https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11423307/KATE-MOSSE-reveals-painstakingly-pieced-tragic-story-great-grandmother.html'I'm outraged so many great women have been wiped from history': Bestselling author KATE MOSSE reveals how she painstakingly pieced together the tragic story of her great grandmother, also a famous novelist but whose name is forgotten
Kate Mosse opens up about the tragic history of her great-grandmother Lily
Lily Watson died in 1932, but was a bestselling novelist, essayist and columnist
The well-respected writer had also sat on committees for education and welfare
By Kate Mosse For The Daily Mail
Published: 22:01, 13 November 2022 | Updated: 22:06, 13 November 2022
Growing up, I'd heard stories that there had been a writer in the family before me: a great-grandmother, Lily Watson, who had died in 1932. But it was never presented as something serious, and my gentle father was never one for reminiscing. Besides, it was many years after Lily's daughter my grandmother died that I became a novelist too. But during lockdown I realised I wanted to know more about her. Without me ever quite deciding it, the book I was writing a celebration of nearly 1,000 trailblazing women missing from the history books started to find its shape around this very personal quest to discover as much as I could about my shadowy great-grandmother. I spent the summer and autumn of 2021 making phone calls, and tracking down diaries, letters, photographs and out-of-print works. I realised that Lily's life told the story of so many women who were famous in their day but were subsequently written out of history. She was, I discovered, not only a bestselling novelist, but also an essayist, a columnist and a writer of children's stories. She sat on committees for education and welfare, and was well-known and well-respected in her day. Yet despite her contemporary visibility, it was nigh on impossible to find out anything about her from public records. The author of 14 novels, volumes of poetry, devotional works, criticism and numerous articles, Lily has left barely a footprint. For more than 50 years she was a correspondent for The Girl's Own Paper, the precursor to today's Woman magazine. Her most famous novel, The Vicar of Langthwaite, was reprinted in 1897 with a foreword by the former prime minister, William Gladstone. Yet all of her books are now out of print. She doesn't appear in anthologies of Victorian literature and references to her online are few. The book I was writing Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World could not have felt more timely. It is, in part, a love letter to the importance of history and about how we cannot know who we are without knowing where we come from. So, who was she?
Lily was born Martha Louisa Green in Taunton in Somerset on October 11, 1849, the eldest of seven children of the Reverend Samuel Gosnell Green, a Baptist minister, and his wife Elizabeth Leader Collier. In a family tree I've inherited handwritten on brittle and faded paper taped together the boys are listed before the girls, regardless of the order in which they were born. The girls' dates are often missing and women, if they married, almost always changed their names, making them harder to keep in sight. The author of 14 novels, she’s left barely a footprint. There was also a devastating piece of medical history I had known nothing about. On a second family tree, someone had written a red H next to some male names and a green C next to others, all women. Later, I learnt the initials stood for 'haemophiliac' and 'carrier' all but one of Lily's brothers and all of her sons suffered from the 'family illness', haemophilia, which was incurable. Almost always, women are carriers and men sufferers. But, it seemed the illness died out on my side of the family within just a generation. I was oddly pleased to discover we were both born in October. Daft, I know, but Lily was already haunting me. For years, I'd thought I was treading new ground as the first to live by my pen in a family of teachers, solicitors and vicars. But now, it seemed, there had been a different story all along. Lily always wrote. I have a small blue notebook dated July 26, 1861, and signed Martha L. Green, Lily's given name. It's a fairy story filled with her distinctive pen-and-ink drawings and dedicated to a friend. On the title page of Little Goldenhair: A Fairy Tale, she describes herself as the authoress of 'Tulip', 'May & Rosa', 'The Fairies', 'Rose's Pilgrimage', 'The Schoolboys' and 'The Forbidden River'. The ink is faded and so, although Lily's handwriting is beautiful, it's hard to read. At more than a hundred pages, it's a short episodic novel rather than a long short story. The ambition of a writer is already there at the age of 11. Part of a fiercely nonconformist Baptist family whose lives revolved around preaching and the Church, Lily was well-educated for a girl familiar with Latin, Greek, Italian, French and German, knowledgeable about music and painting. Her experiences growing up at Rawdon College in Yorkshire, attending school in Edinburgh, and