Like so much of Augusta Webster’s life, her 1878 collection of essays originally published in the Examiner sports a title that is a combination of the dramatic and ironic. The year of publication gives away the fact that this is a work of the Victorian Era and Webster was, indeed, a British writer operating under the conventions of Victorian notions toward the subjects of etiquette, femininity, and behavior.
During an epoch in which “conduct books” were quite popular precisely they rejected the progressive and the radical, one can hardly be faulted for assuming from its title that Webster’s collection is an inoffensive litany of advice now of use only for unintended humor. Webster, however, operated with the kind of brain that never resulted in humor without intent. Suffice to say that her essays do not constitute a handbook on how to behave like a proper English housewife for staid and stuffy Victorian husbands.
A pretty solid argument can be made that A Housewife’s Opinions stands as one of—if not the—most ironically titled documents of the Victorian age. Even her introduction to the volume begins on a note of winking irony with a seeming confession that the essays were originally “written for immediate appearance in those lighter columns of weekly journals which everyone reads and no one recalls.” While it is true that Webster’s reputation suffered an unwarranted decline into near-anonymity following her death, it seems equally true that she hardly considered these essays to be digested and excreted as efficiently as most other such contributions to the type of column she describes. For one thing, the ideas contained within are persistently contrarian to almost every known notion of Victorianism.
Webster is, above all else, a master contrarian. On nearly every page is a confrontation with conventional wisdom which Webster engages in conflict and leaves behind in a condition forcing the reader to think more deeply. The sheer range of her contrarian perspective is enough to make the text worthy of perusal.
At one point she is reinterpreting the moral of the tortoise and the hare into something much more elemental: when racing, hares should avoid naps. While this may hardly seem paradigm-shattering, one must read it within the larger context of her argument that certain traits attributed to humans as positive are in reality more the manifestation of the negative qualities of simply being dull. Likewise, she elsewhere upholds conceit as virtue to be admired rather than a flaw to be condemned by associating its motivational drive with great risks producing great rewards as well as with the ludicrous failures of simpletons. Consider the lesson that her examination of the emptiness of then wildly popular proverbial phrase “virtue is its own rewards” leads toward: success is far more dependent upon having the reputation of being trustworthy than it could ever be for actually being trustworthy.
Augusta Webster wrote verse that at one point made her a serious rival of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the hearts of her countrymen and yet today her poetry is practically unknown. In 1879, Webster was elected for the first time to the London School Board despite the fact that British women did not get the right to vote until 1918. She was one of the leading figures in that movement for women’s suffrage in England, yet is merely a footnote to an era named after one of the country’s longest-serving female monarchs who did absolutely nothing to further the right of women to become politically active. Augusta Webster’s life and legacy is a series of dramatic ironies that coalesce in literary form nowhere better than in the unlikely--but quite intentionally--titled A Housewife’s Opinions.
