I’m Mae Macfarlane, here with the Professor Podcast, the podcast of your professors, their research, and their academic lives here at Saint Thomas. This week, we are delighted to have with us Dr. Alexis Easley, Professor in the Saint Thomas English department.
Welcome, Alexis.
00:00:24 Alexis Easley
Yeah! thank you! Pleased to be here.
00:00:25 Mae Macfarlane
Glad to have you.
00:00:27 Mae Macfarlane
So, Alexis, can you kind of explain to us who Eliza Cook is and what your research around her is about.
00:00:35 Mae Macfarlane
Do you want to read one of her poems first?
00:00:36 Alexis Easley
Oh, sure. OK. All right. So I'm going to read the “Old Armchair,” which was first published in around 1840, in a newspaper. And it was set to music that year by somebody named Henry Russell, who was a very famous baritone singer of the time.
And he went on tour in the United States and sang the song along with a repertoire of other pieces. And it became the most popular song in America in 1840.
And just a little background here. So her mother died when she was 15 and this, she claimed, was the reason she started writing poetry. It was just to really express her feelings of devastation over this loss because they were very close.
00:01:23 Alexis Easley
The Old Armchair
By Eliza Cook
I love it, I love it; and who shall dare
To chide me for loving that old arm-chair?
I’ve treasured it long as a sainted prize,
I’ve bedew’d it with tears, and embalmed it with sighs;
’Tis bound by a thousand bands to my heart;
Not a tie will break, not a link will start.
Would ye learn the spell? a mother sat there,
And a sacred thing is that old arm-chair.
In childhood’s hour I linger’d near
The hallow’d seat with list’ning ear;
And gentle words that mother would give,
To fit me to die and teach me to live.
She told me shame would never betide,
With truth for my creed and God for my guide;
She taught me to lisp my earliest prayer,
As I knelt beside that old arm-chair.
I sat and watch’d her many a day,
When her eye grew dim, and her locks were grey;
And I almost worshipp’d her when she smil’d
And turn’d from her Bible to bless her child.
Years roll’d on, but the last one sped—
My idol was shatter’d, my earth-star fled;
I learnt how much the heart can bear,
When I saw her die in that old arm-chair.
’Tis past! ’tis past! but I gaze on it now
With quivering breath and throbbing brow:
’Twas there she nursed me, ’twas there she died;
And memory flows with lava tide.
Say it is folly, and deem me weak,
While the scalding drops start down my cheek;
But I love it, I love it, and cannot tear
My soul from a mother’s old arm-chair.
00:03:05 Alexis Easley
Most people have never heard of Eliza Cook, and yet she was arguably the most popular poet in Great Britain and America. From about the mid 1830s to the mid 1850s. Everyone knew her name.
In fact, I have a wonderful quote from someone who said that you couldn't make your way through London without seeing these massive posters with her name on them.
00:03:31 Alexis Easley
It’s hard to imagine now, a poet like being that prominent, but she truly was, and it's all the more remarkable when you consider her background. She was born in 1812 in South London, the daughter of a brass and tin craftsman. So, it's stunning that she was able to get enough education to be a poet.
But to be a craftsman is to be an artisan so you're not like the lowest of the low class. So you could still send your kids to a day school or hire somebody to come in. And teach them basic literacy.
Somehow, she arose from this working-class community to become a major poet, and her first collection of poems was called “Lays of a Wild Harp,” which came out in 1835, when she was just 23 years. So, she was really young and she went on to publish many other volumes.
And a few reasons that I think she's super interesting--
Working class. She also was very much an out lesbian. I mean she had “a romantic friendship” is what they called it with Charlotte Bushman, the famous American actress from about 1845 to about 1850, and two of them would go around to all of the soirees and literary parties, you know, dressed, as one actor, described it “in Wellington boots.” And in very carefully tailored men's jackets. But one of the things I found so puzzling about her was that how could you be so radical and out as a lesbian woman during the 1840s when that was not possible just a decade later?
00:05:10 Mae Macfarlane
Yeah, the shift kind of came hard and fast there.
00:05:14 Alexis Easley
So, I think she was such an original, such an iconoclast. I mean, she really realized how exceptional she was, both as a person and as a writer. And I think that confidence, I think, is something that I really love.
