As part of the World of An Insignificant Woman project I collaborated with some of my other relatives, custodians of Marjory’s photo albums, to digitise the old images she kept.
Last year I uploaded a collection of Victorian portrait photographs to a set entitled ‘Harriet Bennett’s Photo Album‘. Swollen with the sharing spirit of the Internet, I gave the images a permissive Creative Commons Licience. My hope was that they might act as a prompt or support for other people’s creative projects.
The first instance of this hope being realised is ‘Papercuts and Curses‘ by Sam Meekings. It uses my scanned image of a young and now anonymous aquaintance of Harriet Bennett to illustrate a story about a young adventurer. Sam begins his story with a liberating broadside against an old writing cliche:
The standard advice to those thinking of becoming writers is to write what you know. The fact that this is clearly the most ridiculous and restrictive piece of advice imaginable does not seem to put people off from repeating it again and again. Edward Gregory Charles was determined to follow it to the letter: with the pragmatism typical of the late nineteenth century, he made it his mission to fill up his mind with experiences.
Read the entire piece on Medium (Twitter founder Evan Williams‘ new project).
As the first chapter of The World of An Insignificant Woman explains, Harriet Bennett turned her hand to poetry in her youth. And her daughter Marjory was obviously very enthusiastic about literature. Sam’s story, about travelling the world and finding you cannot express your experiences, would also have appealed: recall the later chapters of the book, where Ta writes about how Marjory would have loved to have gone on similar adventures! So I am quite sure that both women would have approved of this new use of their photo archive.
I would be delighted if other authors (on Medium or elsewhere) wrote stories based on other images in the Harriet Bennett collection.
The World of An Insignificant Woman 