Literary Weepers: The Forgotten Women Writers of Romanticism

romantyczki_polona_.jpg, default, Paulina Krakowowa, 1882, Paulina Wilkońska, 1875, Ewa Felińska, printed in Lithography. M. Fajansa, 1851-1862, photo: National Library Polona

language & literature

At a time when a woman was expected to be a wife and mother, or at most, a teacher, these women picked up the pen. They made up for what they lacked in talent with ambition and courage in standing up for women’s rights and proclaiming gender equality.

The situation of literary women of the time was not enviable. Harsh and prejudiced criticism, spiteful pruning, being driven to the kitchen, needles and stockings combined with exaggerated fears for the fate of family and motherhood, and finally, gossip, intrigue, and slander were the daily missiles that were hurled at these pioneers of women’s literary activity

– wrote Piotr Chmielowski in 1894 (quoted after Maria Berken-Jabłońska, Women Truth-tellers, Bluestockings, Dreamers, Ladies… (Weredyczki, sawantki, marzycielki, damy…), Łódź 2019). While the names of Klementyna Hoffmanowa, Narcyza Żmichowska and Jadwiga Łuszczewska (Deotyma) are known to lovers of Romanticism, Paulina Wilkońska, Kazimiera Komierowska and many others have been almost completely forgotten by literary history. Who were these ‘literary weepers’, whose work was called ‘torrents of tenderness’ and ‘hysterical flare-ups of nerves’?

A Conspirator: Ewa Felińska (1793 – 1859)

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Ewa Felińska, printed in Lithography. M. Fajansa, 1851-1862, photo: National Library Polona

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She was eleven when she finished her education and over fifty when she made her debut as a writer. Unlike her husband, she was pious, sensible and well-versed in running a farm. In a few days, she wrote the novel Hersylia, where she defied the stereotype of the unintelligent and resigned woman, although she did not entirely succeed in avoiding soppy sentimentalism. However, Ewa Felińska is mostly remembered as a participant in secret patriotic movements.

After the death of her husband, she left with her children for Krzemieniec, where she joined the conspirators gathered around Szymon Konarski. She ran a women’s circle and was responsible for the association’s correspondence in French. After the conspiracy had been discovered, she was arrested and banished to Siberia. She described her experiences in her memoirs, also looking into the life of the natives and the nature of Siberia and the economic development of the settlements. The publication of Revelations of Siberia was insisted upon by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, and later in the same year, 1852, the book was translated into English. The second volume of memoirs concerned the pre-banishment period, and Felińska wrote it with her children in mind.

A Traveller: Łucja Rautenstrauchowa (1798 – 1886)

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Łucja Rautenstrauchowa from Giedroyc, 19th century, from 'Tygodnik Ilustrowany' No. 176/1886, photo: Wikimedia.org/domena publiczna

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Nature, music, painting and literature – this was the artistic hierarchy recognised by the peer of Mickiewicz, who was regarded by Lucja Rautenstrauchowa as the embodiment of affinity for the arts. According to her sensibility, the landscape should accumulate tension, lights, shadows, and thunder, like in dramatic opera or theatre shows. Lucja Rautenstrauchowa, née Giedroyc, was well educated and had daily contact with art both in artistic France – where she grew up among the aristocracy – and during her numerous travels around Europe. She put her impressions on canvas or paper, and it was for her passionate and critical diary entries that she was best known.

She started by writing romances with elements of a thriller (in particular, her debut novel Emmelina and Arnolf (Emmelina i Arnolf) or with gothic motifs (the second part of Destiny [Przeznaczenie]), but these got a cool reception from critics. Józef Ignacy Kraszewski is supposed to have said of the author of Ragana that if he wanted to single out anything positive in her writings, he would have to limit himself to the admiration of the paper, the print and the cover. More professional were her travel books, among them the three-volume work In the Alps and Beyond the Alps (W Alpach i za Alpami), the two parts of her memoirs from France, and the five-volume work Cities, Mountains and Valleys (Miasta, góry i doliny). In this last work, she portrayed Mickiewicz, who, together with Odyniec and Norwid, counted among her close friends. In her travel diaries, she often weaved stories about literature (she discussed George Sand’s work in detail, for example) and made digressions on politics and society. If she moralised, she did it discreetly, but when something did not suit her – for example, the queues to the theatre or clothes the audience wore – she did not bite her tongue. She almost caused a social scandal when she gave a colourful portrayal of the Kraków aristocracy in her fabricated memoirs of her Carpathian journey.

