The Land of Nowhere

Thank you all for your feedback on my review of Charles Auchester! In that post, I only gave brief biographical info on the author, Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, with the plan to do a deeper dive into the historical record on her later. Well, I've now done a deeper dive, and have discovered that much of what's been written about Sheppard's life, including in the introduction to the Gutenberg edition of Charles Auchester, is inaccurate or misleading.

The TL:DR is: Sheppard was born in 1826, not 1830. Her father did not die until after the publication of Charles Auchester, and she was teaching in her mother's school well before his death. While it's been claimed that she started Charles Auchester when she was 16, it seems pretty clear that she didn't write the later parts until 1847 at the earliest. Given this, it's unclear to what extent my description of the book as "teenage fanfic" is accurate -- but non-teenagers can write highly self-indulgent fic too, it's all good!

( extensive detail follows )
This is all for now, but as I enjoy historical detective-work and falling down rabbit holes, you'll probably hear more later. In fact I've just been distracted by discovering that Sheppard's father John was a subscriber (basically a Kickstarter backer) to a book of hymn arrangements by organist Theophania Cecil -- yay for historical woman composer representation!

(Cross-posted to tumblr, where my username is radicalaxis)

Not that I watch it myself, but a Game of Thrones discussion elsewhere had me thinking that fiction really likes the trope of “protagonist’s mother dies giving birth to protagonist”. But it occurs to be that historically, when mothers die in childbirth, often the child also dies, and usually doesn’t become protagonist of anything. (Though I'll give Garth Nix some credit here, as Sabriel would have died without Abhorsen intervention).

I got wondering as to how many famous historical personages had their mothers die giving birth to them (and not to a younger sibling). I couldn’t find a list, but research on Wikipedia and TVTropes suggests “not too many”. Here’s an incomplete list: please suggest additions in comments!


Mary Shelley
Anna Atkins, Victorian botanist and photographer
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter
Michael Dillon, a trans man who lived in England in the first half of the 20th century
Benjamin and Ichabod from the Bible
Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Neville, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 for negotiating the Locarno pact between France and Germany.

Plus various royals and nobles who probably got better than usual postnatal care for their time:

( random royals )