Review: Sarah Ruden on Victoria Woodhull
A real-life transatlantic woman whom Henry James couldn’t have made up with the help of peyote
At the time I was reading Eden Collinsworth’s eye-opening biography of Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), I was finishing a novel by Anita Brookner. I tried hard to hold in a single brain one of Brookner’s repressed, dignified, upper-middle-class British heroines growing old and distressed about the weather in a lonely flat (another bad marriage being her only alternative in life) and a real-life transatlantic woman whom Henry James couldn’t have made up with the help of peyote. One of the entertaining contrasts—but there are so many—between a typical Brookner protagonist and Woodhull is that the latter, born into a home without even an outdoor latrine (the little girl had to bury her feces), finally shot almost to the top of English society, whereas the former, no matter how she is constituted and endowed, is wedged in the same class, not even imagining such operatic rises and falls as Woodhull went through repeatedly.
Woodhull was an adventuress par excellence, a creature far more exotic than the kind of American woman who raised Anthony Trollope’s hackles with her mere potential to marry an innocent English gentleman. Reference sources tend to be—I need this seeming oxymoron, given where the cult of celebrity and media manipulation has landed our polity, and the deep corruptibility that this points to—recklessly respectful toward her for achievements like “running for president,” which were either pretextual or largely imaginary, part of a career of shameless and destructive scams. In a posthumous triumph she would have gloated over, women whose idea of feminism is celebrating each other’s mediagenic selves at exclusive conferences founded (I kid you not) the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership in the 1990s.
Eden Collinsworth’s new biography doesn’t shy away from the main realities and likelihoods of Woodhull’s life. The book’s narrative unfolds from an 1894 lawsuit financed by the middle-aged Woodhull’s British banker husband against the British Museum for housing documents attesting to her views, activities, and reputation in America earlier in her life. Collinsworth assumes the point of view of the ultra-proper Keeper of Printed Books, Richard Garnett, as he tried to discern the life and personality behind this expensive, terrifying assault on his beloved institution. The suit was a Trump-like stunt, nonsensical because its success would have made librarians personally responsible for the “libelousness” (an expansive concept under British law) of any of their libraries’ holdings. Woodhull must have been satisfied with the outcome, £1 in damages and all the court costs charged to her side, for the intimidation value of the spectacle. Finding the main chance as was her wont, she exploited an area of civil law that favored plaintiffs, and made some progress toward the sociopath’s final prize, respectability. Silk-clad, placid of mien, poised, politely firm—the very portrait of a lady—she disputed the right of anyone to know or think anything bad about her, even when it came to things she herself had disseminated.