I mean we, as 21st century women, we think, you know, we've got so many advantages you know, which in many ways we do over Victorian women,
But here is somebody in a society where she couldn't vote, you know, own property, you know, yet somehow, she managed to become the most famous...
00:05:47 Mae Macfarlane
She was holding her own.
00:05:47 Alexis Easley
Yeah.
00:05:48 Mae Macfarlane
And you kind of mentioned that she was this celebrity, like, internationally known, many people today don't know who she is. Can you go into a little bit like, how did you find her and like what drew you to her?
00:06:03 Alexis Easley
I always had known about her journal that she edited because I'm a scholar of 19th century journalism.
In addition to literature. So she did have a self-titled periodical which I brought with me here today...
00:06:14 Mae Macfarlane
Oh wonderful.
00:06:15 Alexis Easley
...called Eliza Cook's Journal, so she's definitely playing off her celebrity identity now with the title of her journal and she wrote a large part of every issue. So, it was a journal that rivaled Charles Dickens's journals in terms of popularity.
00:06:28 Mae Macfarlane
Oh wow.
00:06:29 Alexis Easley
So, I mean, she was really quite successful as a journalist. So, I heard about her first that way, and then a friend of mine asked me to write a little biography of her for a reference book.
And then I got really interested. I thought, OK, I need to know much more about this writer and the more I got into her life story, the more I realized that she really needed a biography of her own.
00:06:49 Alexis Easley
So, I I've started working on that this year and just feel I've never written a biography before, so I'm excited to try it out and to hopefully do justice to her really wonderful life.
00:07:02 Mae Macfarlane
Now that's a huge undertaking, but very exciting.
What have you found the most exciting about your research with Eliza or other aspects of Victorian times and such that you've found?
00:07:12 Alexis Easley
Well, I'm really interested in celebrity culture past and present.
And one of the things that characterized, like, the 1830s and 40s was the rise of new media. So there were, for the first time, mass market newspapers and magazines that had circulations in the, first in the 10s of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands and certainly by mid-century in the millions, you know. So it was like the first time that there's like, this massive explosion of print culture because the price of paper and printing went down, and taxes went down as well.
00:07:43 Alexis Easley
So provide all these opportunities for women because they had to somehow produce content, you know, so like now, you know, they know that, you know, it's like somebody has to produce constant content to feed.
00:07:51 Mae Macfarlane
My brain, when you were describing her like she's kind of an influencer. That's kind of where my brain went, like, she sounds like a modern day, like, Renaissance woman. Like she can run an Instagram, have a blog and do some like multi-level marketing like she can kind of do it all is kind of where my brain went.
00:08:07 Alexis Easley
Yeah, I think that's a really apt comparison. And like she was editing a newspaper, really dispatch, which was a massive, huge circulation newspaper then, you know, branched off into her own journal. And she would, like, publish the same poems in both places.
And she was also publishing books. So, she wrote/was like cross marketing in that way. The poems would appear in newspapers and periodicals. And then people would want to buy the book.
00:08:29 Alexis Easley
You know, so she's very clever at working different media.
Mae Macfarlane
Which feels very unique for that period.
00:08:37 Alexis Easley
Oh, yeah very much so. The only person who compares is Charles Dickens, who's also same time period, right? Also, just very good at taking advantage of new media and new audiences, exploiting the system to kind of create his own celebrity and she was just a genius at this.
And one of the other things that's so curious about her is she had sort of like two lives, so she had her private life whereas I mentioned before, she was having a romantic friendship with Charlotte Cushman, the Great American actress, and writing love poems to her and not thinly veiled, love poems, out there love poems to her in newspapers and periodicals.
00:09:17 Alexis Easley
Just to give you a little quote, example, of what it sounded like this poetry she was writing. This was published in the Weekly Dispatch, that major newspaper.
She said,
“I love thee with a freeborn will that no rude force can break.
Thou lovest me, I know thou dost, and for my own poor sake”
Really pleading with her to be loved and it was horrible when she finally went back to America and the relationship kind of ended at that point.