on walking holidays in Austria and Switzerland, would go on to form the framework for much of her adult fiction in the years to come. This I loved too, realising that landscape a delight in the mountains, the moors and the fells was at the heart of Lily's historical fiction, as it is of mine. Landscape is at the core of all of my fiction, from my Languedoc novels such as Labyrinth and The Burning Chambers to those, like The Taxidermist's Daughter, inspired by the Sussex countryside. I had an unexpected boost just before Christmas 2021, when my second cousin discovered a metal deed box in her attic. Inside were nearly 500 letters between Lily and her husband, Sam, written over the course of their long and happy marriage they married in the chapel at Rawdon College on September 23, 1870, a few weeks before Lily's 21st birthday, and were together until Sam's death in August 1921. But after weeks of deciphering and cataloguing (most letters only had dates, no years at the top, and there was no discernible order), I realised she had put down almost nothing about her thoughts, her state of mind, the tragedies of her life and the struggles of being a woman writer and the mother to six children three of whom were suffering from an incurable disease. I wondered if we would have got on. Rather, the letters and notes were domestic, loving, practical, about arrangements and the fabric of their everyday family life. Only occasionally did she make reference to her writing, or to the health of her youngest son, or problems such as the near collapse of Sam's legal firm thanks to an embezzlement scandal with a cousin. There are tantalising glimpses Sam was often anxious and needing reassurance, Lily was sometimes away on her own in spa hotels and writing of how she was feeling 'less gloomy', leaving me wondering if she was suffering from depression but, for the most part the letters are not confessional or intimate. It was up to me to fill in the gaps. So, for example, I began to wonder if the reason the Lake District became so important to Lily and her family (and my grandmother and father, then my family in turn) is because Lily first went there in 1901 after her youngest son, Leader, had died of haemophilia at the age of only 12. In Newlands Valley, there were no ghosts, no shadow of her lost boy. (Her son Reggie would die in his 20s.) There was little of her in the pages of her novels, either. In truth, I learnt more about the kind of woman Lily was through her journalism. Between 1885 and her death, she wrote nearly 100 articles and pieces for The Girl's Own Paper she was writing an article for them a few days before she died in January 1932 and all but one of her novels were serialised in the magazine. It was disappointing to learn that she was a supporter of the Anti-Suffrage League and, although she was a passionate advocate for girls' education, it's clear that it was within the context of producing good wives and mothers rather than to promote women's independence. It stopped me in my tracks. Lily was so strong, so principled, so determined, it seemed bizarre to me that she would have opposed women being given the vote. I would have loved to talk to her, to listen to her reasons, but of course there was no possibility of that. Several times in the research process, in fact, I wondered if we would have got on. Then, I stopped. Women's place in history cannot be about likeability, or on the grounds of whether or not we hold the same views or admire someone. My job was to try to put Lily on the page, fairly and truthfully, with the limited resources available to me.
In the end, I was able to construct no more than a partial biography of this woman I came to admire and, yes, perhaps even love. Since my book has been published, more letters, more photographs, more books have come to light and this will make a difference. But for now, her place at the heart of Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries is secure. The act of holding Lily's books in my hands also brings me closer to my grandmother, whom I knew and loved, and my father, whom I adored and miss though he has been more than ten years gone. Reading letters from Lily to him when he was a child brings him back to life too. I hope Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries will inspire as I have been inspired. It asks the question of what history is, who makes it and who gets to decide what and who matters. It questions why some people's contributions are lauded and seen as significant, whereas others vanish into silence. It's about honouring those to whom we owe so much: trailblazers and quiet revolutionaries, women of conviction and faith, warrior queens and women of courage, mothers of invention, sisters, friends, lovers, mothers, aunts, carers, daughters, grandmothers, role models, fierce opponents and gentle strangers. So that, together, we can celebrate some of the extraordinary women who also built our world. My great-grandmother, Lily, was one of them.
* Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built The World by Kate Mosse (£20, Mantle) is out now
