Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

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Acquiring a room of her own
‘. . . a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; ’
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(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own)
Catherine Helen Spence was born in 1825, the fifth of eight children of two
Scots – Helen Brodie and David Spence. 1 She accounted herself well-born for,
she said, ‘my father and mother loved each other’. She considered herself well-descended,
‘going back for many generations on both sides of intelligent and respectable
people’. This was a clear statement of a conviction that she began to reach in her
20s and held firmly by the time she was in her 80s – that sincere affection, intelligence
and respectability counted for far more in individual happiness and social harmony
than birth, wealth or even piety. But she was not as wholly unworldly as those
statements in the opening paragraph of the autobiography that she wrote in her 80s
would suggest. She also quoted her father saying that ‘he was sprung from the tail
of the gentry’, while her mother ‘was descended from the head of the commonalty’. 2
Her mother, Helen Brodie, was descended from a long line of East Lothian
tenant farmers who had, she boasted, ‘always been at the head of their class’. 3 To
maintain such a position during the enclosures and onslaught on small holdings of
the 18th century, a tenant farmer must have been ready to adopt new agricultural
methods and implements. Spence’s maternal grandfather had three farms on 19-year
leases, which cost him £6000 a year in rents set during the Napoleonic wars, and he
had won two silver salvers, awarded by the Highland Society, for having the largest
area of drilled wheat sown. Helen Brodie probably grew up in an environment accus-