So anyway, she has this life on one hand, and also her private performances at parties and soirees where she’s just like showing up and shocking, you know, everyone present with her cross dressing, but then you have this.
She's the sentimental poet, you know, and the old armchair.
The poem that I read kind of gives you a feel for what that was like. You know, just like very conventional domestic values of love and faith and just really the kind of peoples’ poetry that everyone could connect to.
00:10:20 Mae Macfarlane
Yeah, I find myself, you know, in my English classes here, as in Thomas and stuff like, I love the poetry sections, cause it's just it's universal. Topics that, of course, every 21-year-old is going to be feeling in our English class. And from what I've read and such of hers that you sent to us it, feels very she's a people’s person and people's poet and she's kind of living a very staunchly different lifestyle than a lot of people.
But she's showing that she's the same as everyone else at the same time, she's breaking these norms, but is very normative at the same time as... Her duality is very interesting.
00:10:56 Alexis Easley
Yeah, exactly her duality. And I think that in a strange way, people loved her not only because her poetry, sort of like spoke to their everyday experience, but also because she wasn't like everyone else. You know, she wasn't one of the dolled up, but beautiful poetesses of the time period.
00:11:15 Alexis Easley
There's something very real about her, and she'd love to write about working class people and culture. And so I think that, you know, she's more relatable.
00:11:22 Mae Macfarlane
So cool.
00:11:23 Alexis Easley
I mean, she was also subject to what today we would call “Gender trolling,” though.
00:11:27 Mae Macfarlane
Yes. Oh, I'm sure.
00:11:29 Alexis Easley
Yeah, and it all really got started when she moved in with Harmar family. So, the Weekly Dispatch that that newspaper that you worked for was run by this Alderman Harmer, who also came from a working-class background.
But he made lots of money. He bought this massive Manor house, and he brought Eliza there once she became famous as a poet to live with him and his granddaughter Emma.
Well, it appears that Eliza and Emma had some kind of romantic relationship with each other and this, like, hit the press and all the really down-market, trashy magazines were like making fun of her and, of course, she just sort of denied all of it but that was sort of how it got started.
And then later it continues, there is a guy named John Ross Dix who was really trying to make a name for himself as a journalist, and he kind of took on Eliza Cook as a special Other.
00:12:26 Alexis Easley
And he wrote a couple of books and articles that where he, like, really just criticized her horribly. He referred to her in 1846 as a hybrid looking individual.
00:12:36 Alexis Easley
And in 1851, he reported that he met with her, where “she flung herself into a chair,” he wrote, “planted her feet on the fender, threw herself back and exclaimed. ‘Give us a glass of beer.’”
Now to me, that endears me to her.
00:12:52 Mae Macfarlane
Yeah, she sounds like a cool girl, right?
00:12:53 Alexis Easley
I thought that, I mean, I think there's definitely more I could say about the difficulties that she ran into from her detractors, but just very quickly, ”gender trolling” is a term used in social media contexts to refer to, usually anonymous, usually men, who attack prominent women. Who described themselves as feminist.
00:13:17 Mae Macfarlane
In my experience of it, it can be even like any, not even social media, like canvas or but it's any platform where yes, it can be done semi-anonymously or even just behind a screen. And even other women can be very intimidated by women in power. It's one of those unique things that's kind of, in my experience, kind of. Anyone that's somewhat insecure, like, sexistly target others.
00:13:40 Alexis Easley
Yeah, it's all about the insecurity of the person doing the trolling and often gender trolling is focused on people's physical appearance as well and that's certainly true that John Ross Dix example that I gave you where you just sort of taking her on in terms of her appearance as much as her edginess as a public celebrity.
A couple of other really interesting little incidents are... that I think it was 1847, somebody else named Eliza Cook murdered her child and this one editor, Thomas Murden, assumed that it was Eliza Cook, the poet who had done this, and he like published this story about how “the great poetess, you know, had murdered her baby.”
And Eliza Cook actually had to go to court to get him to retract this, which he did but had no penalty, didn't have to pay fines or anything like that, which I thought was appalling.
00:14:33 Mae Macfarlane
It's interesting though, because you know, when we think of, you know, falsely accusing someone, you would Google it now, like there is kind of kind of, well, how could he know, blah blah blah. But also if there was already a public: “She's weird. Let's go after her” kind of thing.
