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i
‘This is no ordinary collection on Milton and women. The editors have

cast their net well beyond the usual scholarly circles and academic
subjects. The result is an exciting volume that extends into contemporary
issues such as race and gender fluidity (Milton’s Spirits “when they
please, can either sex assume, or both”). It also looks at fresh ways into
Milton’s female readers, and how their responses are expressed creatively
in imaginative writing and visual art and performance. The Milton that
emerges from this volume is not the canonical figure of Anglo-American
academic study, but a global figure whose poetry reverberates through
many cultures’.
Gordon Campbell, Emeritus Professor and Fellow in
Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester
‘Contributors to this present, groundbreaking volume do not speak

with one voice. Rather, like the female authors and artists whom they
explore, they evince a variety of stances. Bringing new female figures, new
subjects, and new approaches to the study of Milton, they foreground
appropriation and gender in fresh and provocative ways that warrant
further pursuit’.
Laura Knoppers, Professor of English at the University of
Notre Dame and editor of Milton Studies
‘Women (Re)Writing Milton will revitalize the way we think about

Milton and gender. The essays in the collection offer a brilliant array of
perspectives on the ways in which women writers and artists through
centuries and across cultures have re-imagined Milton’s works. Invariably
engaging, often unexpected in their subject matter, these essays herald the
beginning of a more generous and inclusive approach to Milton’s recep-
tion history’.
Karen L. Edwards, Professor of English at the University of Exeter
Scholarly attention to the transnational reception of Milton’s poetry and

prose began in earnest at the International Milton Symposium at the
University of Exeter in 2015, and is now offered to a broad readership in
this lively collection of wide-ranging, thoughtful, and accessible essays.
With the publication of this volume, England can no longer claim exclu-
sive ownership of Milton.
Mary Nyquist, Professor of English and Comparative
Literature, University of Toronto
ii
iii
Women (Re)Writing Milton
This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and

his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting
Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse
historical, cultural, religious, and social contexts across the globe and
through the centuries. The book encompasses a rich range of different
literary genres, artistic media, and academic disciplines and draws on
the research of established Milton scholars and new Miltonists. Like the
female authors and artists whom they explore, the contributors take up
a variety of standpoints. As well as revisiting the work of established fig-
ures, the volume brings new female creative artists, new subjects, and new
approaches to the study of Milton.
Mandy Green is Associate Professor of English at Durham University

where she teaches courses on Milton, Shakespeare, and Renaissance
Literature. Her work on classical presences in English literature has
appeared in a number of journals and edited volumes; she has also
published a monograph on Milton’s Ovidian Eve (2nd edn, 2016).
Sharihan Al-Akhras is a journalist who has worked in a number of media

outlets and social networking services in London, including but not
limited to: BBC Arabic, Al Jazeera English, and Twitter. Her PhD thesis
examined the presence of Judeo-Arabic mythology in Paradise Lost. Her
interests include Early Modern Literature, Middle-Eastern mythology, the
demonic, Arab female authorship, East–West relations, and (social) media.
iv
Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Royalists and Royalism in 17th-Century Literature

Exploring Abraham Cowley
Edited by Philip Major
Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation

Reading through the Spirit
David Ainsworth
Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English

Utopian Literature
Dan Mills
John Dryden and his Readers: 1700

Winifred Ernst
Guido Cavalcanti: Poet of the Rational Animal

Gregory B. Stone
Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy

Iman Sheeha
The Liminality of Fairies

Readings in Late Medieval English and Scottish Romance
Piotr Spyra
The Hawthornden Manuscript of William Fowler and the Jacobean

Court 1603–1612
Allison L. Steenson

Edited by Mandy Green and Sharihan Al-Akhras
To learn more about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Renaissance-Literature-and-Culture/book-series/
SE0537
v
Edited by
Mandy Green and Sharihan Al-Akhras
vi
First published 2021

by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Mandy Green and Sharihan Al-Akhras to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Green, Mandy, editor. | Al-Akhras, Sharihan, editor.
Title: Women (re)writing Milton / edited by Mandy Green
and Sharihan Al-Akhras.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. |
Series: Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of
Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and
rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from
diverse historical, cultural, religious and social contexts across the globe
and through the centuries”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048985 | ISBN 9780367443047 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780367760205 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Milton, John, 1608–1674–Appreciation. |
Milton, John, 1608-1674–Influence. | Literature–Women authors--
History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PR3588 .W586 2021 | DDC 821/.4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048985
ISBN: 978-0-367-44304-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-76025-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-76020-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9780367443047

vi
To My Father, Sameer, who left too soon.

I miss you always.
I love you forever.
Sharihan Al-Akhras
To my grandchildren:
Amelia, our ‘lockdown’ baby, and little Freddie;
and my own ‘irrepressible Eve’
Mandy Green
vi
xi
Contents
List of Illustrations xii

Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers xiv
Acknowledgments xxi
A Note on the Text xxii
Introduction: A Life Beyond Life: Milton’s Afterlives 1

M A N DY G R E E N AN D SH A RIH AN A L - A
KH RA S
PART I
Early Responses by English Women Writers: Poetry
and Prose 15
1 Lucy Hutchinson’s Irrepressible Eve 17

ALLAN DREW
2 ‘Soaring in the High Region of her Fancies’: The

Female Poet and the Cosmic Voyage 31
TH O M A S R . TYRRE L L
3 ‘Two Great Sexes Animate the World’: Laying

the Spectre of ‘Milton’s Bogey’ in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein 49
M A N DY G R E E N
x
x Contents
PART II
Global Perspectives: Biographies, Translations,
Novels, and the Internet 71
II.1
Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Responses 71
4 The Return of William Wells Brown: A Heroic Black

Miltonist in Elizabeth Josephine Brown’s Miltonic
Biography of Her Father 73
R E G I N A L D A . WIL B URN
5 Emilia Pardo Bazán and Milton’s Spanish Afterlife 91

A N G E L I CA DURAN
6 ‘I Am Not “Masculine” I Am Weak’: Ágnes Nemes

Nagy’s Translation of Sonnet 23 106
M I K L Ó S P É TI
II.2
Contemporary Responses 121
7 Milton’s Domestic Life and Tempered Female

Ambition in Kim Wilkins’ Angel of Ruin 123
L A R I SA KO C IC-Z ÁMB Ó
8 From Hell to Paradise: Miltonic Presences in Beatriz

Bracher’s Anatomia do Parais 139
R E N ATA M E IN TS A DA IL
9 Milton and Arab Female Authorship in the Age of

Social Media 153
S H A R I H A N A L -A KH RA S
PART III
Milton through the Female Gaze 169
III.1
Women Re-reading Milton: Education and Theory 169
10 Beyond Milton’s Daughters: Dorothy Dury, Lady

Ranelagh, and the Question of Female Education 171
S H A N N O N MIL L E R
xi
Contents xi
11 ‘Queer Opening’: Eve’s Readers and Writers 182
S TE P H A N I E SP OTO
12 The ‘Paradise Within’: A Post-Jungian Revisiting of

the Feminine in Milton’s Paradise Lost 198
RO U L A -M A R IA DIB
III.2
Milton Visualized: Digital Media, Art, and Performance 211
13 Gendered Reflections on an All-Day Reading of

Paradise Lost 213
J A M E E L A L ARE S A N D KAYL A M. SCH RE IB E R
14 Other Eyes: Women Artists Rewriting Paradise Lost 230

W E N DY F U R MA N -A DA MS
15 Women Directing Milton: Feminist Stagings of

Miltonic Seduction 269
FA R A H K A R IM-C O O P E R
Bibliography 280
List of Contributors 298
Index 301
xi
Illustrations
13.1 All-day Reading of Paradise Lost at the University of

Mississippi, 2019. 215
14.1a Jane Giraud, ‘Eve separate he spies’, Paradise Lost,
Book 9, from Flowers of Milton (London, 1846). 233
14.1b Jane Giraud, Detail of Eve, Paradise Lost, Book 9,
from Flowers of Milton (London, 1846). 234
14.2 Jane Giraud, Adam and Eve’s Bower 1 (Laurel and
Myrtle), Paradise Lost, Book 4 (London, 1846). 235
14.3 Jane Giraud, Adam and Eve’s Bower 2 (Violet, Crocus,
Hyacinth), Paradise Lost, Book 4 (London, 1846). 236
14.4 Jane Giraud, ‘Awake!’, Paradise Lost, Book 5 (London,
1846). 237
14.5 Jane Giraud, ‘Earth Felt the Wound’, Paradise Lost,
Book 9 (London, 1846). 238
14.6 Carlotta Petrina, Adam and Eve in Paradise, Paradise
Lost, Book 4 (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1936). 241
14.7 Carlotta Petrina, Sin with Satan and Death, Paradise
14.8 Carlotta Petrina, Raphael with Adam and Eve, Paradise
14.9 Carlotta Petrina, The Colloquy in Heaven, Paradise
14.10 Mary Elizabeth Groom, Adam and Eve in Paradise,
Paradise Lost, Book 4 (London: Golden Cockerel Press,
1937). 246
14.11 Mary Elizabeth Groom, The Colloquy in Heaven,
1937). 247
14.12 Mary Elizabeth Groom, Humankind Rising in Christ,
1937). 249
14.13 Mary Elizabeth Groom, Angels Rejoicing, Paradise Lost,
Book 3 (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1937). 250
xi
List of Illustrations xiii

