Betina Krahn (65 page)

I hope you enjoyed Antonia’s and Remington’s story. If the substance of their conflict seemed oddly current to you, it may be because, in a very real sense, history repeats itself. It was in the middle-class drawing rooms of London, in the 1880’s and 1890’s that the question of a woman’s rightful place in the world was first asked.

Discussion of “The Woman Question” was prompted in part by an increasing number of well-born women in England who found themselves raised to the Victorian expectation of woman as “wife, homemaker, and mother,” but without any prospect of marriage and with no means of support. As Antonia states, well more than half a million women in England found themselves in just such straits. The reasons for this state of affairs were a shortage of eligible men and an increasing reluctance toward marriage among middle- and even upper-class men. Marriage for such men would have meant trading a comfortable bachelor existence for the restrictions and comparative penury of marriage; their time and salaries would have had to stretch to meet the needs of a wife and, eventually, children.

Thus, embarrassingly large numbers of respectable women who had been indoctrinated in the Victorian ideal
of womanhood were left adrift in society. The advertisements Antonia read from
Cornhill
were indeed taken from old issues of
Cornhill Magazine
. All are regrettably genuine. Notices and ads seeking employment or merely “a place to sleep and a bit of bread” were a regular feature of the newspapers and magazines and are to modern ears pathetic in their appeals. Presumably, claims of being uneducated, abandoned, and unable to do anything of value were meant to evoke pity in their readers. I am indebted to my sister, Sharon Stone, head of the English Department at Granville High School in Ohio, who uncovered these excerpts while doing research for her master’s thesis and generously shared them with me. It was, in fact, her research into Victorian women writers and our discussion of the debate ignited over these “surplus women” that generated the idea for this book.

In popular publications and in scholarly tracts of the 1880’s, questions were raised about the morality of women working outside the home and on ways these unmarriageable women could be made self-supporting. Just what—politicians, social theorists, and reformers asked—could these surplus females actually
do
? Their proposals for appropriate “female labor” run the gamut from simple-minded to chilling.

The 1880’s-90’s and 1980’s-90’s bear yet other striking similarities. Both eras feature a woman of dignity and bearing sitting on an embattled British throne—and waiting in the wings of both is an heir whom the public and the media fear will destroy the monarchy. I have depicted Queen Victoria as my research shows her to have been at this stage of her life: reclusive, obsessed with her widowhood, and—for a female monarch—surprisingly hostile to women in any role outside the home. She actively opposed higher education for women, and enlisted her prime ministers in the fight against women in the professions. She
insisted that a woman’s lot was to be a wife and mother, yet paradoxically bore a great distaste for marriage—called it “a trap which young girls would never allow themselves to fall into, if they knew what was in store for them.”

Another shared feature of both eras is the eager and sometimes unscrupulous British press. The great newspapers of the day were largely reputable and printed news for the middle and upper classes. But there were numerous weeklies, journals, and “ha’penny papers” (precursors of the tabloid journalism rampant in Britain today) that catered to the burgeoning “underclass” of readers—working-class people who were becoming literate as a result of the Elementary Education Act of 1870. But, of course, love of scandal knows no boundaries of class or rank, and these scandal sheets found their way into the poorest tenement and into the palace itself. The despicable Rupert Fitch has real-life counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic today.

As to the heart of the story: the views of men’s and women’s roles and of marriage are purely mine. I have long believed that men and women have much more in common than not. And while our biological and social roles often seem to take us in different directions, we are brought together again and bonded to one another in marriage … sharing strengths and weaknesses, experiences and abilities, sorrows, dreams, and hopes. It is in the grace of a good and loving marriage that we can find the encouragement and the freedom to risk and to grow … to become that which is written in every fiber of our beings … that which we are meant to be.

BETINA KRAHN
—having successfully launched two sons into lives of their own and still working on launching her pesky pet schnauzer
anywhere
—divides her time between homes in Minnesota and Florida. Her undergraduate degree in biology and graduate degree in counseling, along with a lifetime of learning and observation, provide a broad background for her character-centered novels. She has worked in teaching, personnel management, and mental health … despite which she remains incurably optimistic about the human race. She believes the world needs a bit more truth, a lot more justice, and a whole lot more love and laughter. And she attributes her stubbornly sunny outlook to having married an unflinching optimist and to having two great-grandmothers actually named Pollyanna.

THE LAST BACHELOR
A Bantam Book / September 1994

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994 by Betina Krahn.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-42179-1

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