It is disheartening to hear that. And then that she had to go through all those steps and then still there was no like, yeah, he pulled it. He won't get reprimanded or pay a fine or anything.
00:14:56 Alexis Easley
But she would continue to pay the cost because it was still out there, not everyone would have read the retraction, so it was public defamation and this of course, is before the professionalization of journalism. So unfortunately, there wasn't really a code of ethics. That was basically anything went.
There was later in life. There was, I think this was like in 1873 there was another case of mistaken identity. She had a very common name it.
00:15:25 Mae Macfarlane
Yeah, yeah.
00:15:26 Alexis Easley
Just like Jane Smith or something. I'm not sure that's a complete excuse, but anyway, her death was reported in the paper in 1873.
00:15:32 Mae Macfarlane
Oh my goodness.
00:15:33 Alexis Easley
And it was announced that at the funeral, a group of mourners...This was a quote” was seen breaking open the doors of the church and pressing forward to touch the shroud.”
Like she was a saint or something. Turns out it wasn't her at all. She was alive and well, you know, in Wimbledon.
So because she was so famous, I think every paper was just looking for opportunities to sensationalize her life story.
00:15:57 Mae Macfarlane
There's a blessing and curse in that where her work Is being shown and she is this very interesting and captivating writer and woman and publisher. But then also she's a victim of bad press.
00:16:08 Alexis Easley
So she, as a journalist and as a poet, was instrumental in just shaping the field of journalism. I mean, it's astonishing what she was able to do as a journalist. At the same time, she was falling victim to the very sort of system that she helped to create, which is a sort of bitter irony associated with her life.
00:16:29 Alexis Easley
The end of the 19th century, she was very much kind of treated as a joke. People lost track of, sort of, that edgy persona that she had, you know, and she became stereotyped as this very sentimental has- been. And in 1930, her poems were published in a book called The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse.
You know, so, No one read her, you know? And that pretty much put the nail in the coffin of her reputation.
00:16:59 Mae Macfarlane
And she's kind of faded into history, unfortunately, yeah.
00:17:04 Alexis Easley
All this changed in the 20th century. In the 1980s and 1990s, when feminists rediscovered her and began writing articles about her and just recovering her amazing career. And I count myself among the number.
I was one of the people who just found her fascinating and just discovered that she actually also was very feminist in her attitudes. Like for example, in 1851 in Eliza Cook's Journal, she published an article called the “Vocations of Women” where she really took down her critics who accused her of being too masculine as a writer. She said, “This is absurd to refer to my work as masculine just because it's vigorous and energetic.” She said, “Nothing is more energetic and more vigorous than a woman.”
You know, so.
00:17:57 Mae Macfarlane
The more you give me, it's more...She's very interesting and intriguing.
And it's something that I would have enjoyed to have learned about sooner in my public-school education. You know, we've seen someone that is true to themselves, holding their own, and especially then a man's world.
00:18:13 Mae Macfarlane
Alexis, you mentioned earlier that. You were interested in, like, historical journalism and all historical writing of that sort. What kind of got you into that? Would you consider that? Your broad area of research that kind of you narrowed in on Eliza Cook?
00:18:28 Alexis Easley
When I was in my PhD program, I was introduced to this group of scholars called the Research Society for Victorian periodicals. I just randomly went to another conferences, but the more I got to know these folks, the more I realized there's just this whole world that I didn't know about. And what really attracted me to it, because I've always been interested in women's literature, is that there were actually thousands of women writing for periodicals and newspapers during the Victorian period that I didn’t know about and, the reason I didn't know about them is because most of them published anonymously.
So, there's been all sorts of really interesting work in recovering the identities of these thousands of women. So, to be a writer or a woman in the Victorian period, it wasn't to be an exceptional figure. There were a lot of women writing, you know, and writing about all sorts of really interesting topics.
Most, I mean, Eliza Cook in this regard is an outlier, because she was such a named journalist and poet. Most women writing during this period weren't for the very reason that they feared gender trolling. They wanted to live their middle class, usually, lifestyles without any harassment and could do it if they published anonymously.