14.14 Carlotta Petrina, Satan Falling into the Lake of Fire,
Paradise Lost, Book 1 (New York: Limited Editions
Club, 1936). 251
14.15 Mary Elizabeth Groom, Satan Invading Paradise,
1937). 252
14.16 Mary Elizabeth Groom, The Devils in Pandaemonium,
1937). 254
14.17 Carlotta Petrina, The Chariot of Paternal Deity, Paradise
14.18 Carlotta Petrina, Eve After the Fall, Paradise Lost, Book
9 (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1936). 257
14.19 Carlotta Petrina, The Expulsion, Paradise Lost, Book 12
(New York: Limited Editions Club, 1936). 258
14.20 Mary Elizabeth Groom, Eve’s Temptation, Paradise
Lost, Book 9 (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1937). 259
14.21 Mary Elizabeth Groom, Adam’s Temptation, Paradise
14.22 Mary Elizabeth Groom, Eve’s Intercession, Paradise
14.23 Alexis Smith, The Snake Path, Stuart Collection,
University of California, San Diego. Photograph by
Philipp Scholz Rittermann. 264
14.24 Alexis Smith, Paradise Garden, The Snake Path, Stuart
Collection, University of California, San Diego. 265
15.1 Lucy Bailey in Rehearsal for Comus at The Globe, 2016.
Photograph by Sheila Burnett. 276
vxi
Foreword
Laura L. Knoppers
In 1997, Lives of the Monster Dogs, a first novel by young American

author Kirsten Bakis, offered a fantastical story of creator and creatures,
loyalty and rebellion, loneliness and desire in the lineage of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The narrative, framed
by New York University student Cleo Pira, switches back and forth from
present-day to recent and distant past, drawing on Cleo’s recollections,
diaries of the dogs and of the mad scientist who created them, press
clippings, magazine articles, and even a canine-authored libretto.
From these materials we learn that a nineteenth-century Bavarian sci-
entist, Augustus Rank, had labored to create an army of dogs endowed
with human intelligence, artificial hands, and mechanical voice boxes for
Kaisar Wilhelm II. When the Kaisar loses patience, the scientist and his
devoted followers flee Prussia for a remote part of Canada where they
continue their project in cult-like secrecy. Rank dies before completing the
dogs, but promises to return again; the dogs, having been completed and
enslaved by Rank’s followers, ultimately rebel and move to New York
City, where they are treated as rich and famous celebrities. One early
reviewer acclaimed the book as ‘a clever, compelling Frankenstein for
the millennium’ (Ingraham 1997: 141). It is also a late twentieth-century
American version of Paradise Lost.
In the novel, the monster dogs desperately want to be human. The
150 genetically-modified Great Danes, German shepherds, Malamutes,
Rottweilers, bull terriers, and Samoyeds who arrive in New York City
by chartered plane on a cold November day walk upright, speak heavily
accented English, and dress in late-nineteenth-century Prussian finery.
They eat extremely cultured food and drink alcohol. They live at the
Plaza or in luxurious apartments on the Upper East Side. They ride in
limousines rather than taxis. Among them, they are proud to have their
own historians, scientists, musicians, and composers. They tour museums
and sit for television interviews. And, late in the novel, they build a gigantic,
expensive castle in the Lower East Side and throw a Great Gatsby-like
party. Their celebrity gives the dogs a place in New York society, but it
also keeps them marginalized. And they have a dark secret. Behind closed
doors, to their horror, the dogs are experiencing increasingly frequent
v
x
Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers xv

bouts of what they term madness, during which they revert to the con-
sciousness and behavior of normal dogs.
Much of the narrative focuses on Cleo’s growing friendship with the
dogs, and especially with Ludwig von Sacher, a bespectacled and melan-
choly German shepherd who is trying to write the history of their race.
Ludwig believes that if he can find the purpose of their lives –why their
creator made them –it can stop the growing insanity to which the dogs
fear they will all succumb. The novel traces Ludwig’s increasing desper-
ation and the measures to which the dogs will go to preserve their own
dignity, alongside Cleo’s growing identification with them and concern
for their plight.
Scholars who specialize in Milton have very likely never read Kirsten
Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs. And readers of this late twentieth-
century fantasy novel would be equally unlikely to make the connection
with Milton. Yet Shelley, and Milton behind her, allow us to see deeper
resonance in the fairy-tale story of highly intelligent, cultured, and seem-
ingly doomed canines. In his desire to know his Creator and the pur-
pose of his life and his race, Ludwig echoes Milton’s postlapsarian Adam:
‘What is our purpose? If we no longer serve the followers of Rank, what
are we here for? To me this is an immediate and urgent question’ (2017:
8). Like Adam, he seeks to know his maker: ‘If only I could understand
the man, if I could smell him, if I could love him, I think I could under-
stand the history of my race –I could understand what he meant by
creating us, what we are’ (2017: 12). As slaves in isolated Rankstadt,
waiting for the return of their god, the dogs ‘knew no other life, but we
were also aware that we had been created for a higher purpose’ (2017:
10). Now that purpose is gone: ‘We have scattered into the world. We no
longer have anything to wait for, and we don’t know what to do with our-
selves, or why we were created’ (2017: 10). Klaue, a Malamute and the
autocratic leader of the dogs, more bluntly describes himself as ‘an ugly
mistake made by a madman […] We didn’t ask to be made’ (2017: 111).
Such words evoke Milton’s despairing Adam: ‘Did I request thee, maker,
from my clay /To mould me man? Did I solicit thee /From darkness to
promote me[?]‌’ (10.743–44).
That Miltonic query also serves as the epigraph to Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. Her agonized Creature asks: ‘Who was I? What was I?
Whence did I come? What was my destination?’ (1818: 89). Having read
Paradise Lost, his questions sharpen: ‘Cursed creator! Why did you form
a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in
pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form
is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its resemblance’ (1818: 91).
Lamenting that ‘no Eve soothed my sorrows, or shared my thoughts; I was
alone’, the Creature remembers ‘Adam’s supplication to his Creator’, and
curses his own Maker, who has abandoned him (1818: 92). He pleads
with Frankenstein: ‘Remember that I am thy Creature. I ought to be thy
Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for
xvi
xvi Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers

no misdeed […] I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.
Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous’ (1818: 68).
Bakis’s fantastical rewriting, through Shelley, of Paradise Lost evinces
the kind of rich and variegated appropriations of Milton by female
authors and artists to which this present volume turns. Ranging widely
in time, place, person, and genre, Women (Re)writing Milton addresses
a considerable scholarly lacuna. Milton scholars, unlike Shakespeareans,
have until very recently remained resistant to exploring appropriations of
his work.1 At the same time, echoes and adaptations of Milton in a wide
range of texts, productions, and artistic works, particularly by women,
often go unrecognized, or, if made explicit, unexplored.2 This volume
finds a cohesive center in Milton and gender, a topic that continues to
attract considerable attention and debate.3
Who are the women rewriting Milton? The women explored in this
volume range in class, time, place, profession, and ethnicity. They are poets,
novelists, literary critics, translators, visual artists, journalists, activists,
film directors, and lay theologians. They write or create in seventeenth-,
eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Britain; in post-civil-war and twenty-
first century America and England; in 1930s wartime Italy and Britain;
in post-war Communist Hungary; in late-nineteenth-century Spain; and
in late twentieth-century Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and
Saudi Arabia. They are scholars and students, gentry, aristocrats, or the
daughter of a freed slave. They are Puritans, Catholics, and Muslims.
They are Milton’s own literary characters.
What Milton do they rewrite? They rewrite Paradise Lost, Comus,
and Milton’s sonnet on his late wife. They draw on Milton’s advocacy
of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, his arguments for freedom
of speech, and his programs of reformation and education. At times it is
the radical, visionary prophet-poet of the Romantics who is rewritten. At
times, it is the dominating father of historical biography. At other times it
is the patriarchal bogey of Virginia Woolf and of Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, arguably themselves rewriters of Milton as they strive to forge
narratives of women’s literary history.4 Other rewriters unlock the dra-
matic potential of Milton’s masque, Comus, or of his epic, Paradise Lost,
itself created in the performative context of the blind poet’s dictation.
How do these women rewrite Milton? They rewrite in image and in text.
By translating or commenting on his poetry. By meditating on Genesis,
on astronomy, or on nature. By quoting or paraphrasing Milton’s text,
or by dropping quotations and replacing them with indirect commen-
tary. By fictionalizing Milton’s life. By creating Eve-figures, Sin-figures,
and Adam-figures. By reworking Miltonic themes, characters, and situ-
ations in science fiction, devotional poetry, meditative verse epic, fictional
biography, and novels. By illustrating Paradise Lost in delicate water-
color paintings, wood-engravings, or outdoor installation art. By staging
productions of Miltonic or Miltonic-derived texts or by hosting all-day
marathon readings of Paradise Lost.
xvi
Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers xvii

