The Lost Properties of Love: Dr Sophie Ratcliffe (1876)
For our Valentine’s Day Special episode of Travels Through Time, we visit Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to talk to Dr Sophie Ratcliffe about Anna Karenina, Kate Field, Sofia Tolstoy and the year 1876.
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Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is one of the dazzling achievements of nineteenth century literature. It is a story of power, ambition, fidelity and lust, ‘a warning against the myth and cult of love’, with the ill-starred relationship between the Russian socialites Anna and Count Vronsky at its centre.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Sophie Ratcliffe shows how Anna was very much a child of the 1870s. Various historical figures can be found in her character. A well-known inspiration is Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a jealous lover who threw herself under a freight train. A lesser-known one is the American journalist, lecturer and early telephone pioneer Kate Field.
Field was hugely charismatic and popular. The Chicago Tribune judged her ‘perhaps the most unique woman the present century has produced.’ She was among the first celebrity journalists. She was acquainted with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. For a time in the 1870s, she was employed as the first public relations manager for Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention, the telephone.
Here Ratcliffe explains how Field’s legacy stretched further still. As she explains in her new book, The Lost Properties of Love: ‘Parts of Kate Field live on in Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is part Kate Field. That’s what writers do. They change lives.’
In this conversation, Ratcliffe guides us back to 1876 and to a historical past suspended between fact and fiction. She describes how trains were viewed as an invasive new technology; how time operates in intriguing ways in Tolstoy’s fiction, and she speculates about what was hidden in Anna’s red handbag as she stepped off the railway platform.
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Show notes:
Scene One: A warm Sunday evening in late May 1876 (probably Sunday 30 May by the Russian calendar), the platform of Obiralovka Train Station, Russia.
Scene Two: The Gaiety Theatre, London, late April 1876, to watch Kate Field in a play called The Honeymoon by John Tobin
Scene Three: 17 March, 1876, Sofia Tolstoy’s bedside, Yasnaya Polyana Russia.
Memento: The front page of the Times (with the classified ads) for Tuesday 13 June, 1876
What you will learn in this episode
The symbolism of trains in the 1860s
About Kate Field. Celebritiy journalist, tech pioneer, actor and dashing friend to the famous
The literary and historical context to Anna Karenina’s suicide
The small details of life in a literary household, like that of Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sofia
Whether Leo Tolstoy approved of Heinz Tomato Ketchup
Characters you will encounter in this episode
Kate Field (01 October 1838–19 May 1896), journalist, actress, and editor. Field was a hugely popular figure in the USA & UK in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the age of twenty-one she charmed Anthony Trollope and other literary figures in Florence, and shortly after she launched a journalistic career by sending letters from Italy to a Boston newspaper, the Courier. For a generation thereafter she was rarely out of the news.
Leo Tolstoy (9 September 1828 - 20 November 1910), Russian novelist and star of the first magnitude in the history of letters. His best known works are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina, which was published in serial form between 1873 and 1877.
‘If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.’ (Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters & Miscellanies)
Sofia Tolstoy (22 August 1844 - 4 November 1919) Russian diarist, editor and photographer. Sofia was the daughter of a court physician at the Kremlin. In September 1862 she married Leo Tolstoy and together the couple had 13 children, eight of which survived childhood.
Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 - 6 December 1882) English novelist and satirist of the mid-Victorian Age who managed to sustain both great commercial and critical success. His reputation among writers has remained particularly high, from Leo Tolstoy to Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and P.D. James.
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Thumbnail credit: Wikimedia Commons
