Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks by Etta M. Madden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks by Etta M. Madden Ilaria Serra ENGAGING ITALY: AMERICAN WOMEN’S UTOPIAN VISIONS AND TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS, by Etta M. Madden. New York: SUNY Press, 2022. 342 pp. $95.00 hardback; $33.95 paperback. It is a rare treat to sit in a nineteenth-century Roman salotto where upper-class American expatriates gather and exchange their impressions of Italy. This is what happens when you open Edda M. Madden’s volume Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. The book’s first pages bring the reader inside a Roman salon where American poet and educator Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the guest of honor. The following pages leave the man behind to focus on three women who frequented these receptions—Emily Bliss Gould (1822–1875), Caroline Crane Marsh (1816–1901), and Anne Hampton Brewster (1819–1892)—and who asked the question, “What can we do to make this crazy, beautiful country better?” The author’s detailed archival research and her laborious deciphering of handwritten letters unearthed from long-closed drawers afford the readers this leap in time. It is no small task, and the author immediately indicates to readers of the uniqueness of her sources by asking: “How to capture the numerous abbreviations (often singular to the author), the underlining and double underlining, the superscripts, and the strikethroughs?” (p. xv). The answer is the secret of this book: by getting to know them personally and becoming privy to their habits and peeves, allowing them to take life in the pages. [End Page 165] Madden’s book allows an unprecedented, close look at a particular slice of nineteenth-century society, the American community in Rome, which may now have been forgotten but deeply influenced Italian culture and left some tangible traces. Even rarer is to learn the pursuits of the women in this society, who were already uncommon travelers—following their husbands’ careers, in two cases out of three—but also exceptional visionaries who had minds and projects of their own. Gould was not just the wife of American physician James Gould but also the founder of a home for poor children in Rome. Marsh was the wife of the United States ambassador to Italy, George Perkins Marsh (considered the first environmentalist), and a published poet and translator, an activist, and a philanthropist who financed Salvatore Ferretti’s “Free Church” orphanage. Brewster was proudly never anybody’s wife, a pioneer journalist, one of the first women correspondents from abroad, and an independent and non-conformist spirit. These three ladies were nearly the same age and spent an important part of their lives in Italy around the same time. Two died in the country: Gould in Perugia and Brewster in Siena. All three did not just attend and organize glitzy cultural and social events as part of their social duties but also pursued their own projects. Gould kept a long correspondence with George Marsh, the ambassador, asking for his help in fundraising and complaining about the ignorance of the men around her who, according to her, did not understand the culture they lived in. These letters reveal her frustration with the Italian educational and political system, the Americans in Rome, and their religious divisions. She was even arrested for meeting with Protestants in her home and defended herself well, her motivation boosted by the affront. The ambasciatrice Caroline Marsh, working side by side with her husband, was deeply affected by the extreme poverty she saw in Rome and the Italian countryside after a big flood destroyed the living quarters of the poorer people. Moved by the “incredible amount of idleness, poverty and beggary,” she fought to alleviate this misery by opening a Roman orphanage and school (p. 30). The rebellious Brewster spent her life fighting her brother for her inheritance and opposing his prohibition against her seeing her long-time friend and partner, Charlotte Cushman. She left many poems and astute articles in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Boston Daily Advertiser, New York World, Chicago Daily News, and Cincinnati Commercial. Brewster never lost her irony, recognizable in her words when she conceded a fight to Roman leader Rodolfo Lanciani: “I...