Surprisingly, Eve and other characters become Milton’s first rewriters.
Essays here trace how Lucy Hutchinson’s Eve breaks out from the strictures
of meditation and of Genesis as she laments, co-parents with Adam, and
exerts her matriarchal authority by naming her sons; or how, in Beatriz
Bracher’s 2015 novel, Anatomia do Paraíso (Anatomy of Paradise), Sin
and Eve metamorphize first through the graduate student Felix, who uses
Milton’s Sin to structure his sexual experience, and then through the
defiant single-motherhood of a second Eve-like protagonist, Vanda.
Other Miltonic characters and even his female family members gain
new authority in modern-day rewritings. In her 2001 novel, Angel of Ruin,
Australian writer Kim Wilkins imagines that it is, the ‘good daughter’,
Deborah herself, who rewrites Paradise Lost to rescue Milton himself
from a demonic inspiration of which only she (and not he) is aware.
Female directors of two twenty-first century productions of Milton in
the Jacobean theatre at London’s Globe show how a ‘proto-feminist’
Milton can emerge when explored theatrically. A 2016–2017 production
of Comus, directed by Lucy Bailey, presents a Lady who moves away
from debates about chastity to become a figure for freedom of will and
self-determination. A 2018 staged reading of Paradise Lost, rewritten as
a five-act play and directed by Farah Karim-Cooper and Emma Whipday,
deliberately foregrounds an independent Eve and, in a framing narrative,
gives Milton’s daughters a role in the poem’s genesis. A marathon reading
of Paradise Lost at the University of Southern Mississippi (2019), which
brings together faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, community
members, and a librarian and follows the principle that Milton teaches
people how to read his text aloud, arguably allows Milton to rewrite
himself.
Why do these women rewrite Milton? Some take an oppositional
stance toward Milton, challenging and correcting a masculinist ethos.
Essays in this volume explore how recent feminist revisions of Jungian
theory can find ‘feminine’ qualities of Paradise Lost not as inferior but
as part of the important union of opposites but equals; or how queer
Eve provides an opening into the text for women who feel excluded by
its patriarchal ethos. In the late seventeenth century, Samuel Hartlib’s
editorial interventions when publishing the correspondence between
Dorothy Moore Dury, John Dury, and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh,
revises Miltonic ideas of conversation to open up more space for educated
women. Writing in the religious and social context of late nineteenth-
century Spain, literary critic Emilia Pardo Bazán is admittedly unsym-
pathetic to what she sees as Milton’s intolerant Puritanism and gender
strictures drawn from his own unhappy marriage; but Pardo Bazán none-
theless places Milton alongside the Catholic Dante, Tasso, and other epic
writers as part of an emerging world literature canon.
Other women enlist Milton as an ally, suggesting that Milton was
a true poet and of Eve’s party without knowing it. Victorian botanical
illustrator Jane Elizabeth Giraud discovers in Milton a feminine ethics
xvii
xviii Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers

of care through her delicate water- color paintings of the flowers of
Paradise Lost. In translating Milton’s sonnet on his late espoused saint,
mid- twentieth-
century Hungarian poet Ágnes Nemes Nagy, silenced
by the Communist regime, shows a passionate, private female voice at
odds with her published poetry and frames her own terminal illness and
approaching death. Mary Shelley contrasts the overreaching and solip-
sistic Victor Frankenstein to Milton’s Adam, critiquing the individualism
of male Romantic writers by showing how Victor thwarts Elizabeth as a
confidante and true companion.
Other women rewrite or stage Milton to render the radical implications
of his text more visible. Three eighteenth-century women poets, Elizabeth
Singer Rowe, Elizabeth Carter, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, adapt and
modernize Milton’s description of the heavens, rewriting the devotional
sublime as a way of asserting poetic authority from within the private
sphere. American artist Carlotta Petrina’s drawings and English artist
Mary Elizabeth Groom’s wood engravings of key scenes in Paradise Lost
rival Henry Fuseli and William Blake in their revisionary power.
Translation and fictional rewritings of Miltonic characters allow
female authors to comment indirectly on present-day social, cultural,
and political issues. Petrina, working in Italy in the mid-1930s under the
shadow of Hitler and Mussolini, brings out scenes of existentialist terror
and sadness. Groom, illustrating Milton in war-time England, offers a
strong and mutually supportive Adam and Eve and an androgynous mer-
ciful God. A number of modern-day female Arab writers redefine the
feminine in general and Eve in particular. In her novel Innocence of the
Devil, Egyptian writer Nawal El-Saadawi critiques the widespread asso-
ciation of the feminine and the demonic, drawn from the story of the
fall; Joumana Haddad, Lebanese poet, journalist, feminist author, and
activist, fictionalizes and celebrates the rebellion of Lilith; in Dancing on
Arrowheads, Saudi writer Rehab Abuzaid creates an Eve figure (the pro-
tagonist Al-Batool), who echoes and rewrites Milton’s Eve as she embarks
on a journey toward independence, enabling Abuzaid to address sensitive
political and social concerns.
As women rewrite Milton, they appropriate his cultural status to
fashion themselves and their own literary or artistic authority. Some do
so by recreating the experience of Milton’s poetry. In her 1991 installa-
tion art, Snake Pit, Alexis Smith creates not an image or series of images
but a literal journey through the campus of the University of California,
San Diego. Some use Milton to fashion others. African-American writer
Josephine Brown deploys indirect allusion to Milton to show the epic
poet as secondary in stature to her father, William Wells Brown, fugitive,
self-educated slave and prominent antislavery spokesman, in the cause of
liberty.
In rewriting Shelley, Kirsten Bakis rewrites Milton, and her Lives of
the Monster Dogs reaches back to some of the most influential aspects
of Paradise Lost. The monster dogs crave human society, but they are
xi
Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers xix

inevitably cut off. Theirs is a late twentieth-century version of Satan’s
damnation in a world in which there is no hell. Like Satan (and like Mary
Shelley’s Creature), they can see the Garden of Eden: they can even live
there, but each is ultimately isolated and alone. The mad and sadistic
scientist, Augustus Rank, emotionally stunted by a miserable childhood,
the early loss of his mother, the indifference of his father, and rejection by
the woman he loves, turns to create a race of dogs who will uncondition-
ally love him alone. Indeed, Rank evokes Shelley’s lonely misfit Creature
as much as Victor Frankenstein, himself a shifting double for Milton’s
Adam, God, and, eventually, Satan. Rank calls attention to Frankenstein
as a dark double of the Creature he rejects and condemns. Does the doub-
ling also call attention to doubling between Milton’s God and Lucifer/
Satan?
As with some of the writers and artists discussed in this volume, Bakis
foregrounds Miltonic domesticity, loneliness, sympathy, and connectivity;
the novel brings the reader to question and doubt the nature, wisdom, and
justice of the creator and to empathize with the outcast. As for Ludwig, he
desperately tries to find a connection with his maker, to piece together the
spirit that might help the dogs retain their human consciousness. Ludwig
rejects despair for a philosophy of connectivity and tries to reach out to
Cleo, the human friend with whom he has fallen in love. His quest to
forge a connection with his maker and to find a companion to remedy his
loneliness is deeply Adamic, evincing the humanity that even Cleo does
not fully recognize.
Contributors to this present, groundbreaking volume do not speak
with one voice. Rather, like the female authors and artists whom they
explore, they evince a variety of stances. Bringing new female figures, new
subjects, and new approaches to the study of Milton, they foreground
appropriation and gender in fresh and provocative ways that warrant fur-
ther pursuit. Will scholars of Milton someday attend not only to Homer,
Virgil, Dante, Lucan, and Spenser, but also to adaptations by Beatrice
Bracht, Elizabeth Rowe, Josephine Brown, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Emilia
Pardo Bazán, Rehab Abuzaid, and Kim Wilkins? The present volume
holds out the promise that it might well be possible to teach old dogs
new tricks. Speaking of which, as to whether or not the German shep-
herd, Ludwig, ever finds his soulmate –or his god –in Bakis’s Lives of the
Monster Dogs, you will just have to read the novel to find out.
Notes
1 See the case set out in Laura L. Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza,
Milton in Popular Culture (2006). Some of the most innovative approaches to
adaptations of Milton have come within the past five or so years. See Reginald
A. Wilburn, Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriations of Milton
in Early American African Literature (2014); Eric C. Brown, Milton on Film
(2015); David Currell and François-Xavier Gleyson (eds), Reading Milton
x
xx Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers

through Islam (2018); Islam Issa, Milton in the Arab-Muslim World (2017);
Angelica Duran, Islam Issa, and Jonathan R. Olson (eds), Milton in Translation
(2017); Angelica Duran and Elizabeth Sauer (eds), ‘Milton in the Americas’,
Milton Studies 58 (2017); Queer Milton, ed. by David Orvis (2018); and
Angelica Duran, Milton Among Spaniards (2020).
2 On Milton and seventeenth-and eighteenth- century women, see Joseph
Wittreich, Feminist Milton (1987) and Shannon Miller, Engendering the Fall:
Milton and Seventeenth-Century Woman Writers (2008).
3 On Milton and gender, see Catherine Gimelli Martin (ed.), Milton and Gender
(2004); and Laura L. Knoppers, ‘Gender and the Public Sphere in Habermas
and Milton: New Critical Directions’ (2014).
4 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1981, first published 1929); Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women
Readers’, in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and The
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2020; first published 1979), pp. 213–
47. Gilbert and Gubar’s much-reprinted work still dominates conversation on
Milton and Shelley, although for differing views, see Lucy Newlyn, Paradise
Lost and the Romantic Reader (1993: 133–39); Ana Acosta, ‘Frankenstein; or,
L’Education des habitants d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes’ (2016: 159–62);
Laura L. Knoppers, ‘Miltonic Loneliness and Monstrous Desire from Paradise
Lost to Bride of Frankenstein’ (2006: 99–112); and Lauren Shohet, ‘Reading
Milton in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (2018). See also Mandy Green in this
volume.
xxi
Acknowledgments
First, we would like to offer our grateful thanks to Laura Knoppers and
Mary Nyquist who have both generously supported this project, offering
advice and encouragement, and to Laura, especially, for contributing such
a lively and genuinely illuminating Foreword, seeing so well the shape
and structure of the book. We would also like to express heartfelt thanks
to Mary Nyquist and Julie Crane for their attentive and close reading
of the entire manuscript in draft and their thoughtful recommendations.
Our warm thanks, too, go to Mark Sandy, a colleague at Durham
University, who was ever ready to share his considerable experience in
editing volumes of collected essays.
Lastly, we would like to thank our contributors who, despite the many
difficulties that beset them this year (2020), worked together to make
this volume possible. Given the scale and severity of the pandemic that
touched all our lives, we were struck that a group of individuals with
widely differing viewpoints, separated by space and time zones, came
together as a community of readers and writers. As editors, we have been
closely involved in the process of ‘rewriting’ that these essays have inev-
itably undergone in readiness for print. This said, we would like to make
it clear that, although the views expressed by our contributors do not
always coincide with our own, we are fully appreciative of the way each
voice included here has enriched the conversation.
I would like to thank my father, Dr. Sameer Al-Akhras, for always

believing in me. He was a man who valued education like no other. Had
it not been for him, this book would not have come to light. He would
have been so proud.
I would also like to thank my husband, Dr. Alexander Webb. He is a
physicist who does not know much about Milton, but he, nonetheless,
always would lend a listening ear.
Sharihan Al-Akhras
xx
ii
newgenprepdf
A Note on the Text
The text of Paradise Lost used throughout this volume of essays is taken
from the Oxford World’s Classics edition, edited by Stephen Orgel and
Jonathan Goldberg (reissued 2008). All quotations from the poem will be
noted parenthetically in the text.
Unless otherwise indicated, all other references to Milton’s poetry
and prose are taken from the Riverside Milton (1998), edited by Roy
Flannagan, abbreviated as R and noted parenthetically in the text.
1
Introduction
A Life Beyond Life: Milton’s Afterlives
I
In the Areopagitica, Milton defined ‘a good Booke’ as ‘the pretious life-
blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life
beyond life’ (R 999). The afterlife of Milton was assured by the con-
tinuing survival of his literary corpus, animated by his own powerful
authorial presence.1 But ‘a life beyond life’ is pre-eminently the legacy of
Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost, which has caught, held, and sustained
the imagination of generations of readers and has been reimagined in
countless works of creative artists over the past three centuries. It is with
Paradise Lost that Milton most fully realised his life’s ambition, outlined
over twenty-five years before the publication of his great epic. The preface
to the second book of Reason of Church Government (1642) was, in
effect, a literary manifesto in which Milton publicly announced his inten-
tion to produce for his own nation a work to stand the test of time:
‘so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die’ (R 922).
Milton determined to write a work in English that he trusted his own
nation would keep alive, though in so doing, he had to reconcile him-
self to restricting his reputation to his native land, resolving to rest con-
tent with a more limited sphere of influence than writing in Latin would
have offered at that time: ‘not caring to be once nam’d abroad, though
perhaps I could attaine to that, but content with these British Ilands as
my world’ (R 923). The wistful concessive clause underwrites Milton’s
belief that by writing in English he would forego the opportunity to reach
an international audience. Today, Paradise Lost reaches an impressively
wide general readership, as well as an academic audience, within and
beyond the Anglosphere, on a scale that Milton himself could never have
envisaged after resigning himself to a ‘fit audience … though few’ (7.31).2
Our critical collection of essays testifies to Milton’s global reach.3
Milton matters.4 Rather than a ‘monument to dead ideas’ (Raleigh 1900:
89), Paradise Lost is instead alive to urgent and vital issues that engage its
present-day readers: from preserving personal and political liberty to the
work–life balance, from the boundless cosmic space that surrounds us to
our relationship with our own planet. Paradise Lost represents love, con-
versation, and companionship as the highest good and encapsulates the
possibility of relationships that are not limited by gender, where partners
2
2 Mandy Green and Sharihan Al-Akhras

‘Can either sex assume or both’ (1.424). It should come as no surprise
that the author of Areopagitica composed a poem which promotes a plur-
ality of perspectives. As recent criticism has come to recognise, Milton’s
plural and inclusive vision assigns to its readers responsibility for making
interpretative choices that arise out of, as Annabel Patterson put it, ‘a
welter of conflicting textual directions’ (1993: 272).
Over the last fifty years or so, one of the liveliest debates in Milton
studies has centred upon Milton’s attitude to women.5 The first marriage
naturally formed the disputed territory on which to mount an attack or
defend Milton against the charge of misogyny,6 or, at least, of what has
often been held to be an offensively patriarchal rendering of gender diffe-
rence. There is no denying the ‘stridently masculinist’ tone that Mary
Nyquist detected in the lines that notoriously proclaim the placing of the
first man and woman in a hierarchical relationship of greater and lesser,
superior and inferior (1988: 107).7 This observation had been adumbrated
by assumptions harboured about Milton the man: the enduring impres-
sion of Milton’s daughters, constrained against their will either to read
aloud to their blind father in languages they did not understand or take
dictation from him, stubbornly persists.8
Much critical ink has been spilled on Milton’s attitude to women, but
what about Milton’s female readers –how do they respond to Milton?
One of the most famous and evocative meetings between Milton and a
female reader is intriguingly fleeting: in a passage of accumulating con-
ditional clauses, Virginia Woolf takes notice of Milton as a figure who
must be overlooked in order that the female writer, a free-spirited and
sinuously androgynous creature who is ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, can finally
emerge:
if we live another century or so […] if we have the habit of freedom

