Forgotten Wives and Sisters

“It is of little consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may contribute most to the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other.”¹

So wrote John Stuart Mill in reference to the role of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, in his own published works. (I gratefully acknowledge the truth of the principle from personal experience!). History is replete with other examples than Mill of women who exercised unheralded influence on a writer who—often because of women’s more obscure place in patriarchal society—ventriloquized a wife or—in two famous cases—sisters. 

William Wordsworth revolutionized English poetry, and is celebrated as the Father of British Romanticism. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, in an age of fervent optimism and revolution, Wordsworth gave powerful expression to the innocence of children and the fundamental goodness of human nature. His constant companion—more so than wife or friends—was his sister Dorothy. She was “a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath . . . independent of the wind.”² He was the most celebrated English poet of his day. However, one can track in her journals the embryos out of which William fashioned some of his most famous poems. If journals and diaries had persisted as credited forms of literary expression, she might herself have achieved celebrity status. His poem best known to school children begins with the famous lines,

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze . . .

It is not clear that his words improved upon the unadorned account Dorothy recorded privately, earlier:

We saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.³

More consequential for the history of early Christianity was the remarkable woman Macrina the Younger—known to few besides specialists today, and largely overshadowed by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory became the most eloquent proponent in the fourth century of the theology of ascent—that view which sees humankind as a work in continual progress, participating in gradual sanctification and union with the divine. Gregory read the Song of Solomon as a beautiful allegory of human response to the “arrows of love” with which God relentlessly pursues his creation. Gregory developed the theme most lyrically in his Life of Moses, wherein he recast the prophet’s entire life as a universal model: “The great Moses, as he was becoming ever greater, at no time stopped in his ascent, nor did he set a limit for himself in his upward course. Once having set foot on the ladder which God set up (as Jacob says), he continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained.”⁴  

Yet Gregory left no doubt that his spiritual teacher and master was Macrina, “the common glory of our family.” Macrina had actually brought several of her brothers to Christ, and served throughout her life as their spiritual director. In 379, as Macrina lay dying, Gregory paid his last visit. Like Socrates the night before his execution, Macrina wanted to discuss the soul’s origin, God’s purpose in its creation, and what awaited us after death. Her last words were a testimony to the creation itself as an outflowing of God’s love—and reaffirmed those very teachings which her brother would make more famous. Gregory’s tribute, published as “On the Soul and Resurrection,” was his way of proclaiming to Christians the true author of  the most beautiful teachings that lighted the way for fourth-century Christians: his sister Macrina.

Rational nature was brought into generation for this purpose, that the riches of the divine goodness should not be idle.” We were fashioned as souls “with free wills . . . for this very purpose: that there would be some capacities able to receive his blessings, capacities that are enlarged by the addition of that which is poured into them.” God “has but one goal: the whole plenitude of our nature is brought to completion from the first human being to the last.” He will offer “to all a participation in the beautiful which is in him.⁵

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

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Artwork by Anna Ancher.

1. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), 171.

2. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 182.

3. Dorothy Wordsworth, Written at Grasmere (April 15, 1802), in Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. William Knight (London: Macmillan, 1897).

4. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 113–14.

5. Anna M. Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Turnhout Belgium: Brepols, 2008), 241.