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Exploring a visionary woman's life
By Megan Marshall |
February 17, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
JENNIFER S. Uglow has written several biographies, including works on George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Fielding, William Hogarth and Samuel Johnson between 1987 and 1998.
They were written under the name Jenny Uglow, who quickly revealed herself to be one of the most resourceful and innovative writers in the genre.
Her latest, "The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine - Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary," is a quest to document "women's strength in action" and a continuation of more recent efforts to capture the "energy and ideas that flowed through the age" that Uglow has already explored in "The Lunar Men."
This new tale begins in Tolkienesque fashion with a meeting of village elders, the Twelve Men of Wreay, on Candlemas Eve, 1836, to consider a humble petition put forward by Sarah Losh, then 50 years old and unmarried, yet the wealthiest resident and largest landowner in her rustic corner of Cumbria, a dozen miles from the Scottish border. "Miss Losh," as she is identified in village records, requests leave to make improvements on the road through town where it passes the church and burial ground, rerouting the lane to expand the churchyard.
But Uglow, adept at shifting time frames, has already let us know that Sarah Losh's petition was successful, that in fact it was mere subterfuge, enabling her six years hence to construct a work of "great genius," in the estimation of the Pre-Raphaelite poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a new church of yellow sandstone. Its style anticipated the Romanesque Revival, yet it harked back to other pasts: trimmed with turtles and dragons as gargoyles, an eagle atop its belfry and with an interior of "strange stained glass, bright leaves on black backgrounds, kaleidoscopic mosaics, alabaster cutouts of fossils." Most striking was the presence, everywhere, of pinecones - carved into the roof beams, the walls and even the front door-latch, "an ancient symbol of regeneration, fertility and inner enlightenment."
As in the best biographies, the question becomes not what the subject will do, but how and why she will do it. The answers are difficult to determine. Losh destroyed most of her personal papers, and the house she inhabited at Wreay was cleared of its contents a century ago. As Uglow writes, Losh "left stones and wood, not letters, for us to read." But gaps in the evidence inspire Uglow to trace a narrative that "spiraled outwards," like her subject's favorite symbol, from the little town of Wreay and Losh's cluster of eccentric stonework creations.
Elegant and instructive
We learn that Losh's collective works "fashioned a whole landscape of memory," both personal and historical. She was the oldest of the three
legitimate children of John Losh, himself the oldest of four surviving brothers, "born into a new age of improvement, science, law, industry and reform," who made their fortune in an alkali works, and later from iron foundries and railways, at the industrial hub in Newcastle.
In religion and in biography, some mysteries are best left unplumbed, and Uglow is wise to cut her speculation short. Her narrative, if not "a poem in three dimensions," as she describes Losh's church, stands as an elegant and instructive rendering of a life, a place and a time.
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