and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little
from the common sitting-room […] if we look past Milton’s bogey,
for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact […]
that there is no arm to cling to […] then the opportunity will come
and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body
which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of
the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before
her, she will be born.
(1942: 171–72)
The sweeping sentence presses on, caught up in, and energised by, its own
gathering sense of hopeful possibility for future times. The only named
authors within its ambit are Shakespeare and Milton. Shakespeare is
invoked, as he is in the work throughout, as a generously nurturing presence
with whose imagination Woolf can engage, but with Milton it is other-
wise. Milton is a haunting and oppressive ‘bogey’, a threatening spectre
who would stand between Woolf and us and that enticing panorama of
3
Introduction 3
possibility. Indeed, the sideward glance to Milton impedes the very flow
of Woolf’s passage: that aside, ‘for no human being should shut out the
view’, acts as an awkward interruption to its own forward momentum.
But, awkward as Woolf’s phrasing is, it has proved an enduring image to
which female critics especially have repeatedly returned.9
Our volume opens up crucially different perspectives on Milton and
his works by foregrounding how they are seen by a community of female
readers and writers. From this vantage point, Milton is no longer a figure
to skirt past with trepidation or unease, but to be met with on different
ground, so that the encounter may be more confrontational or conversa-
tional. Though not exclusively so, it is Milton as a more enabling figure
rather than a deterring spectre that many of the chapters in our critical
collection are concerned to address. Our collection takes the reader on
a journey of discovery and recovery which permits a richer, more com-
plex grasp of the reception history of Milton’s literary bequest, his poetry
and prose, and Paradise Lost in particular. Unsurprisingly, many of the
writers and artists represented here return to Paradise Lost, and espe-
cially to the figure of Eve, who speaks some of Milton’s loveliest lines
and utters some of the epic’s most compelling arguments, and who has,
in recent times, supplanted Satan as the focus of readers’ interests. This
shift in critical focus has halted the obsessive concentration on the role of
Satan, which has persisted since the Romantic period. Now recognised to
be the most protean and complex character, Eve has finally come into her
own as Milton’s true epic hero.
Our volume consists of fifteen essays that fall naturally into identi-
fiable categories: the chapters in each of these three parts are discrete,
but thematically as well as chronologically interrelated. Part I focuses on
early responses to Milton’s writing by English women authors. Taking
up wider questions of Milton’s reception, the two subsections that com-
prise Part II range in time from the eighteenth century to the present, and
radiate outward from England to Europe, and then beyond to encom-
pass responses from African-American and Australian women writers,
alongside reactions from North and South America and the Arab world.
Part III is similarly comprised of two subsections. The first section offers
insights into Milton through a series of feminist re- readings of the
author and his writings which have shaped the work of three female
academics, two of whom are writing within Milton studies while the
third has evolved an interdisciplinary approach, deploying a Jungian-
inflected psychoanalytic reading to open up a fresh perspective on the
presentation of Eve. The final section focuses on female practitioners
and adopts an intermedial perspective on twentieth and twenty-first cen-
tury re-appropriations of Milton’s early modern epic. Of interest here is
how Milton’s Paradise Lost has especially influenced women working
in a range of media and performance activities, including an all-day
reading of the poem, the visual arts, and theatre, contextualised in terms
of current feminist criticism.
4
II
The first two chapters in Part I uncover notable instances of women’s lit-
erary endeavours that lacked visibility and failed to gain recognition in
early modern England. The first example is Milton’s contemporary, Lucy
Hutchinson, who can arguably claim the distinction of having composed
the first epic poem written by a woman in English. Yet not only were the
first five cantos of Order and Disorder published anonymously in 1679,
just twelve years after Paradise Lost, they continued to be attributed to
her brother Allen Apsley until late into the last century. In contrast with
Milton’s narrative epic, Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder is written
in the meditative genre. In ‘Lucy Hutchinson’s Irrepressible Eve’, the first
chapter of this volume, Allan Drew shows how this generic positioning
moulds Hutchinson’s creation of Eve’s character. For Hutchinson, Drew
explains, Eve is an emblematic figure from whom she can launch rele-
vant meditations, and, as such, demands a much more static and biblic-
ally authentic character. Indeed, Hutchinson explicitly eschews the sort of
poetic invention undertaken by Milton; it is her intention not to deviate
from God’s biblical word. However, as Drew effectively demonstrates,
Hutchinson’s act of building Eve as a static emblem has the contrasting
effect of complicating and enriching Eve’s character. As the meditation
unfolds, the character of Eve proves irrepressible in a poem intended by
its author to constrain her.
While the limited education afforded to Milton’s daughters persists
as a notorious feature of Milton’s ‘legend’ (see Chapters 7 and 10),
Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (‘On the nature of
things’), the first authorised rendering of the complete poem into English,
as well as her poetic accomplishments, reveals a high level of educational
provision for at least some women during Milton’s lifetime, and in the cen-
tury that followed, as the next chapter testifies. In Chapter 2, ‘ “Soaring in
the high reason of her fancies”: The Female Poet and the Cosmic Voyage,
Thomas R. Tyrrell recovers a female literary succession that spans the
eighteenth century in the works of three English women poets, Elizabeth
Singer Rowe (1674– 1737), Elizabeth Carter (1717– 1806) and Anna
Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825), with each poet aware of, and building
on, the achievement of the last. Tyrrell traces these poetic engagements
with the sublime cosmography of John Milton’s poetry and analyses
the way they lay claim to Milton’s universe, expanding and revising it
to suit each female poet’s own devotional needs, as well as accommo-
dating the emergence of Newtonian physics. Although, as John Leonard
has complained, ‘Generations of critics […] impoverished Milton’s stellar
universe by making it fit a Ptolemaic model that was long out of date by
the time Paradise Lost was written’ (2016: 66), this chapter demonstrates
how these three early readers understood Milton’s cosmology to be more
forward-looking than many Milton critics in the twentieth century have
realised. By revisiting their writings, Tyrrell reveals how Milton had a
5
Introduction 5
liberating influence on their work: their poems draw from Paradise Lost
a way of surveying God’s works and asserting the poet’s authority from
within the confines of the private sphere.
Turning to the Romantic Period and its championing of the subjective
and private sphere, the final chapter of this section, ‘ “Two Great Sexes
Animate the World”:10 Looking Past “Milton’s Bogey” in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein’ turns from lesser-known figures to a celebrated novelist. In
Chapter 3, Mandy Green, one of the editors of this volume, re-examines
Mary Shelley’s modern myth, one of the most famous readings of Paradise
Lost to issue from the Romantic Period, though it is worth remembering
that even Frankenstein, her most acclaimed novel, was initially presumed
to be by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley when it was first published
anonymously in 1818. Taking issue with the incandescently provoca-
tive essay by Sandra Gilbert (originally published in 1978), which found
it difficult to look past ‘Milton’s Bogey’, Mandy Green argues that the
foregrounding of conversation, together with the establishment of the
domestic sphere as the vital stage of human activity in Milton’s epic,
allows for a more richly complex insight into its place at the heart of
Mary Shelley’s novel. Shelley emerges here as a more critically responsive
reader of Paradise Lost than had been recognised: by evoking repressed
alternatives through a controlled use of Miltonic allusion, Shelley, like
Milton, offers the reader insights into how things could and should have
been.11 While Mary Shelley generously acknowledged her husband’s col-
laborative support for her own literary endeavours in the Introduction to
the 1831 edition, she also carefully established the limits of their literary
partnership and unequivocally claimed her authorship of the novel.
The two subsections of Part II chart the way an appreciation of Milton
and his works reached beyond ‘the British Isles’ –which he had presumed
would be the limit of his influence –as his poetry begins to take root
and flourish in different cultural and geographic terrains. Chapter 5, ‘The
Return of William Wells Brown: A Heroic Black Miltonist in Elizabeth
Josephine Brown’s Miltonic Biography of Her Father’ institutes a trans-
global project of recovery by Reginald A. Wilburn in which he introduces
readers to works by two black writers, father and daughter, which, prior to
this collection, had not been seen to engage with England’s Christian and
epic poet of liberty, John Milton. The chapter concentrates on Josephine
Brown’s biography of her father, William Wells Brown, the famous fugitive
slave, self-taught antislavery orator, and novelist, whose travel narrative
contained numerous references and allusions to Milton. Having studied
and taught in Europe, Elizabeth Josephine Brown returned to the United
States to discover that both of her father’s autobiographies were no longer
in print. Determined that her father’s name and his own heroic stand for
liberty should be preserved for the future, she skilfully spliced together
portions of her father’s slave narrative, Narrative of William W. Brown
(1847) and his travel narrative, Three Years in Europe (1852), into a
single biographical work. In 1856, the fruits of her voluntary labour were
6

