32 - In Time of Disturbance: Political Dissonance and Subversion in Violet Fane's Contributions to the Lady's Realm

Summary

BETWEEN 1894 AND 1896, THE Hamidian Massacres caused the deaths of thousands of Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire. Partially elicited by the rise of Armenian nationalist movements in the preceding decades, the political dynamic between the Ottoman Sultanate and the indigenous Christian minority was of great importance to the British Empire. Britain hoped to prevent the fall of the Ottoman Empire because such a collapse would mean ceding control of its territories to Russia. For this reason, during the 1890s the Armenian Question and the Hamidian Massacres themselves featured heavily in the British press. One individual who had first-hand experience of these events was Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie, wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1898. Lady Currie was better known by her literary pseudonym, Violet Fane. Having published both poetry and prose throughout her earlier life in a range of periodical titles, Fane was a well-known, if not commercially successful, writer. Crucially, Fane also wrote several poems on the theme of civil unrest in the Ottoman sphere during her time in Constantinople. These pieces are remarkable examples of poetic reportage because they focus on a series of genocidal acts that Fane herself witnessed in situ. This essay explores how Fane used her poetry from this period to engage with the Armenian massacres within the British press during the 1890s. Her politically charged contributions to the Lady's Realm, ‘On the Marmora’ (1896) and

‘A Deserted Village’ (1897), did not attract political attention during the period in which the Armenian Question was the subject of heated national discussion. Using these poems as case studies, I argue that Fane used the Lady's Realm as an accessible platform for communicating her ideas about controversial political issues – ideas that would have created controversy if they had appeared in a different publishing venue such as the British Review, where her poetry also appeared during this time period. As a review magazine that was interested in the Eastern Question and devoted significant attention to the Armenian atrocities, the British Review would at first seem to be a more appropriate place for poems such as ‘On the Marmora’ or ‘A Deserted Village.’ She clearly preferred publishing her more controversial work in a woman's magazine, perhaps because they would be less likely to attract negative publicity in that context.