The Heart of Westminster Abbey? Poets' Corner and Writing Women by Fay Bound Alberti

Westminster Abbey 

In October I had the opportunity to visit Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, before the doors opened and the tourists poured in. I was recording with the Rev. Giles Fraser, who was presenting a series of programmes on Radio 4 about the heart. Giles had recently undergone major heart surgery, and it had got him thinking about all aspects of the heart in history and culture. Other guests included Rowan Williams and Susie Orbach, and I had the pleasure of talking about the heart in science and medicine and history. You can listen to the programme here.

It was extraordinary to be in the Abbey when it was virtually empty, save for the occasional hum of a vacuum cleaner. We visited Poets' Corner, the name traditionally given to the South Transept of Westminster Abbey because of the high number of poets, playwrights and writers buried and commemorated there. The first poet to be interred in Poets' Corner was Geoffrey Chaucer, and the site has become famous for the number of romantic poets, interred or commemorated there.

In my interview, I talked about the meanings of the heart as a romantic organ, still connected to authenticity, truth and emotion, even though we now place emotions in the mind. And the ways in which we still regard ourselves as driven by heartfelt feelings, even though the tyranny of neuroscience insists the brain is first. I wrote a book about the 'two hearts' that exist, the poetic and the medical, and you can find out about that here.

Writing women are lacking at Poets' Corner - a problem I have written about here. The photos below (permitted by a kind security guard), show the commemoration of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Shakespeare, amongst a wall of marble white men. We stopped for a time at the plaque to Shelley, because his mythology, as a radical, a poet and a Romantic, is so bound up in his heart.

Adele Geras and Anna Mazzola have both written in this blog about Shelley - whose heart was snatched from the funeral pyre and kept, it is said, by his wife in a silken cloth for many years before being buried with their son after Mary Shelley's death. There is no memorial to Mary Shelley, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, though she was a successful writer in her own right, best known for her novel, Frankenstein.

Shelley's plaque, visible top right 

Of the few women who did make the cut, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1851) is an interesting case because she, like many Romantic and Victorian writers, suffered with heart complaints, in addition to believing that the heart was the centre of emotions, the self and even the soul.

Born in Durham, Elizabeth was a successful poet, having written since the age of six years old. Like many early feminists, she was a social reformer and campaigner against the slave trade, and an avid admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems (1844) brought the poet great success, and attracted the attention of the poet Robert Browning, with whom she eloped, much to her family's displeasure, despite the fact that she was then 40 years old, Elizabeth suffered from numerous ailments, including spinal problems, lung problems and heart trouble.

The nineteenth century was a time when scientific medicine identified many different kinds of heart defect, and Barrett Browning was not alone in suffering from heart complaints. She discussed her cardiac trouble with her friends, including the feminist writer and early sociologist Harriet Martineau, who also believed that she suffered from a heart defect. I have suggested in another article that it was better to be diagnosed with a cardiac complaint than with the gynaecological condition that seems to have caused Martineau's debilitating symptoms.

Besides the shame Martineau felt at her 'women's troubles' being openly discussed, there was something rather prestigious in her day about having a weak heart: it was the mark of a sensitive and creative soul in an age where the heart was still seen as the emotion centre; only with the birth of Cardiology in the early twentieth century was heart disease principally associated with poor living, fatty food and too much stress. Unfortunately, Martineau is not memorialised anywhere in the country, let alone at Poets' Corner, despite her remarkable contemporary influence.

And what of Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Despite periods of intense ill health, Elizabeth lived happily with Robert in Italy, though she was disinherited by her family. They had one son, called Pen. Elizabeth died in 1861, apparently in her husband's arms. Her family refused to allow her remains to be buried with Robert, when he died in 1889 and was interred in Westminster Abbey. Her name, however, is inscribed on the base of her husband's headstone.

I will leave you with Barrett Browning's poem, 'My heart and I', which seems remarkably apposite, given the subject of the heart, and because she had suffered for so many years before her death.

ENOUGH! we're tired, my heart and I.
We sit beside the headstone thus,
And wish that name were carved for us.
The moss reprints more tenderly
The hard types of the mason's knife,
As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life
With which we're tired, my heart and I.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's inscription at the foot of her husband's stone. 

I won't be posting until the new year now, so I wish you all much love and happiness and heartfelt feelings over the festive period. You can visit my website and find out more about my writing and research here.

