The Fabulously Creative Emily Maguire

Emily Maguire

Before I went to hear Sydney author Emily Maguire speak at Leichhardt Library last night, I dropped into Berkelouw's on Norton St. There I saw lots of copies of the new winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Sofie Laguna's The Eye of the Sheep. And who should be endorsing it right on the front cover but Emily Maguire! It was a sign. I definitely have to read this one.
The last Miles Franklin Award winner I read was Michelle De Kretser's Questions of Travel, which is simply one of the most superb Australian books ever written. I always have a soft spot for the Miles Franklin award because A) I rather like old Miles and her dabbling in Christian Science and B) Sumner Locke Elliott won it in 1963.

Walter Mason and Emily Maguire

Emily was there to talk about her most recent novel, Fishing for Tigers, a book set in Hanoi. I was fascinated to hear about her experiences as a writer in Hanoi, trying to make sense of a new culture and also of the other Westerners living there and how they lived alongside the Vietnamese. This is very much what the novel itself is about, and so I was fascinated to hear about the thoughts and experiences that lead to it.

Emily said she first had the motivation to write a Hanoi novel while sitting at Van Mieu, Hanoi’s Temple of Literature. This old Confucian university is indeed a beautiful place and, if you can catch it on a quiet day (increasingly difficult) it is a great place to reflect on matters literary. She searched for silence in Hanoi, a city she described beautifully as "overwhelmingly cacophonous." It was in this cacophony, however, that she began to write her fourth novel.

She had been in Hanoi on an Asialink fellowship, and she was working there editing English translations at the state publishing house. And while she was inspired, her central character didn't come to her till she was walking around Hanoi’s fabulously grey neo-gothic Cathedral. This district, too, is an incredibly romantic and inspiring one, and I am not surprised the muse descended there.

Emily speaks of her fascination, as well, with the expat community in Hanoi, a community she admits to spying on in the bars and restaurants that catered to them. And while at work she was learning about Vietnam's long history of female warriors and heroes, a history that spoke to her feminist convictions. She also spoke about her return to Australia when she realised that there were considerable differences in perception of and feeling towards modern Vietnam among overseas Vietnamese communities.

Emily Maguire is an ambassador for the Room to Read charity, which works in Vietnam providing books and educational facilities to disadvantaged children, with a particular focus on girls' education. She spoke about how writers can use their creative platforms as a tool to do greater things. Sometimes there is no place in our work for didacticism, but we can use our art to help us teach people about issues and ideas so that, in Emily's words, "the creative project and the project of being a decent human being can be entwined."

Most excitingly, Emily told us that she has a new book coming out in March 2016 called An Isolated Incident. I can't wait!

Emma Curtis Hopkins

Probably the most famous obscurity in the history of self-help literature, Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849-1925) is known as "the teacher of teachers" and was responsible for the training of many of the stellar figures in the New Thought movement.

A quiet, reclusive wopman, Hopkins had for a time been Mary Baker Eddy's right-hand woman. Eddy banished her, however, when Hopkins made it clear that she would not become a mindless devotee. Never one to brook opposition, Mrs. Eddy became furious when she learned that Hopkins was devising some of her own ideas, and so caused the division which would help shape a whole new movement (New Thought) and probably, ulitimately, guaranteed the eventual obscurity and decline of Christian Science.

While she always propagated the general ideas of Christian Science, Emma Curtis Hopkins was much more committed to ideas of personal choice and individual free will, and lacked Eddy's famously dogmatic personality. Travelling from city to city, Hopkins would set up shop in a genteel hotel and set about teaching lessons in 'Christian Healing' to select groups of students. In this quiet way she lived out her life, earning a living from teaching her lessons and spending much of her time alone and in prayer.

Painfully shy, Hopkins (who had left her husband years ago in order to follow Mary Baker Eddy) spent most of her time her room, occasionally releasing a book. These books were extraordinarily dense and difficult to read (inspired, most probably, by the style of her great mentor), but their subject matter continues to influence the content and ideas of self-help, though most authors are completely unaware of it. Though gentle and retiring, she must have been possessed of a great charisma, because she taught and inspired people like Charles & Myrtle Fillmore, Nona Brooks and, right at the end of her life, Ernest Holmes.

