Sally Blundell
The Defiance of Frances Dickinson by Wendy Parkins (Affirm Press, 2024), 400pp, $34.99
There is blood. Blood on the sheets, blood on the rug. After-birth blood, blood from miscarriages, blood from marital rape. Less than two weeks after giving birth to her fourth daughter, ‘I seep, I leak, I cannot be contained,’ writes Wendy Parkins’ young protagonist Frances Geils, as she lies in the room below the nursery where her new baby daughter peacefully sleeps. ‘Yet John will not leave me alone, coming to my chamber last night after arriving from Scotland.’ It is July 1845 and Frances Geils, nee Dickinson, is fearful, for herself and for her children. ‘He will destroy me, of that I am certain.’
The real-life Frances Vickris Dickinson was born in 1820, the only child of magistrate and translator Charles Dickinson and Catherine Allingham. The sole heir to a considerable fortune—including Farley Hill Court in Berkshire and the Queen Charlton manor house in Somerset—she became known as a journalist, writing semi-autobiographical articles under the pseudonym Florentia, and a series of light and largely forgettable travelogues and histories under the name of Frances Elliot.
But in this fictionalised account, Australian-born, Dunedin-based former professor of Victorian literature Wendy Parkins focuses on the years leading up to Dickinson’s widely publicised legal suit through the ecclesiastical Court of Arches to end her seven-year marriage to Scottish lieutenant John Geils. To tell this story she uses real, embellished and fictitious diary entries, letters, book extracts, press reports, court documents, witness statements and medical determinations.
Through Dickinson’s diary entries and those of housemaid Amy Webb, we encounter young Fanny as a spirited young woman immersed in literature, nature and merry romps in the attic with Webb. She later recalls her mother’s conversations with her close friend Mary Russell Mitford: ‘They both held that girls were not to be kept indoors, nor over-burdened with tedious feminine accomplishments, but instead permitted to read and speak and fancy as they desired.’
Within a few pages, this carefree adolescence is infused with murmurings of marriageability, private wealth and social standing. Such conversations, along with a feisty female protagonist and the promise of a loving (and financially advantageous) marriage, bear all the markings of the Regency romances still being served up in Austenesque movies and Netflix series. Certainly there are the bonnets and the balls, the flagrant evaluations of wealth and power, but Parkins is quick to divorce her story from that tradition.
Young Dickinson describes Jane Austen as ‘misguided’. Together with Ann Radcliffe and Samuel Richardson, she writes, Austen abandons her heroines once marriage pacts are made: ‘Whatever pitfalls and dangers faced on the path to betrothal, their maidens fade from view once they leave the alter. Surely this is when life begins, in its fullest sense?’
This confidence quickly shatters. At the age of eighteen, she marries John Edward Geils, a lieutenant in the 4th Light Dragoons, leaving the gentle landscape of Berkshire for dreary Dumbuck House in Dunbartonshire, Scotland (not a manor house, we are later told, but ‘a grander type of farmhouse’). While Geils is happiest traipsing the estate with his hunting gun (or ‘runkling’ the skirts of servants), in the drawing rooms and bedrooms of his family home he is truculent, belittling and sexually violent.
Geils’ behaviour, his family’s indifference, a series of miscarriages and the various teas and laudanum drops administered to her leave the new Mrs Geils alone and dispirited. Over the next seven years they have four children, but in this grey world ‘north of the Tweed’, more akin to the gothic romances of Daphne du Maurier than Austen’s high-waisted decorum, Frances’ world flickers and thickens in fear and self-doubt. Did she misinterpret her husband’s mocking tone? Does she imagine the torment? As she endures yet another painful sexual encounter, she recalls her mother’s description of a husband’s ‘special’ embrace but, ‘Why did it hurt so?’
Everyone fails her. The local reverend blames Dickinson’s pallor on the weather: ‘She will settle in and become a fine Scotswoman in no time, I predict.’ While recognising the ‘profane tone’ of some of the Dumbuck men, he goes on to muse, ‘would not the sweet influence of wives … bring about a greater mellowing of word and deed in these young men?’