Facing the Future as Someone Else: A History of Face Transplants by Fay Bound Alberti

Faces matter. They tell the world who we are and where we come from. They reveal our individuality, our genetics, emotions and ethnicity. But faces are also 'matter,' a composite of tissues, muscles and nerves that can be changed by cosmetics, art and surgery.  Face transplants are no longer science fiction, which they were in 1997 when Face/Off hit the cinemas, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage and directed by John Woo. Since 2005, it has been possible to perform face transplants, in which the face of a dead donor is overlaid on the body of a recipient. That recipient will more than likely have undergone some traumatic event or accident, and multiple reconstructive surgeries before receiving a new face. What must it be like to wake up as someone else? To have to learn to speak, eat, smile and inhabit a totally different visage? What would it be like for your family? Or for the family of the donor, constantly looking for and hoping to find (or not to find) an essence of their loved one. 

I have been thinking a lot about these kinds of questions. I'm writing a history of face transplants from the 1950s to the present, focusing especially on post 2005, when the 38-year old French woman Isabelle Dinoire became the first face transplant recipient. Hers was a partial transplant; her nose, chin and lips had been lost when she was savaged by her pet dog. Isabelle was unconscious at the time, having argued with her daughter and taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. Whether or not it was a deliberate overdose has proved contentious: could she have given true, informed consent for a face transplant when she was depressed enough to commit suicide? When she couldn't possibly have known what the world had in store for her? 

As it turned out, the world was very interested. The hospital that treated her released pre- and post- operative photos. The media immediately picked up the story: they wanted details from her neighbours, her friends. They wanted to know what it was like to have someone else's face; what it was like for her family and the family of the donor. They discussed whether she would be able to kiss, to have a new relationship, to return to her old existence. Life was never the same again for Isabelle. She remained dependent on her doctors and did not return to full time work. She constantly watched her skin for signs of tissue rejection. She lived with a face that she described as half her own and half somebody else's. When Isabelle died of cancer in 2016, her doctors denied it was in any way connected to the cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs she had been taking - though those drugs are known to increase the risk of cancer. I have written in detail about Dinoire elsewhere. Her case is important - not just because of her own experiences as a female patient undertaking a cutting-edge technique, but also because it draws attention to the limits and obligations of what has been called 'Frankenstein science'. Where do we draw the line in medical experimentation? What can and can't be transplanted? Who decides?

I have not included images of Isabelle Dinoire in this blog post, since some readers might find them upsetting. But they are widely available online. So, too, are images of her surgeons, Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard, who also performed the first hand transplant. The hand transplant was not ultimately a success, because Clint Hallam, the recipient, could not bear living with it or dealing with the possibility of tissue rejection that occurred. For transplants to hold, massive amounts of immunosuppressants must be taken. Doctors are experimenting with alternative methods, but to date these have been unsuccessful. 

The history of face transplants is a history of experimentation, of trying to master the complexities of the different tissues making up the face. People with transplanted faces do not gain full facial mobility, so in addition to belonging to the realms of both the living and the dead, they are both healed and not healed. Isabelle Dinoire said that she felt like a 'monster' before her operation, when her wounds were visible and like a 'circus freak' afterwards, when everybody knew that she was the first face transplant recipient. Other people's responses to disfigurement and transplantation are hugely important. Face transplant surgery can be traced back to World War I and to the development of plastic and reconstructive techniques as a consequence of soldiers being wounded in ways and numbers never before seen. 

Another History Girl, Louisa Young, has written beautifully on questions of facial reconstructive surgery and social rehabilitation in My dear I wanted to tell you and the follow-up novels, The Heroes' Welcome and Devotion. I first met Louisa in 2006, when we were both contributing to the Wellcome Trust's first public exhibition, which was on hearts. Louisa had written her glorious Book of the Heart and I was working on a history monograph, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, Emotion. Eleven years later, by a wonderful serendipity, I find myself working on the history of face transplants soon after the publication of My Dear, I have something to tell you.  

Maybe that isn't such a coincidence as it might appear. After all, hearts and faces have a lot in common. I became interested in the history of transplants because of what they tell us about our bodies - and how we feel about them. Heart transplant patients often claim they have received more than a stranger's heart; stories abound of people's personality or even their cravings and abilities changing as a result. Transplants are gifts, from one person to another (at least in the UK where donors are not paid). They provoke a range of emotional responses: fear of having a new organ, disgust that organ is assimilated into their own bodies, gratitude to the donor, guilt that s/he has died while the recipient lives on, and so on. Isabelle expressed both revulsion that her tongue touched the dead lips of her donor as well as gratitude for her new face. There is an added poignancy to the fact that Dinoire's donor was a young woman who committed suicide. In life as in death, the two were linked together forever.