Guest post by Douglas Martin
I’M BEGINNING TO FEEL THAT IT’S ABOUT TIME I SAID SOMETHING for myself in this discussion about Jonathan’s book. And in case anyone following this tortured saga has not yet grasped the point, what we are talking about is Jonathan’s book. For me, the ghostwriting idea had been dead on the table the moment he mentioned it, but for him it continued for some time to be the project we were talking about.
I don’t want to come across 
sounding like a wise old bird who, from the first, had enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the destiny of the project. Nor do I want to leave anyone with the impression that I’m simply offloading a job that no longer fits into a busy schedule. But that the Farmer biography had become Jonathan’s book became suddenly clear to me on that afternoon, here in my apartment, when he first introduced into our discussion the subject of gender.
It’s not easy to express exactly what happened in my mind when I finally looked clearly at the full implications of the fact that the subject of my interest was not a man, but a woman. To put it that way now sounds simplistic and pretty obvious. But the last thing that would have occurred to me when I was doing my research in the 1960s was the idea that Sarah Farmer’s being a woman made any basic difference to essential elements of a biographical treatment. Indeed, looking back, I would be hard put to imagine that the issue would have registered as a significant one with any of my faculty advisors during that long vanished and unlamented era of academia.
When I think now of the compromises that I felt obliged to impose on the memory of Sarah Farmer’s life, because of the narrow academic requirements of the time in which I had been working, I can’t escape a sense of embarrassment. To my intense regret, the only way I could get the life and work of this extraordinary woman accepted as a thesis subject was to present her as a minor figure, one whose worth lay not in her own astonishing achievements but in the capacity of her modest life story to “summon up the intellectual climate of a vanished age,” as one major scholar of the period put such matters. The effect was as false as it was patronizing.
The other feature of Jonathan’s approach to the subject that I found immediately engaging was the way he planned to go about exposing his developing conception of the story to public scrutiny and discussion. In sharp contrast to the closed, defensive approach to writing history that my generation had painfully learned, this transparency promises a revolution in the way we collectively approach our understanding of our collective past.
To switch to another issue entirely, I have noticed with appreciation Jonathan’s inclusion in these blog posts of photographs that help the reader appreciate the stage of the discussion being covered, and I would like to take full advantage of this feature of the project. In an earlier post he was moved to describe my living room as “tightly furnished,” which, not surprisingly, elicited from a reader a question as to whether he had found the setting “claustrophobic.” Imagine my gratification at seeing that his most recent posting includes a photograph of my living room. As you can see, despite my advanced age, I do not inhabit a Victorian retreat festooned with velvet drapery, crowded with overstuffed furniture, housing dead birds under glass bell jars, and garnished with photographs of long dead ancestors.
With that settled, be sure that I will be watching carefully any assaults Jonathan will inevitably be tempted to make on my dissertation, of the kind he has made on my innocent living room. The photograph attached to this blog post, which he himself kindly took, shows the said dissertation safely in my own hands (where, sadly, it probably won’t long remain.)
