Thirteen Years of a Busy Woman's LifeAlec-Tweedie, Mrs. (Ethel)
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Thirteen Years of a Busy Woman's Life
Alec-Tweedie, Mrs. (Ethel)
Alec-Tweedie, Mrs. (Ethel), -1940; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
If I gave an honest account of the editing of that volume people
would laugh. Up to that time no careful register of “old girls”
had been kept. These were the initial days of women learning to be
business-like, I suppose, and if the girls’ names were known their
addresses were not forthcoming, or else nobody had any idea whether or
not the said “girls” were married.
Persistency and dogged determination is rewarded in most things, and in
the end the first page of the little volume entitled:
“THE FIRST COLLEGE OPEN TO WOMEN,
QUEEN’S COLLEGE, LONDON,”
recorded the following contributions, among others (it appeared in
1898):
Dorothea Beale, “Recollections of the Early Days
of Queen’s College.”
Sophia Jex Blake, “The Medical Education of
Women.”
Louisa Twining, “Workhouses and Pauperism.”
Lady Beerbohm Tree, “Quick, thy tablets, memory!”
Dr. Jex Blake was too busy to write her own articles, so I jotted down
the sort of thing I wanted and she filled in the facts and figures.
Another good lady’s I entirely re-wrote; it was so impossible in the
form in which it was sent in.
Some of the other contributors accepted the task gleefully, wrote to
the point, sent copy to date, returned their proofs the same day, and
otherwise showed the difference between an amateur and the professional
journalist.
Several of my contributors seemed unaccustomed to writing for the
Press. One dear lady actually wrote to enquire how she would know when
she had written fifteen hundred words. She explained that a friend
had told her, that _she_ had a friend, who had another friend, who
thought that a column of a daily paper contained about three thousand
words, etc. etc. I suggested her writing a page and counting it, and
multiplying by the number of pages, but when the manuscript came back
the first page had been counted, and at the top of the second page
appeared, “Carried forward 162 words,” at the top of the third page,
“Carried forward 314 words,” and so on, as if it were the butcher’s
book. She had succeeded in life, but not as a scribe.
Another insisted on writing something quite different from the subject
arranged and asked for.
I had to sit in Maud Tree’s dressing-room at the Haymarket Theatre
during a performance of _Julius Cæsar_ to get her article out of her at
all. Not that she does not know how to write, for she is particularly
clever with her pen, as in many other things; but she has a little
trick of procrastination, so it was only by sitting beside her during
the “waits” and taking her ideas down on pieces of paper that we
managed the article. I know nothing of shorthand, unfortunately, so
the notes were somewhat scratchy and interlarded with remarks to her
dresser: “Give me my cloak,” “A little more rouge,” “Has the call-boy
been?” and so on.
There are two classes of successful people: those who buy a reputation,
and those who make one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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