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Marianne Farningham: Work, Leisure, and the Use of Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In 1907, aged seventy and nearing the end of her long life as a journalist and writer, Marianne Farningham published her autobiography. She gave it the forthright title A Working Woman’s Life, thus indicating that in her old age she constructed her identity as that of both ‘woman’ and ‘worker’, closely bound up with her gender as well as with the type of life she had lived. Looking back from the perspective of the early twentieth century, although with a view of life largely shaped in the 1840s and 1850s, she recounted, amongst other things, the joys of her work, the perils of overwork, and the pleasures of relaxation. Her writing accordingly included several passages addressing matters relating to the use and abuse of time.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 37: The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History , 2002 , pp. 343 - 355
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2002
References
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19 Hope, Eva, Grace Darling (London, 1875), p. 56 Google Scholar. In addition to her journalistic work, Famingham wrote several biographies and edited at least three collections of poetry, all under a second pseudonym of Eva Hope which, as she commented later (Famingham, Life, p. 131), was ‘about the weakest [name] we could have found.’ The account of Grace Darling is almost certainly fictional: see Armstrong, Richard, Grace Darling: Maid and Myth (London, 1965), p. 62 Google Scholar. Whilst, as Armstrong argued, this work is ‘bad beyond belief as a biography (p. 10), it provides a useful reflection of the beliefs and attitudes of the author.
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21 Farningham, Life, p. 141.
22 Supplement to The Christian World, 18 March 1909, personal tribute by Jennie Street.
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24 Farningham, Girlhood, pp. 30–5.
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36 Farningham, Life, p. 141.
37 Ibid., p. 275. The biblical quotation is from Acts 13–36.
38 Farningham, Girlhood, p. 43.
39 Ibid., pp. 40–1.
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51 Farningham, Home Life, p. 52.
52 Farningham, Life, pp. 22–3.
53 Ibid., p. 71.
54 Farningham, Home Life, p. 54.
55 Farningham, Girlhood, p. 46.
56 Farningham, Boyhood, p. 54.
57 Farningham, Girlhood, p. 46.
58 Ibid., p. 44.
59 Ibid., p. 45.
60 Farningham, Boyhood, pp. 54–6.
61 Farningham, Sketches, pp. 9–11.
62 Ibid., p. 128.
63 Farningham, Life, p. 165.
64 It is interesting that she regarded it as self-evident that ‘my writings have appealed most of all to the working-classes’: Farningham, Life, p. 269.