Our invitation was to come and discover the extraordinary story of former Bloomsbury resident Georgina Weldon, who was catapulted into the popular consciousness in 1878. And, Emily Midoridawa spoke to a packed audience.
Although long admired in society circles thanks to her talent as a singer, Weldon had been regarded locally as something of an unstable eccentric, not least because of her belief that she could contact the dead. After a failed attempt by her husband to have her committed to an asylum, she was rewarded with an outpouring of public sympathy and her years of subsequent crusading against Britain’s archaic lunacy laws, turned her into a most unlikely Victorian celebrity.
REFLECTION ON THE TALK:
Author Emily Midorikawa featured the life Georgina Weldon as part of a series of talks to celebrate International Women’s Day at Senate House. This presentation for Pascal Theatre Company’s Women for Women project was no dry academic speech. It was a performance which dramatised Weldon’s life.
Why do we know nothing of Georgina Weldon? This was the question behind Midorikawa’s talk. An activist, a singer and escapee from the plan to incarcerate her in a lunatic asylum, Weldon was a famous celebrity.
Her political activities helped change the Lunacy Laws after her husband plotted with doctors to lock her away in a ‘lunatic asylum’. Was Weldon mad or merely eccentric?
Certainly she never hid her interest in the occult at a time when seances with the dead fascinated Victorian England but this hardly merits being certified.
The talk gave us a character who is one of the many Victorian women who dared fight against their secondary status. It brought Weldon out of obscurity. Thanks to Midorikawa’s easy lecturing style and strong sense of drama, she allowed her attentive audience to re-discover a Victorian revolutionary whose achievements should not be forgotten.
Emily Midorikawa is the author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, and the coauthor of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. She is a lecturer at New York University London. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, The Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. She is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.
Georgina Weldon: Georgina Weldon – Pascal Theatre Company (pascal-theatre.com)
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