A Suffragist: Anna Libera (1805 – 1886)

Thumbnail — The title page of Anna Libera's book 'Poezye narodowe. Cz. 1' (National Poems. Part 1), Towarzystwo Naukowej Pomocy (Society for Scientific Assistance), 1849, Paris, photo: National Library Polona

A Woman in Disgrace (Kobieta w upodleniu), A Woman and Her Destiny (Kobieta i jej przeznaczenie), Esteemed Countrywomen (Szanowne rodaczki) – these are some titles of unpublished treatises by one of Kraków’s best-known 19th-century women writers. Anna Libera represented the Polish Women’s Committee, founded in 1848. She fought for gender equality in society, politics, culture and education.

She received no education and supported herself by embroidering. She came from a poor family – that is probably why she so often portrayed the plight of peasants in her poems. She published a total of three volumes describing the life of her hometown, Kraków. She turned local legends into poetry, and her Cracovians (Krakowianki) is still performed by folk groups today. In her poetry, she presented Romantic folklore; in her prose, she gravitated towards realism, but her historical dramas – mostly unpublished – already heralded a positivist approach. Today, Anna, known as the Krakowianka, could be well described as a suffragist.

An Educator: Paulina Krakowowa (1813 – 1882)

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Paulina Krakowowa, Adam Dzwonkowski's Lithographic Institute (Warsaw), 1859-1872, photo: National Library Polona

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Her father provided her with an education so that after he died, she was able to support herself on a teacher’s salary. After Paulina Krakowowa married, she could pursue her youthful passion for a while. ‘The doldrums, the literary stagnation that prevailed in Warsaw; for her, after all, writing must have been a need of the soul, and she dared to take up again that pen to which the hand of a young maiden had once crept,’ recalled Bluszcz a few days after her death. She wrote novels with autobiographical motifs (Diary of a Young Orphan [Pamiętnik młodej sieroty]), her didactic works for young people were repeatedly reprinted, and she edited the Zorza magazine with the youngest readers in mind. However, it was the religious-sentimental Primrose (Pierwiosnek) that proved to be her most outstanding achievement.

Among others, Narcyza Żmichowska made her debut in this first literary magazine on Polish lands written exclusively by women. Paulina Krakowowa was definitely closer to the conservative Klementyna Hoffmanowa, née Tańska, than to the radical views of the author of Poganka, but like both these women, she devoted herself to the education of girls. She established a boarding school for them, where she taught Polish and literature. She did not resign from the managing school until thirty years later, having succeeded in creating a first-class academic institution with a modern curriculum.

A Novelist: Paulina Wilkońska (1815 – 1875)

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Paulina Wilkońska, 1863, photo: Grzegorz Sachowicz / National Library Polona

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She was one of the first professional women writers on Polish lands, although she never received a comprehensive education. Initially, creation was a cure for her loneliness – her husband, whom she married when she was young, was imprisoned for patriotic activities. She helped to free him, and between 1840 and 1851, they ran a literary salon together, of which Anna Nakwaska was a regular. These experiences were meticulously recorded by Paulina Wilkońska in her book My Memories of Social Life in Warsaw (Moje wspomnienia o życiu towarzyskim w Warszawie), published twenty years later – this book brought her the greatest acclaim, despite the fact that she already had dozens of novels to her credit.

Juliusz Wiktor Gomulicki, the publisher of Wilkońska’s later memoirs, called her a ‘mediocre’ or even ‘dull’ novelist. However, readers appreciated her melodramatic stories about women so that after her husband’s death in 1952, she was able to support herself solely by writing. She was as keen on historical subjects as on contemporary ones, and although she was no advocate of emancipation, she sometimes polemicised against the traditional division into the world of women and the world of men. It was thanks to her encouragement that Władysław Syrokomla created the poem ‘Margier’. Nowadays forgotten and accused of graphomania, Wilkońska was one of the most famous Polish women writers of the 19th century.

A Poet: Józefa Prusiecka (1815 – 1887)

Very little is known about her private life: she was orphaned at an early age, educated under the tutelage of Hoffmanowa, never married, and earned a living on teaching and writing. She made her debut in 1838 in Krakowowa’s Pierwiosnek, published regularly in several magazines in the 1840s, and her Moral Novels (Powieści moralne) and New Stories for Children (Nowe powiastki dla dzieci) are nothing special. Her poetry, however, is another matter.

For the publicist and editor Hipolit Skimborowicz, it was sufficient that Józefa Prusiecka published one collection of poems in 1841 and more than a dozen individual pieces in the press which compared her to the Greek Sappho. The author of Poetry (Poezje) replaced the moralising common in women’s poetry of the Romantic era with the expression of her inner life. Practically every one of her poems is an intertextual dialogue with Polish and foreign Romanticism, conducted not for the sake of showiness but testifying to a profound knowledge of the literary tendencies of the time. At the same time, she remained a modest, solitary poet, distrustful of her surroundings. Maria Berkan-Jabłońska calls the lyrical subject in Prusiecka’s poems ‘a female version of Gustav from Forefathers’ Eve, part IV’ (‘unfulfilled love or betrayal became the cause of loss of hope and inner burnout’ we read in Women Truth-tellers, Bluestockings, Dreamers, Ladies….) Prusiecka was able to reconcile her educational mission with her aspirations as a writer, which was not a universally approved attitude for women in Romanticism.