published as Biography of an American Bondman, by His Daughter,
and, in a radically revisionary gesture, her biography concludes with an
address by Wendell Phillips, an early advocate for women’s rights and
staunch abolitionist, which goes so far as to praise Wells Brown’s heroism
at Milton’s expense.
In Chapter 5, Angelica Duran focuses on The Christian Epics (Los
epopeyas cristianos, 1879) and The Christian Epic Poets (Los poetas
épicos cristianos, c. 1895) by the Spanish woman of letters Emilia Pardo
Bazán (1851– 1921), who views Milton with a similarly independent
spirit. Pardo Bazán was herself a Catholic and the collections of essays
chronicle important ways that Spanish elite readers, including at least
one woman, engaged with the epic as a genre and Milton within their
specific religious and social contexts. Duran draws attention to the way,
especially in her latter work, Pardo Bazán asserts the liveliness of the
author-reader relationship, a dynamic enhanced by access to author biog-
raphies. Yet Duran detects a certain ambivalence running through Pardo
Bazán’s response: on the one hand, Pardo Bazán highly values the epic
genre, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, at a time when its popularity
was waning; on the other hand, she openly admits to finding Paradise
Lost’s appeal limited by a lack of universality. As Duran demonstrates,
this is a personal assessment based on Pardo Bazán’s own close readings,
comparisons to other works in the evolving canon of world literature,
and selections from the literary criticism of the transnational republic of
letters in which she situates herself and Spanish letters.
Translation has played a key role in Milton’s transnational and global
reception. The final chapter in this section sheds light on the work of
the female Hungarian poet and literary translator, Ágnes Nemes Nagy
(1922–1991), who challenged three centuries of male-dominated recep-
tion of Milton in Hungary with her translation of Milton’s Sonnet 23,
‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’, the most intensely personal
of all his sonnets. Nagy was one of the leading figures of the Újhold
(New Moon) circle, a semi-formal post-war group of poets and writers
who were sometimes forced to resort to literary translation as the only
possible creative activity under the oppressive cultural policy of state
socialism. In Chapter 6, ‘ “I Am Not ‘Masculine’ I Am Weak”: Ágnes
Nemes Nagy’s Translation of Sonnet 23’, Miklós Péti delineates the
excessively masculinist tendencies in the Hungarian reception of Milton,
in order to consider the importance of Milton’s work in the context of
Nemes Nagy’s career as a poet and a translator, and to contextualise
his close analysis of her translation of Sonnet 23. Péti explores how this
woman poet negotiated her way through the long tradition of ‘serious
and masculine’12 readings of Milton’s works and considers whether her
socio-cultural background, writing during a communist dictatorship,
influenced the text of her translation. Péti also reflects on the way Sonnet
23 remained an enduring presence in her own life and poetry: he points
out how the undated poem Én láttam ezt (‘This I have seen …’) reads as
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soldier, not a consort. Our friend Von Hügelweiler has an evil tongue, and
he has spread cruel slanders about you and the Queen. Evil things win quick
credence in Grimland, and the only way to give them the lie is for you and
Gloria to see nothing of each other at present."
"That is a little rough on a newly-married man."
"Your marriage is nothing. The Grimlander, who is fickleness

personified,—and who would like a change of dynasty once a week,—is
never a Republican. He would not tolerate the idea of his sovereign mating
with a commoner. The only possible chance of such a step being accepted is
for you to do something quite out of the ordinary in this campaign. It will
hardly be wise even then—but we might chance it."
"I believe in fate," said Trafford stubbornly.
"Comfort yourself your own way," said Bernhardt. "I, for my part, wish
you well. There is a dash of the devil about you that wins my best wishes.
But I have no further time to waste discussing your affairs. I am wanted
here, there, and everywhere, and the time is one of war, not of love. Only,
remember my command, my advice if you prefer it; keep your mind fixed
on your military duties, and avoid her gracious Majesty Gloria as you
would the plague."
That night they encamped at Schafers-stadt—a quaint old town lying in

a sunless valley between precipitous hills. Next day they started early,
reaching Wallen, a mountain village within easy striking distance of
Weissheim, shortly after sunset. Here accommodation was somehow found
for the considerable force under Bernhardt's command. Shelter had to be
obtained for all, for to sleep out of doors at such an altitude during the
winter months meant awakening in another world. Food had also to be
provided on a large scale, for the force was what is called a "flying
column"; that is to say, it was proceeding across country in the most direct
line to its objective, and not relying on road or railway for a continuance of
supplies.
The only transport accompanying the force was of a grimmer nature. A

number of pieces of ordnance were being conveyed on flat-bottomed
sleighs, specially constructed for the purpose. And these had to be drawn,
with infinite labour, by men on skis, for the way lay over a countryside
many feet deep in snow, and horses would have been absolutely useless for
such a purpose. Trafford, therefore, was busy on his arrival unearthing
cheeses and loaves, wine-casks and other fascinating objects, from the
cellars of the more or less hospitable Walleners. Whilst so employed he
was, approached by a private of the Guards with a note.
"Come to the big house in the Market Square—the one with the carved
escutcheon over the door—at 6.30, and I will give you dinner.—Gloria R."
"I will write an answer," said Trafford.
"There is no answer, Excellency," said the man, and with a salute he was
gone.
Trafford rubbed his hand thoughtfully up and down the back of his
neck. Bernhardt had been quite definite in his command to him not to see
the Queen, and though the order was little to his liking, he approved its
prudence. But the letter in his hand was also a command, and it came from
a higher source than even Bernhardt's dictum.
Accordingly, at half-past six he presented himself at a big balconied

house in the Market Square. A simple meal was spread for two in the
dining-room,—a low pitched apartment panelled from floor to ceiling in
dark pine, and garnished with a wealth of cumbrous, antique furniture.
He waited alone for a few moments, cheered by a most appetising and

savoury odour of cooking, and then Gloria entered, smiling, cordial,
eminently composed.
"I am so glad you have come," she began.
He took her outstretched hand and kissed it.

"I am a soldier, and I obey," he said.
"When it pleases you," she laughed. "And I hope it does please you to
dine tête-à-tête with me."
"I can conceive no greater felicity."
"None?"
"None," he answered. "I have the excitement of a military campaign,

my eyes are continually feasted with magnificent scenery, and my lungs
with matchless air. Then, on the top of a day of most exhilarating exercise
comes an invitation from the lady who is my wife on paper, and whom I
have sworn to make my wife in the sight of all men."
Gloria looked him fully in the face and pressed a small hand-bell that
reposed on the table at her side.
"Gaspar," she said to the orderly who had entered, "bring in the dinner.
You know that our friend Bernhardt has forbidden us to meet," Gloria
continued, after a dish of yungfernbraten—roast pork and juniper berries—
had been set before them.
"I know," said Trafford, "and he was right."
"Why?"
Trafford hesitated.
"Von Hügelweiler seems to have coupled our names in an unpleasant

manner," he said at length.
Gloria flushed.
"Then you should not have come," she said.
"You gave me no option. As your husband I might have refused. As

your officer I had to obey."
"You might have exercised your discretion."
"I might if I had any," he replied. "But I am a most indiscreet man. To-
morrow, so I understand, I am going into action. I may win fame or I may
be shot through the head. As the latter alternative is not unlikely, I am
anxious to spend what may be my last evening on earth with the one
woman whom I really——"
A forcible ring from Gloria interrupted the sentence's conclusion.
"Gaspar, fill this gentleman's glass. As you were remarking, Captain,

Grimland is a very beautiful country."
"It is a very cold country," Trafford growled, plunging his fork into the
steaming viands.
"To-morrow night I shall be sleeping in my ancestral home—the

Marienkastel," Gloria pursued, as the orderly withdrew. "It is a fine old
place, and Karl forfeited it when my father failed to carry out his projects in
1904."
"That is the place you wish me to win back for you?"
"If you will be so kind?"
"And suppose I am killed in the process, will you think kindly of me?"
"Very."
The callousness of the affirmation horrified him.
"I believe you were right when you said you had no heart!" he cried
indignantly.
"That is what I want you to believe," she returned calmly.
"And that if I am killed," he went on bitterly, "you will welcome the

termination of an impossible situation."
Gloria gave an almost imperceptible shrug.
"You keep harping on death," she protested, "surely you are not afraid?"
He turned fiercely on her, but restrained his voice to a level tone.
"From what you know of me," he asked, "am I the sort of man who is
likely to be afraid?"
"No," she admitted readily. "The night of the revolution you were
heroism personified. Also I have heard of your exploit in Herr Krantz's
wine-shop, and it—it sounded very typical of you."
"Thank you," he said, meeting her gaze; and an instant later, he added:
"There is no such thing as fear in the world for me."
"Why?" she asked.
He answered her question with a reckless bang on the table.
"Because I have lived!" he cried. "If a bullet finds its way to my heart it
will have warm lodging. I am a happy man, and my happiness stands high
above the accidents of life and death. Eternity has no terrors but solitude,
and for me there will never be such a thing as solitude again, because I have
met my second self."
A hand was stretched out towards the bell, but Trafford intercepted it,
and the bell was swept off the table on to the floor.
Gloria rose with flashing eyes.
"I asked you here in a spirit of camaraderie," she said haughtily.

