In Time of Disturbance: Political Dissonance and Subversion in Violet Fane’s Contributions to the Lady’s Realm

In this essay, Ceylan Kosker explores how Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie (1843‒1905) used her poetry publications in the Lady’s Realm, ‘On the Marmora’ (1896) and ‘A Deserted Village’ (1897), to address the Hamidian Massacres, which took place in the Ottoman Empire, 1894‒96. As an aristocrat and wife of a British ambassador, Currie had to be careful in her treatment of political subject matter. Thus, she not only adopted a pseudonym, Violet Fane, but also published her political poems in a women’s magazine rather than in a mixed-gender monthly or quarterly magazine. She employed a number of strategies that aimed to hint at the topicality of her subject matter, yet she also obscured her political aims by aestheticising images of violence (in tandem with accompanying illustrations) and by emphasising her own public identity. Publishing political poetry in the Lady’s Realm thus ‘allowed her to express the haunting quality of the trauma she suffered from witnessing the Armenian atrocities without damaging her reputation as a literary celebrity’ (p. 526).