropocentric conceptions of time and the natural world. By considering biocentric perspectives or “the difference of the nonhuman in a non-hierarchical way” (Plumwood 129), I think literature can extend in new and creative ways.

By elevating this often overlooked, literally trodden-on organism, Gilbert causes us to reconsider our appreciation for the natural world which tends to extend only to beauty and cuteness. We might fawn over baby animals but not their dangerous adult selves, just as we admire picturesque landscapes but often overlook uncultivated land. Eco-feminists draw our attention to the importance of considering nature not simply as something beautiful to be protected, but as an integral, interdependent part of us - “‘Nature’ is … both that which we are not and that which we are within” (Soper 21). The eminent ecocritic, Val Plumwood, differentiates between land and landscape, stating the latter is a cultural projection onto the former, as typified by the 19th century’s picturesque movement which fetishized tamed and prettified topographies. “To describe the land as a ‘landscape’ is to privilege the visual over other, more rounded and embodied ways of knowing the land, for example, by walking over it, or by smelling and tasting its life,” says Plumwood (123).

In a sphere apart from the inherited and intuitive healing practices of rural Ireland in the same century, Alma inhabits instead the scientific world, or the proto-scientific world still semi-permeable to female ‘enthusiasts’ of the time. I am fascinated by this century, especially the increasing stratification of society which was removing pastimes enjoyed by women into the hierarchical, academicized, and professionalised domain of men and Science.

While Biddy Early, the women herbal healers of The Good People, and their later female counterparts working under the scientific name of botany, may seem worlds apart, Jenkins’ article highlights an unfortunate similarity. Early’s mythic status was such that some people deny she ever existed (167). But Jenkins argues that to disprove her existence would be a very difficult endeavour considering not many facts abound about any “nineteenth-century Irish peasant woman” (167). This might speak more broadly to the effacement of women from history, especially women who worked subversively outside of, or parallel to, masculine (medical) traditions. While fern-collecting, the language of flowers, preserving petals, floral drawings and embroidery were popular pursuits of Victorian women, this period saw the invention of botany as an exclusive, masculine, scientific field cordoned off from the majority of women. According to Ann B. Shteir, botanical science succeeded plant study between 1830 and 1860 (29). She asserts that botanical pursuits were closely associated with women in the late eighteenth-century (29), but due in large part to the work of John Lindley, it was deliberately divided into “polite botany” for women and a newly defeminised “botanical science” for men (33). But there were some exceptions to this hermetic seal – if a woman was upper/middle class and related or married to a scientific man. Alma in The Signature of All Things, or Molly Gibson in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, thus manoeuvre the system. Gibson is the daughter of a doctor, and marries Roger Hamley, a scientist and prominent member of The Royal Geographical Society. Through these connections, resources, and fortunes of birth, both characters manage to engineer their way around 19th-century restrictions and mature a lifelong love of nature into a life’s work.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Sanditon. 1817. Penguin, 2019.

Boyt, Susie. "Susie Boyt on The Signature of all Things by Elizabeth Gilbert."

FT.Com, 2013. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/trade-journals/susie-boyt-on-

signature-all-things-elizabeth/docview/1448103684/se-2.

Correll, Timothy C. “Believers, Sceptics, and Charlatans: Evidential Rhetoric, the

Fairies, and Fairy Healers in Irish Oral Narrative and Belief.” Folklore (London),

vol. 116, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1-18.

Davies, Stevie. “The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert – review.” The

Guardian, 5 Oct. 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/05/signature

-things-elizabeth-gilbert-review.

Dreifus, Claudia. “Elizabeth Gilbert Finds Inspiration Behind the Garden Gate.”

The New York Times, 4 Nov. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/

elizabeth-gilbert-finds-inspiration-behind-the-garden-gate.html.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Wives and Daughters. 1866. Penguin, 2003.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. The Signature of All Things. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Jenkins, Richard. “The Transformations of Biddy Early: From Local Reports of

Magical Healing to Globalised New Age Fantasies.” Folklore (London),

vol. 118, no. 2, 2007, pp. 162-182.

Kent, Hannah. The Good People. Picador, 2017.

Kingsolver, Barbara. “The Botany of Desire.” The New York Times, 26 Sep. 2013,

www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/books/review/elizabeth-gilberts-signature-of-all-

things.html.

Plumwood, Val. “The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency

in the Land.” Ethics & the Environment, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115-150.

Shteir, Ann B. “Gender and “Modern” Botany in Victorian England.” Osiris, vol, 12,

1997, pp. 29-38.

Soper, Kate. “The Discourses of Nature.” What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the

Non-Human. Blackwell, 1995, pp. 15-34.

Walker-Dunseith, Holly M. “The Healer in the Tower: Biddy Early and Discourses of

Healing in the Work of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory.” Irish Studies

Review, vol. 30, no. 3, 2022, pp. 340-356.