Strong Women in History and Literature by Bonnie Hobbs

Usually, I am lost in history. Especially American history, and usually immersed in the

lives and loves of “Westering Women.” I think of my grandmother, my great-grandmother and all the greats before them. Coming from the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, settling on farms or small-holdings in Texas and Oklahoma, then trying to outrun the dustbowl into California. Thinking of them is when I think “Strength.” And that’s who I try to honor by my words.

Now, romance? Maybe not so much, if we think about it seriously. Relieving oneself behind a scrubby bush along the trail through the prairie might not be conducive to “romance,” as we think of it. But love? To find, give and keep love alive in such circumstances? Decidedly so. People fell in love. People always do. That’s what keeps us creating (and procreating)

Lately, though, maybe because of PBS showing us their version of Jane Austen’s Sanditon, I’ve begun thinking of Jane Austen and her work. I read them all as a girl, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion. I read them as a girl too young to truly appreciate the artistry and the message in those works. The underlying strength of those female characters.

Jane Austen was not “frivolous and silly,” as one of my male friends once said. Not unless Jane Austen wanted to be silly, then she was delightful.

So. Strong women: both the writer and the characters (not all, of course). Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice says, “Everything nourishes what is strong already.”

Yes, Elizabeth goes on about time and beauty, but I’ve always believed there’s more in those words. And Austen wanted us to see more.

Romance flourishes in Austen’s books, of course, romance and practicality when the only acceptable outcome is to be married “well,” or so it is thought. There’s jockeying for position in drawing rooms and balls, there are “accidental” meetings on woodland or seaside paths. But always there is strength. Strength in resistance, or in careful choices if choices must be made.

Jane Austen

Reportedly, the upcoming showing of the reimagined Sanditon will include English ladies boycotting sugar to protest the evils of slavery connected to that trade. And yes, this truly happened. Elizabeth Heyrick from Leicester evidently wrote a pamphlet that sold thousands of copies in Britain and the US, making a clear case that conditions on plantations in which enslaved people worked to produce sugar was appallingly evil. It’s estimated that 400,000 people boycotted sugar for a time. I can only imagine what strength it took for Heyrick to take up such a cause, write a pamphlet that clearly opened her to scorn or ridicule by many.

According to a book by Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Austen had clearly read the tracts written in her time and spoke of her opposition to the slave trade. She didn’t finish Sanditon. She died before she could, but we can wonder how much she might have said in that book, for threads of social concerns twist through all Austen’s other works.

I try to weave in commentary about the lives of women and girls in the old west, not just their romances. I try to show their strength, not the “gal with the gun” kind of strength, but the quiet, determined kind. The kind I learned by reading authors like Jane Austen.

About Bonnie: 

Bonnie Hobbs grew up in California’s rural central coast, earning degrees in Women’s Studies, Society and Justice, and nursing. She began her nursing career caring for birthing women and ending it caring for hospice patients. 

Drawing from her father’s passion for history and her mother’s love of romantic mysteries, she writes about struggle and triumph, love and loss in the lives of women of the American frontier: Native women, European and Asian immigrants and the daughters of immigrants, Black women enslaved and free, women lured or bullied as well as inspired to move on, always westward. 

She shares a home in southern Oregon with her husband. Their blended family of five grown children have given them fourteen grandchildren, the newest baby boy born only last week.