Sheila Rowbotham

Rowbotham presents us with a biography of a man she thinks is more important for the interpersonal connections in his life than for his actual ideas, which she finds -- let's say rambly. Carpenter was so concerned with inter-relatedness that he never quite settled on anything definitive. I've mostly been aware of Carpenter through his inter-connections, so I was willing to go along with the thesis.

It does, however, make for a book that sometimes reads like those visitors' books you see at tourist locations where people sign their name and write things like, "Great view." I'm sure her efforts to document the hundreds of important people Carpenter influenced during his 80+ years will be of immense use to other biographers, but it was more than I wanted to know.

From the point-of-view of good reading, the book is best in the period from 1860 to 1890 when Carpenter was part of the socialist movement in England and was involved with important events of labor and socialist history.

The book has two other strengths. One is the story woven throughout of how Carpenter was able to remain a fairly open homosexual even after the trial of Oscar Wilde. Rowbotham hypothesizes that some of the vagueness in Carpenter's writing is due to his inability to speak directly about the things that mattered to him most.

The other strength is Rowbotham's eye for the stories of the people who have no voice: the wives of Carpenter's lovers who kept house for him, the lesbians who were attached to him but who he was not attached to in turn, his lower class lovers who weren't always well-regarded by Carpenter's middle-class friends. I particularly appreciated how Rowbotham was able to make Carpenter's flaws and blind-spots clear while still making him a very sympathetic character.

If you are interested in the history of gay men before Stonewall, socialism, neo-paganism, simple living, or the influence of Eastern thought on Western ideas, you're going to run into Edward Carpenter eventually. You will find dipping into this book in the areas that interest you to be worthwhile and eye-opening.… (more)

Long before the widespread feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s, Sheila Rowbotham explores the women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were transforming women's lives and social possibilities in the areas of work, motherhood, marriage, domestic labour, personal and sexual relationships, housing, food and fashion. Well documented with many primary sources, this is an important resource to make sure the contributions women made to shaping the modern world and opening up new possibilites are not forgotten.… (more)

Edward Carpenter is a fascinating figure, and historically important - in the history of British labor movements, in the history of "new age" thought and most of all in the history of gay rights. So it's great that at last we have a big, detailed biography that does some justice to the many different ways in which he influenced his time and ours. On the whole, Rowbotham has to be applauded for doing massive research and organizing it all into a pretty comprehensive account.

On the other hand, the prose is clumsy, the punctuation erratic, and at times the point of view lacks imagination -- it's sometimes like reading a stack of index cards, each of which contains one factual datum. So I wonder how many people are going to read this book cover to cover, which is a shame, because Carpenter really deserves a biographer like the one Wilde received in Richard Ellmann. But that might be hoping for too much. I'm grateful for this bio, but just wish it had been a little more elegant and readable.… (more)