"Because I owe much to you and am conscious of the debt, I risked
angering Bernhardt and smirching my own fair name. But you abuse my
confidence. You know, as I know, that the present is no time for love-
making. And yet——" She stopped abruptly, for Trafford had risen, and,
picking up the bell, he put it on the table before her.
"Ring," he said.
"Can I not trust you?"
"No!" he retorted. "You gave me the right to love you, not by your
promise to go through the ceremony of marriage with me, not by the
fulfilment of that promise, but by a certain light that shone in your eyes for
a few brief seconds in the chapel of the Neptunburg. I am exercising that
right to-night."
She drew in her breath sharply.
"You said just now that I was heartless," she said.
"That is the usual lover's lie," he retorted; "the reproach that is only
justified by its manifest untruth. But I am a gentleman, as you vaguely
surmise, and I will not persist in an attention which is unwelcome to you. I
came to make an appeal. You have but to command, and I will leave
without another word."
"What is the appeal?"
"Do you wish me to make it?" he countered.
"You have said so much you had best go on."
Trafford drew back the curtain of the mullioned window and gazed at
the shining pageantry of the frosty skies. For a full minute he stood gazing,
and then he dropped the tapestry and faced his royal hostess.
"I said I was content with things as they are," he began, "and to a point
that is so, for they are better than they might have been. But with the eye of
faith I see something nobler than this struggle for a kingdom we have no
right to possess. Something has made me wise these past few days:
something has taught me that the love of excitement can be very cruel, and
that the harrying of a brave man is not necessarily a more elevating sport
than bull-baiting."
"You wish me to abandon this expedition against Karl?"

"Oh, it is an absurd, impossible demand, I know," he said, "and I don't
ask you for a moment to consider it. There are a hundred reasons why we
should go on, and there is only one reason why we should not; and that
reason does not seem to weigh with you at all. But I am a madman, a
visionary, and, like Bernhardt, I see things. And in my hallucinations I see a
woman who is Queen, not of Grimland, but of an even more delectable
country. And the woman I see has but one subject, and she is content with
him alone, because her sway over him is so paramount."
Gloria stood very, very still. Only her fingers moved as they plucked the
fur trimming of her dress.
"If I asked you to give up Grimland and fly with me to America, would
you do it?" he cried passionately.
"No—but I should like to hear you ask it." A smile, the slowest smile
that ever was, bent the extreme corners of the fascinating lips, and
ultimately broke in a burst of sunshine illuminating the whole face. Its
arrival found him by her side, his hand on her arm, and a look in his eyes
that sought for something with an almost pathetic intensity.
"I do ask you to come to America with me," he said. "Will you come—
come to New York, the great, bright city, where the people do not do the
horrible things they do in Grimland and other out-of-the-way corners of
Europe?" He waited a moment, and then added: "Of course, we shall always
keep this beautiful country in our hearts—a land of rocky spires and
splintered crags, a land of swelling snow-fields and amazingly blue skies; a
land where the air is sweet and keen and pine-laden, and the face of Nature
stands bold and true, crisp-cut from the chisel of the Master-mason."
There was no answer. His hand trembled on her arm like a vibrant note
of interrogation; his eyes strained to catch the light he longed for, the light
he had seen, or fancied he had seen, in the gloom of the Chapel Royal.
"Will you come?" he breathed; and for a pregnant second the world of
things material rolled back from his consciousness, and left him standing
alone in space with his fate. For the strange brain was playing tricks with
him,—as big, uncontrolled brains do with impulsive, ill-balanced people.
His five senses were in abeyance, or warped beyond all present usefulness.
He saw a pair of eyes as points of light in a world of darkness, but all sense
of reality had utterly deserted him. He was as he had been in the Chapel
Royal when his bride had made her hesitating avowal of a half-passion. A
sheet of flame seemed to be passing through his body, a roseate glow
suffused his vision; he never realised that he was uttering a beloved name in
a voice of thunder and grasping a beloved object with no little strength. But
ecstatic entrancements, however subliminal, yield ultimately to rude
physical shocks, and dimly and slowly the world of dreams vanished and he
became conscious that someone was hitting him violently on the back.
Turning round with half-dazed eyes, he found himself confronted with the
stern lineaments of Father Bernhardt. The ex-priest, clad in a military
overcoat and high leggings, and powdered with still unmelted snow, carried
mingled wrath and astonishment in his countenance.
"Sunde und Siechheit!" he cried. "Are you, too, an absintheur, Captain

Trafford?"
For the moment Trafford had not the vaguest idea what an absintheur
might be, but he replied vaguely in the negative.
Bernhardt uttered an oath.
"I called you three times by name," he said, "and I struck you three
times on the back before you would condescend to pay me any attention."
"I apologise," said Trafford; "I was thinking of other things."
"You were in a delirium," retorted Bernhardt. "The fiend of Tobit——"
"Oh, hang the fiend of Tobit!" interrupted Trafford hotly. "I may be a
lunatic, Bernhardt, but I'm a healthy-minded lunatic, if there is such a thing.
I was making love, and we'll leave it at that, if you please, and drop all talk
of delirium and fiends."
"I was finding an excuse for you."

"I don't need one, thank you." Trafford, as is the way with interrupted
lovers, was in an irritable mood, and being so did not notice that Bernhardt
was really angry.
"Indeed you do!" retorted the ex-priest. "I forbade you expressly to see
the Queen, and I find you dining alone with her, and making violent love to
her in addition."
"I received a command to dine."
"And a command to make love?" sneered Bernhardt.
"That is my affair."
Bernhardt turned from the irate American to the confused Gloria, and
there was little deference in his regard.
"Your Majesty does not value your reputation too highly," he said. "As
long as you play at being a maid it is as well to act like a maid."
"My reputation can look after itself," she retorted with dignity.
"We are five thousand feet above sea level," put in Trafford, "and at
least two thousand above the level of perpetual convention. What was a
wise precaution at Weidenbruck becomes sheer timidity at Wallen. But if
you still think my presence is infectious to the Queen's honour, I will
withdraw. The question I came to ask has been answered, and answered
well."
Bernhardt turned a pair of piercing eyes on the intrepid American.

Trafford met the look without flinching.
"You are a very strange person, Herr Trafford," said the ex-priest
slowly; "you are not afraid of me. I believe you and Saunders are the only
two men in Grimland who are capable of standing up to me in my wrath.
But tell me before you go, what was this question you put and what was its
answer."
"I asked her Majesty if she wished to continue this expedition against
Karl, and she answered, 'No.'"
"She answered 'No!'" Bernhardt gasped.
"If you do not believe me, ask her yourself."
Again Bernhardt turned to the young Queen.
"Is it true?" he demanded.
Gloria passed her hand across her forehead, as if she was just recovering
from a condition of unconsciousness. When she spoke it was in jerky,
consequent sentences.
"Karl is a brave man; he is not a bad man. It is cruel to harry people—

loyal, brave people. He is the lawful sovereign of Grimland. I don't wish to
cause suffering. I——"
"There speaks a Schattenberg!" interrupted Bernhardt with a mocking

laugh. "The man who killed your father is entrenched within two leagues of
you. Your house, the historic Marienkastel, home of the Schattenbergs for
centuries, is his appanage. You have six thousand men at your back to win
you back your heritage; but the old, heroic fire is burning low, the fierce old
blood is running thin—the Schattenbergs are bred out!"
The man's calculated scorn, his splendid insolence, filled Trafford with
admiration; and it was plain that his caustic speech was not without its
effect on the sensitive Gloria. She seemed to be emerging from a stupor
which still drugged her senses.
"I would like the Marienkastel," she conceded; "it is the home of my
childhood; its walls are very dear to me. It should be mine by right."
"Say rather by might," retorted Bernhardt. "You like the Marienkastel,

but you do not like the withering fire that decimates the storming party. Its
walls are dear to you, but the forlorn hope, the scaling ladders, and the
petard are abhorrent to your soul. You wish to possess, but the strong man
armed is too forbidding a person to be ousted."
"If the expedition were against the Marienkastel——"
"It is against the Marienkastel," interrupted Bernhardt. "The

Marienkastel is the key to the whole town. If we can hold it for half an hour
we can dictate what terms we like."
"Dictate what terms we like!" Gloria repeated the last words of his
sentence with eyes aflame. She was a Schattenberg again, ardent, ambitious,
reckless. All trace of weakness had left her.
"And can we take it—can we hold it?" she went on in tones of eager
inquiry.
Bernhardt stretched out his hand towards Trafford.
"There is the answer to your question," he said.
"You will capture the Marienkastel for me?" she asked, turning to her
silent lover.
Trafford looked at the girl before him long and searchingly before
answering.
"The Marienkastel is the key to Weissheim," he said at length; "it is

also, it appears, the key to your heart. I thought there was a nearer way,—a
better way. Yes," he went on, "I will capture the Marienkastel, or do all that
a man can do to capture it, and then I will claim my reward."
"You shall have it," said Bernhardt; "I swear it."
"And I promise..." breathed Gloria.
Trafford nodded to himself.
"I am content," he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE OPENING BARS
Mr. and Mrs. Saunders were having breakfast together in the pretty
stone villa they had built for themselves at Weissheim, overlooking the
Nonnensee. The view of the mountains beyond the lake, the exquisite
expanse of snow, growing into sparkling life under the touch of the rising
sun, furnished a prospect of sufficiently absorbing grandeur. But Saunders'
eyes wandered only from an omelette aux fines herbes to a belated copy of
the Morning Post. English newspapers had been scarce since the cutting of
the railway, and the present specimen had reached its destination by a
roundabout way through Vienna, and had cost exactly tenpence.
"What is the Government doing?" asked Mrs. Saunders, who took an

interest in home politics.
"I don't know. When I am in this delightfully disorganised country the

mild animosities of English party strife fill me with contempt. I was reading
the 'Births, deaths, and marriages' just to prove to myself that there are
natural tragedies and romances, even in the decently regulated areas of
Bayswater and Mayfair."
"Is anyone we know mentioned?"
"By Jove!" ejaculated Saunders after a pause.
"Well?"
"By Jove!"
"Please go on, Robert," said Mrs. Saunders with pardonable impatience.