An Activist: Seweryna Duchińska (1816 – 1905)

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Seweryna Duchińska, around the 19th century, photo: Wikimedia.org/publicdomain

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You shall write, madam, he stated firmly. You know the miserable state of our country; we need to gather all our strength; whoever manages to lift a brick, let them take it boldly, and bring it to the public benefit – you must work.

This is how Seweryna Duchińska (then Pruszakowa) remembered the words of Kazimierz Wójcicki, who helped her make up for deficiencies in education. The poet, translator and editor was well aware of how difficult the situation of women writers was: their literary aspirations were not backed up by an adequate education, the society envisaged different roles for women and men, and even if they were allowed to create, it was with certain thematic and formal restrictions. Duchińska did not feel comfortable enough in poetry, so she turned to prose. The heroine of one of her novels was Elżbieta Drużbacka – a Baroque poetess considered a defender of women’s rights.

Seweryna, who sometimes signed her works with the ‘Ukrainicz’ name, found herself more at home in cultural and social activities. During the January Uprising, she organised the so-called Women’s Fridays, i.e. groups of volunteer women caring for the families of insurgents. Fearing arrest, she emigrated to Paris, where she mainly worked as a translator.

A Publicist: Józefa Śmigielska-Dobieszewska (1820 – 1899)

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Józefa Śmigielska-Dobieszewska, 1870, photo: Mazovian Digital Library

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‘It was not even my point to emphasise that she was a pretty decent writer for her time. Nor even that she was a gifted publicist and sharp-witted columnist. Or an independent and informed editor of a magazine run by women. Or an author of interesting travel impressions from her expeditions around Europe. Nor even that she was a speaker – one of the first women to appear in public, although her speeches in Lviv in the early 1870s caused a press storm in Galicia and beyond. [...] For she was an independent, intelligent woman, trying to convince other women of her time of what she believed in: the role of science, the role of work and, above all, the importance of independence,’

– argues Maria Berkan-Jabłońska, author of the biography Against the Wind. Reading the Life of Józefa Śmigielska-Dobieszewska (Pod wiatr. Czytanie życia Józefy Śmigielskiej-Dobieszewskiej).

The desire for women’s freedom of thought and freedom of action in a patriarchal reality constantly runs through Śmigielska’s novels: Succession and Work (Sukcesje i praca), It Is Not Always He Who Reaps That Sows (Nie zawsze ten zbiera, kto sieje), Three Generations (Trzy pokolenia). The writer, however, was not constructing a radical programme to reverse roles but was instead striving for a fair distribution of roles for female co-participation in public life. She presented her views, daring for those times, in magazines, each time provoking discussion. When she married a doctor sixteen years her junior at the age of forty-five, she had already made a name for herself and had a successful literary career. Accompanying her husband on his travels, she kept a close eye on the situation of women. Śmigielska-Dobieszewska’s biography, published in 2021, reclaims the herstory of Romanticism and the genealogy of the Polish emancipation movement.

The Other One: Kazimiera Komierowska (1829 – 1863)

The legendary improviser Jadwiga Łuszczewska, known as Deotyma, needs no introduction. Few remember, however, that the poet had an older sister, Kazimiera, who was an author of lyric poetry. Both were talented and educated by private teachers; they published a home magazine, Pszczółka (the Warsaw archive burnt down in 1944). However, they chose a different model of existence. When Deotyma turned twenty, she officially debuted with a volume of poetry, while her sister got married at the same age. The temperamental Jadwiga took an active part in social life (she was involved in patriotic activities and, following her parents’ example, ran her own literary salon), while the traditionalist Kazimiera devoted herself to the family (she gave birth to several children, although it is primarily her son, a poet hiding under the pseudonym Wacław Pomian, who is remembered today).

The prematurely deceased Kazimiera had no chance to step out of her younger sister’s shadow. The only trace of her work is Jolanta's Poems (Poezje Jolanty), published in 1862 – artistically not of the top flight, but bold in formulating thoughts. For Komierowska, the ‘poetess’ was the ‘sage’, while the Messiah who would save humanity was to be a woman. However, no amount of flattery from Deotyma (‘she wrote beautiful poems with a dreamlike and lofty content, with a robust and exquisite form’) could save Kazimiera from oblivion.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

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