So yeah, I'm super interested in women's work as journalism, but also how it intersects with their literary work. Name a Victorian writer and you'll see that she was also a journalist.
00:19:53 Mae Macfarlane
So, when you are doing research on those authors, as you mentioned, how do you find out who they are? And where their backgrounds come from?
00:20:02 Alexis Easley
Well, there is a whole long history of people associated with this professional organization of people who like scour letters, scour ledgers, publishers, archives, you know, it's trying to find this information. So that's been going on for about 50 years.
00:20:17 Mae Macfarlane
OK, wow.
00:20:18 Alexis Easley
But there's still discoveries to be made. For example, when I was at the National Library of Scotland before the pandemic. I found this ledger for Chambers Edinburgh Journal, which was, sort of, like Eliza Cook’s, was meant to appeal to a really broad popular audience. But anyway, I found the ledger that had all the names with all the titles of things that people published and it said how much they were paid said where they lived. So, it was like a gold mine.
00:20:45 Mae Macfarlane
Yeah, yeah, that's what I was kind of thinking. It would be the payroll sheets that would hold all that information because – taxes -- you have to be correct about that kind of stuff.
00:20:55 Alexis Easley
And women wrote about surprising things when they were anonymous. They could write about politics, economics, business, drug use. I mean you name it. So, they won't limit it to traditionally feminine kinds of subject matter, because nobody knew it was them?
00:21:10 Mae Macfarlane
Would women use pen names as well, or was it?
00:21:13 Alexis Easley
In fact, one of the writers that I'm really interested in. Eliza Meteyard, who is a contemporary of Eliza Cooks’. Her pen name was Silver Pen, which I always thought was the best pen name ever!
00:21:25 Mae Macfarlane
That's very clever. Kind of cheeky too, which is kind of fun.
So, kind of talking like, you know, these women doing, like, covering all these topics and breaking their own norms through their own subtle ways. How do you think that this research and looking back on these writers applies to, like, everyday life.
00:21:42 Alexis Easley
I mean, I think that all of us should be inspired by people who were willing to just radically be themselves. I find that inspiring every day and just the bravery that it takes to enter into a male dominated field.
And just say, “You know, I'm. I'm going to be a major poet. I'm going to have my own journal. I'm going to be a celebrity.”
And just make it happen and to fall in love with somebody this fabulous actress. And to be just unashamed about it. Yeah, just to follow her heart, which I think is brilliant.
Charlotte Cushman is herself a super interesting figure who's actually been written about a lot. But she was also a poet, I discovered, in addition to being an actress. But famously, when she came to the UK and when Eliza Cook first met her in the 1845, she was playing britches roles. In other words, she was playing male roles on the stage, not exclusively.
For example, she played Romeo to great critical acclaim. I mean, everyone thought she was the best Romeo ever.
So, you. have this image of Eliza Cook watching this play unfold, sort of looking at Charlotte Cushman. Like, yeah, she's amazing and falling in love with her as a man on the stage. And then falling in love with her again off stage.
Another discovery that I made along the way was that both Charlotte and Eliza had their portrait taken by somebody named William Trautschold. And I knew about the Eliza Cook portrait first, which was infamous during its time period where she looks very masculine.
I mean, she is wearing a waistcoat. Yeah, her hair is bobbed. Same style as Charles Dickens’s bob. But anyway, Charlotte Cushman's portrait I saw for the first time the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC and I when I looked closely at it, I saw that she was holding a book and I looked at the book and it was the poems of Eliza Cook that she was holding.
00:23:38 Mae Macfarlane
Stop it. My heart just melts.
00:23:47 Alexis Easley
That I was just. Like, oh, it's so sweet.
Mae Macfarlane
That is very sweet. Oh, my goodness.
00:23:49 Alexis Easley
So, it was like this, this little coded message between the two of them.
00:23:51 Mae Macfarlane
Not, which is very sweet and powerful,
kind of relating to that scene, like applying to everyday life. How do you think Eliza Cook's writings relates to modern day life now?
00:24:02 Alexis Easley
I mean, I think that the sentiments are still very real. I mean, the old armchairs are about loss.
We all experience grief and the way your grief can be focused on objects that have been left behind.