Her own books are really exercises in theology, and barely fit the mould of self-help at all. They explore biblical stories and the sayings of Jesus in-depth, in a manner obviously inspired by Eddy. Because of the radical nature of her views and the popular manner of their propagation, she is yet to be recognised as a theologian, though I would suggest she is, perhaps one of the greatest and most influential biblical scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her continued obscurity is testament to the shameful gap in knowledge about New Thought and its importance on the behalf of most historians and scholars of religion. This obscurity was, however, addressed brilliantly by Gail M. Harley in her scholarly 2002 biography of "The Forgotten Founder of New Thought."

Hopkins was as well a committed 'womanist', a proto-feminist whose inspiration and ideas helped shape the New Thought movement into the female-dominated domain it was and is.

Each Mind a Kingdom

One of the things that is most apparent when studying the history of self-help literature is the dominance of women. Since the earliest days of New Thought women have been the movement's principal leaders and followers. Certainly in the early literature of Australian self-help, immersed as it is in the philosophy of New Thought, women are the real pioneers.
American historian Beryl Satter has written an excellent book called Each Mind a Kingdom, which details the phenomenon of women in the New Thought movement.
In my research on Sister Veni Cooper-Mathieson, a wonderfully eccentric Australian author, publisher and spiritual leader, I noticed that she led something called the White Cross Crusade. I was surprised to discover that this was a society to promote celibacy aming young women. They met weekly in the Domain, and there was a companion group for young men. By the brevity of the mentions, I can only assume that both movements were not particularly well subscribed. Sister Veni wrote extensively on the subject of female emancipation, a key component of which she saw as being chastity among the young.
It wasn't until I read Satter's fascinating book that I realised that these crusades for morality and celibacy were an intrinsic part of the New Thought movement in America. Indeed, the position was seen as a progressive one, helping to combat the problems of unwanted pregnancy, venereal disease and the abandonment of unmarried mothers.
The New Thought movement saw itself as ushering in a new, purer age, in which women were empowered, and would no longer be enslaved to what was characteristically cast as the baser sexual demands of men.
Physical desire - and sexuality in general - was posited in this early movement as a problem, something to be overcome. It is fascinating how these early feminist visions were tied in with ideas of chastity and sexual purity.

Gift From the Sea

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's remarkably long-lasting popular classic Gift from the Sea is one of those books that more properly belongs in the category of inspiration rather than self-help, mostly because its more conventional, straight-forward narrative format does not fit the template of self-help books.
However, I feel it is important to read and analyse because it is a frequently quoted book, and one of those that people often say changed their lives.
I was surprised at how specifically the book was focused on women's issues and problems. I'd always imagined it to be more general than that, but open reading it I mostly felt excluded from the message. Of course, much of what she says could be applied to the male journey as well, but she seems to be directing her narrative specifically toward women.
I found the structure of the book a little contrived - each chapter is named after a particular seashell, and is made up of the moral lessons she has arrived at through examining the particular qualities of each shell. The writing, too, is quite pedestrian.
She does, however, have some interesting things to say. She speaks eloquently about loneliness and solitude - pre-empting Australia's own Stephanie Dowrick, who would, decades later, write a beautiful book called Intimacy and Solitude - and the necessity of creating islands of peace in our lives in which we are not afraid to be alone with our own thoughts.
On occasion she addresses herself, as a writer, to other writers, and once more she stresses the importance of loneliness in the process of creativity. In this I think she serves as something of a predecessor of Julia Cameron, whose mega-selling The Artist's Way speaks of "artist's dates" in which the artist needs to go somewhere alone in order to cultivate a talent for observation and self-absorption.
In general, Lindbergh's message is quite an old-fashioned one, especially when she discusses matters of the heart. Her own life was, of course, fascinating and filled with tragedy, but she rarely alludes to it here. Instead she talks about the different kinds of pleasures available to the mature person, and to the long-term couple.
I think that might be the secret to the popularity of this gentle, slight and even inconsequential little collection of essays. Its ultimate message seems to be that we should be content with the little we have, and to find pleasure in the simple offerings of an uneventful life.