These deeply rooted expectations of wifely compliance and obligation are promulgated in books of the day. Parkins quotes from Sarah Ellis’ 1843 book The Wives of England describing man’s noble exemption ‘from those innumerable littlenesses which obscure the beauty, and sully the integrity, of woman’s life.’ Even language fails the increasingly desperate Mrs Geils. There is no legal definition of domestic abuse, let alone marital rape (marital rape was not recognised as a crime in the UK until 1991, six years after New Zealand), and little understanding of psychological trauma. When later asked to describe John’s sexual violence, Dickinson feels powerless: ‘How can I do such a thing?’ It is only when she asks her mother to explain sodomy, describing her husband’s ‘unnatural’ and forceful approaches, that the legal wheels start to turn.
When Geils enters a suit for restitution of conjugal rights (Dickinson has decamped to Berkshire with her four young daughters), her lawyers respond with a suit for separation on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and ‘unnatural connection’. Crucial to this case will be depositions, some included here, sourced from former staff and family members by industrious legal advisor Mr Puckle (a real person, writes Parkins, ‘although I have taken some liberties with his characterisation, with a nod to Dickens’).
As the Geils vs Geils case begins in October 1847, the media attention is intense. While Geils’ adulteries, cruelty and rape, including anal rape, are all reported, the weight of opprobrium falls on his wife. ‘We do hope there are not many of her sex,’ fumed The Times, ‘who could have it in their power to make such a disgusting charge!’
‘Will I not forever be shunned as the wife who brought such things into the light of public exposure,’ writes Dickinson, ‘things that I have been told, over and over, should never have been spoken of, things that I should never even know of? As if it is my knowledge rather than John’s crimes that are subject to judgement?’
The cruelty grounds are dismissed for lack of evidence. The charge of sodomy is refuted on the grounds that that, if the crime had been committed, the accuser must have been a ‘partaker in her husband’s guilt’. As real-life surgeon Thomas Callaway wrote, unless actual force is used by the man, and the woman is deprived of all powers of resistance, ‘it is physically impossible for a man to have connection with a woman without her consent’. But the charge of adultery, hanging on the deposition of servant Lizzie Campbell, is sufficient to grant the separation. It was, writes Parkins, a ‘definitive win that set the course for all the cases that followed’.
In 1849, Dickinson successfully applied for a divorce through the Scottish courts (at this time possible in England only through a private Act of Parliament). This allows her to quit her financial obligations to Geils, and to travel overseas with her daughters. Twenty-five years later, Dickinson is living in Siena. Her three surviving daughters have all married men of ‘character and distinction’; she is gaining traction as a writer for her travelogues, titled Diary of an Idle Woman in … (the UK version of this book is simply An Idle Woman).
In the final pages, Dickinson wonders if she might tell the story of ‘the end of my own romance’ but she decides against it: ‘Why should I not tell new tales rather than old ones? If I embellish a tad here or conceal a little there, what then? The words are my own.’ In this way, Parkins not only crafts the approach that she takes on to tell this story but also vindicates the subtle melding of the original source material and authorial invention (including, we can only surmise, Dickinson’s diary extracts).
The seamless blending of fact and fabrication is a clear endorsement of the author’s proficiency in Victorian penmanship, even if it leaves the reader—or at least this reviewer—rifling through the Afterword to identify where veracity slips into conjecture. Parkins emphatically stands by her protagonist, even as she acknowledges Dickinson as a privileged heiress, subject to the prevailing prejudices about race and class. (Other commentators, though, are more circumspect: in her blog, ‘The Idle Woman’, British museum curator Sarah Vowles speculates on Geils’ dismay to find his heiress wife ‘turned into a frail, demanding, argumentative creature’.)
But in its careful interweaving of the objectifying lens of historic documentation and personal diaries, in its fast pace and historic legitimacy, The Defiance of Frances Dickinson pulls the reader into the courage and frustration of an intelligent young woman close to drowning in a sea of misogyny, sexual violence and social myopia that, as in Austen’s novels, largely ignores the plight of women once they have left the altar.
Parkins wanted to tell this story, she writes, ‘to explore issues that continue to dominate too many women’s lives, whatever their social status: gaslighting, coercive control and the “blurred lines” of sexual consent’. While the Frances Dickinson case failed to clarify those lines, Parkins’ retelling highlights entrenched attitudes that even today leave so many victims of domestic and sexual violence without a voice.
SALLY BLUNDELL is a freelance journalist and writer living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury. She was formerly books and culture editor for the NZ Listener.
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