00:24:14 Alexis Easley
I mean, after my mother died, like all of her things, you know, took on the sort of halo of feeling you know, and I think that that's what she's getting out this poem and that's why it was so wildly popular.
00:24:25 Alexis Easley
They dealt with a lot more death on a daily basis in the Victorian period than we do. Even childhood diseases had no vaccines. You know, they didn't have antibiotics. There was a lot of death. So a lot of her problems have to do with death, especially her mother stuff.
And I thought I'd read you another one.
00:24:41 Mae Macfarlane
Yes, that would be wonderful.
00:24:42 Alexis Easley
So I relate to this one because she was just a year older than me when she wrote this one. So when she was in her twilight years, she lived in Wimbledon, which is, as I'm sure you know, a suburb of London just an hour south of London.
I'm actually going there in a month, and I've tracked down her, her grave, which is. And see her house, which apparently still stands.
So anyway, she wrote this poem, which I always felt really poignant.
00:25:08 Alexis Easley
This is 1871 in St. James's Magazine, and I don't think it was published anywhere else, but I just found it just very poignant. Reflection on death. So, it's called
“In the Churchyard, Old Wimbledon.”
There, beneath the churchyard, Willow, where the latest sunbeams come.
I would gladly seek a pillow, sleeping in my last sweet home.
For healths ebbing Tide has left me, on a stark and dreary shore.
Year by year, has time bereft me of what time can now restore?
Friends whom once I love to reckon, give no more the clasping hand
Cold and dust they can but beckon to another better land.
Hopes as vivid as the tinting of the April rainbow light
Thoughts as tender as the glinting of the first pale star of night
All have faded, all have perished.
All have gone forever gone.
Forms beloved and visions cherished; all have vanished one by one.
Well, I know that some beside me fondly strive to soothe and cheer
And that let what may betide me they will hold me near and dear.
Well, I know my breast return of changeless faith and grateful truth.
Well, I know my hearts flame burneth with the oil.
That fed its youth.
Still beneath the churchyard willow, gazing on each sodded heap.
I would ask a quiet pillow with a long and dreamless sleep.
Where no sculptured pomp above me shall extol with praise and fame,
But where those will come who love me just to sigh and breathe my name.
00:26:57 Alexis Easley
I think that might be my favorite poem of hers.
00:26:59 Mae Macfarlane
That's really beautiful. And you said it was towards the end of her life. I think that that's a very powerful sentiment. You know, it's kind of alone and you're feeling that well.
00:27:09 Alexis Easley
I mean, there's a kind of irony to it because in it she is suggesting that she doesn't want fame.
You know, she just wants those who love her the most to remember her. And yet the poem is published in a major periodical.
00:27:22 Alexis Easley
So, it's like this... Yeah, It's meant to also remind people that she's still alive.
00:27:29 Mae Macfarlane
And that she's still kicking and still writing
Alexis Easley
And writing beautiful poems, yeah.
00:27:33 Mae Macfarlane
Thank you for sharing that with us and reading for us.
00:27:37 Mae Macfarlane
Kind of to switch it over from talking about just Eliza Cook and your research. How does your research and your interest in these topics impact your teaching? Do you bring it into the classroom, or do you like to explore other aspects.
00:27:50 Alexis Easley
I don't know that I've ever taught Eliza Cook in a class.
But I certainly have taught lots of other poets who are also journalists and help students to see that you can read a poem separate from its original publishing context.
But you really lose something when you do that, so if I were going to teach “In the Churchyard, Old Wimbledon,” I would have students look at the Saint James's Magazine, see what else is published there, see how it's sort of situated historically.
00:28:17 Alexis Easley
So that's something very important to the one that I teach, not just looking at things published in modern editions, but exploring the publication history.
00:28:25 Mae Macfarlane
Meaning and I think gives a more holistic look at the piece in itself.
00:28:29 Mae Macfarlane
I feel like enough times in English classes we are looking at like “what's the author going through when they wrote this,” but not necessarily grand scheme, things which I think can really elevate understanding as well and…
00:28:40 Alexis Easley
Also try to communicate to students just the wonderful pleasures of doing archival research.
I've taken students abroad three times now and I've taken two groups of graduate students abroad to work in libraries in the UK, and it's just the wonderful, serendipitous discoveries that you make in the archive and just all the questions that arise. We really want to know the answer to these questions.
For example, sorry I can't resist going back to Eliza, You know, I am in touch with one of her ancestors whose name is Roz. She contacted me on Twitter, and she claims that she found evidence that Eliza Cook was in Australia on a visit.
And then elsewhere I found a very short news report saying that she had gone to America. So I'm like, hmm, would she have done that? And if so, what happened when she was there?
So that's a burning question for this next research trip I'm about to take.
00:29:35 Mae Macfarlane
Well, and what a motivation to go to Australia and dig around. Just like archival research there!
00:29:44 Alexis Easley
Now you're talking my language. Yeah, I definitely want to do that.
00:29:49 Alexis Easley
But I think I mentioned to you too that she had lived in this wonderful house with the Harmers before the scandal happened and she had to leave.
But anyway, this house still stands, and I really want to go and look inside it, but it's in private hands and the one of the people who lives there is name is Irene Major who I definitely follow her on Instagram. Yeah, because I'm hoping I can maybe get to know her a little.
Bit but she is a model. And celebrity. And to me, that's super interesting. And that's kind of like different layers of celebrity like coming together in this story so.
00:30:25 Mae Macfarlane
That's no, that's very interesting. And again, kind of goes back to the influencer mindset. That I brought up earlier. That's kind of full circle moment.
00:30:30 Alexis Easley
Yes. So, I love that. To me, that's what research is all about, just like super interesting questions that you can only answer by really delving into the scholarship and doing archival research. So, I love the archive. I mean a lot of the works that I used to have to look at in libraries have been digitized and are available, which is fabulous.
But there's some things you can only get in the British Library and places like that. So, I have to go there. Right?
00:31:00 Mae Macfarlane
Oh, no. You have to go to London! That would be the dream.
00:31:04 Mae Macfarlane
So, Alexis. Why should the average person care about Eliza Cook?
00:31:09 Alexis Easley
Yeah, I think that as I said, I think she's a very inspirational figure for us all to think about, you know, somebody who was so iconoclastic, so original, so passionate, and also forgotten.
And there's something. Especially pleasureful about rediscovering somebody so fabulous who other people have overlooked. I think there's a lot of interest right now in the prehistory of gender fluidity. So, I think people are really interested in this prehistory of gender fluidity, which is why I think a biography of Cook is long overdue.
00:31:46 Mae Macfarlane
What is an interesting question about your research that no one ever asks?
00:31:51 Alexis Easley
One thing people rarely ask me is whether her poetry is any good. I actually had one person ask me that. after a presentation once and I was a little bit flummoxed.
I'm like “What? Why is that an issue?” It's interesting, you know, it's culturally important and interesting. I mean, I think that, I mean it, it's not good in the sense that it would benefit or reward close reading in the way that, say, Tennyson's poetry does. Or Elizabeth Barrett Browning's. But that doesn't mean it's not super interesting.
00:32:23 Mae Macfarlane
Why did you choose to become an English professor?
00:32:27 Alexis Easley
Yeah, I think it was because I I'm so passionate about reading and writing. I love both of those things so much and every time I walk into a bookstore or library and my heart just sort of, like you know, seizes up because I know there's no way I could read everything I want to read in my life, you know.
And I love narrative. I love poetry.
I love what it gives me, and I love communicating that to students.
I once had a professor who said that the goal of any English class you could teach was to get people to want to read 10 more books. and I've sort of, that's been my creed ever since, you know, to inspire the next generation just to love reading and writing as much as I do.
00:33:11 Mae Macfarlane
Thank you so much for joining us today, Alexis. It's great to have you.
To learn more about Alexis's work, you can find them on the Saint Paul campus of the University of Saint Thomas.
The Professor Podcast is brought to you by the Saint Thomas libraries, made possible with funding from the College of Arts and Sciences. I'm your host, Mae McFarland, a 2022 graduate. The producers and library staff are Merrie Davidson, Andrea Koeppe, and Trent Brager.
Thank you so much to our guests and, to you, our listeners.
0 Comments.