"Angela Knox, that American girl, is——"
"Well?"
"Is going to marry a grouse moor."
"Pray be explicit."
"Glengourlie—a little man in the Scots Guards. Eldest son of the

Marquis of Stratheerie; ten thousand a year and the best half of Inverness-
shire."
Mrs. Saunders received this startling information with composure.
"She'll make a handsome peeress," was her comment.
"What about George Trafford?" asked her husband.
"Grimland is a country of short memories and swift changes," said Mrs.

Saunders. "It converted you from a blasé bachelor to a happy husband; and
it has converted George Trafford from a broken-hearted desperado to a
lover of an usurping queen."
"Do you believe Von Hügelweiler's tale?" asked Saunders in surprise.
"Yes, and no; I believe George has undoubtedly been fascinated by

Gloria. With her beauty, high spirit, and fearless temperament, she was
bound to attract him. Fresh from a recent disappointment—and lacking as
he is at all times in all sense of proportion—he is quite capable of
demanding her hand in marriage. But Gloria,—though she would like him
well enough as a friend,—would not dream of stultifying herself by
marrying a plain American; still less would she stoop to the depths Von
Hügelweiler hinted at."
"I am sorry about it all," said Saunders. "Nervy, with all his faults, is a
lovable sort of scoundrel, and he had a pretty severe knock over l'affaire
Angela. If Gloria is fooling him for her own purposes—as seems more than
certain—it will leave him, spiritually and mentally, in a condition of pulp."
"You mean——"
"Oh, not exactly; for one thing, he's mad already. He's like a man on a
free-wheel bicycle without a brake—all right on the level, but in the deuce
of a fix if he begins to go downhill."
Mrs. Saunders looked thoughtful.
"There is a possibility that he may never live to be disillusioned," she

said. "He is said to be accompanying this force against us, and he is not the
sort of person to cultivate the art of taking cover. However, things will be
settled one way or the other soon."
"Very soon," Saunders agreed. "Meyer's scouts report that the enemy
encamped last night at Wallen; and they don't waste time there. Six
thousand able-bodied men in a bracing climate eat a good deal—and Wallen
is a small place with a limited supply of hams and maize. They will be here
to-day or to-morrow."
Mrs. Saunders devoted her attention to the omelette which furnished

their morning meal. She was a lady who had made a point of hiding her
emotions, and the near prospect of her husband being in danger necessitated
a strong effort of control. It was some minutes before she spoke again.
"What are you going to do this morning?" she asked at length. "I should
'curl,' if I were you. You haven't 'sent down' a 'stone' for weeks, and I think a
respite from your military preoccupations would do you good."
Saunders sighed regretfully, and stretched himself.
"There is a competition to-day," he replied; "Major Flannel's Cup, and I

am not in for it. I may watch for a bit, but things are too critical now to
admit of much leisure. You see, I've been told off to hold the Marienkastel,
and our good friends the enemy may send us their visiting-cards at any
minute."
"And can you hold the Marienkastel?" asked Mrs. Saunders.

Saunders smiled.
"I can hold it for a couple of hours," he replied, "which is all that Meyer
requires of me. We are to put as many of the enemy out of action as we can,
and then yield possession with a bad grace. After that we have a little
surprise for them: a couple of concealed mortars, which will blow the
historic old fabric and those inside it into several thousand fragments."
Mrs. Saunders suppressed a shudder.
"And are they sure to attack the Marienkastel?" she asked.
"Absolutely certain," he replied, "if they know the rudiments of military

science. Besides, there are sentimental reasons for their doing so, for the old
Schloss is the ancestral home of the Schattenbergs."
Mrs. Saunders was silent for a moment; then she spoke, hesitatingly, but
with a forced calm.
"And will your position—be a very dangerous one?" she asked.
"Fairly so," he replied lightly. "You see, we shall have to bear the brunt
of the main attack, and we shall hang on as long as we can. But it is in the
evacuation that we shall probably lose most heavily."
Mrs. Saunders nodded sagely.
"And it is in the subsequent bombardment that the enemy will suffer

most severely?" she inquired.
"Precisely. It will mean turning the fine old place into a shambles, but
we must strike hard or not at all; and Karl's blood is up, as it was in 1904."
A deep, vibrant "boom" broke on their ears, and died with long-drawn
echoes amid the encircling mountains.
"The enemy have sent their visiting-card!" said Mrs. Saunders.

Saunders rose, and stepped hurriedly out of the long window on to the
balcony, his wife following. The former produced a pair of field-glasses,
and critically regarded a puff of smoke that hung motionless in the still
morning air to the extreme left of the panorama.
"Four-inch Creusot," he said laconically; "that means that redoubt A has

found something to practise at—a feint attack, probably. I must go to my
post in the Marienkastel. They'll have worked round there in a couple of
hours, and then the serious business will begin."
Another sounding roar came pealing along the hillsides, and then a
veritable concert, as the other iron mouths took up the harsh music and
shook the thin air with their stern melody.
From where they stood the actual operations of the attack were invisible
by reason of the pine woods that clothed the plain in that direction. But
there was much to see from the commanding site occupied by the Saunders'
villa. The town itself,—with its circle of improvised forts,—lay
considerably below them to the left. Companies of soldiers were plainly
discernible defiling to the various points of defence assigned to them, and
the blare of bugles rang shrilly through the strident chorus of the distant
cannon. It was plain that the greatest activity prevailed, but an activity well-
ordered, thought-out, and purposeful.
Meyer,—with all his unsoldierly distaste for personal danger,—was

almost perfect as the general of a threatened city. Every detail had been
thought out, every unit of the defence was ready at a moment's notice to
take his appointed place.
Saunders turned his sweeping gaze to the right, and it lighted upon the
private curling-rink belonging to Major Flannel's villa. He smiled, for the
contest for the Flannel Cup had already begun, and was going on heedless
of the stern symphony that was making the valleys echo with bursts of
shattering sound.
A curling competition demands a whole-hearted absorption from its

votaries, and takes little heed of battle, murder, and sudden death, provided
the ice is keen and in good order.
"What are you smiling at?" demanded Mrs. Saunders.
"British sense of proportion," he replied, and as he spoke a man on skis

approached from the street below and called on him by name.
"Orders from the General, Excellency!"
Saunders took the note. It was a hurried scrawl in Meyer's handwriting:
"Proceed instantly on receipt of this to the Marienkastel. Hang on till

they get within a hundred yards, then bolt for the abatis in the new
cemetery!" Saunders read it aloud, and then turned to his wife.
"Farewell, dearest," he said simply. "When I have gone make your way
to the Pariserhof. You will be perfectly safe there."
Mrs. Saunders hung speechless a moment in her husband's embrace.

When she spoke it was apologetically, as one demanding a difficult favour.
"Robert," she pleaded, "should I be a great nuisance in the

Marienkastel? I could tend the wounded—I might even——"
"To-day is a day of obedience and discipline," he interrupted with firm

kindness. "I am ordered to the Marienkastel, you to the Pariserhof. Yours is
the post of anxiety, mine of excitement. Man is selfish and woman patient
—and so the latter always has to bear the crueller burden."
She bit her lip and nodded, and released herself from his embrace.
Strong arms handed him his rifle, and cool, steady hands fastened the
cartridge-belt around his waist.
"You know Karl entreated you not to take part in this stupid war," she
said with the suspicion of a break in her voice. "Was it kind to me to refuse
him?"
"It was infernally cruel," he replied. "Necessity generally is."
Again she nodded thoughtfully. He was right; he was bound to help

Karl, but it needed a brave woman to admit the necessity. But Mrs.
Saunders was no ordinary woman, and for a minute her hazel eyes fought
hard and not unsuccessfully against the hot, pent stream that battled for an
exit. For a moment she fought the unequal fight; then nature gained the day.
The tears won through, and the strong, supple form became a clinging
thing of naked grief.
Saunders pressed the bowed head tenderly against his bosom, and
intertwined his fingers lovingly in her hair.
"Good-bye, best beloved," he said. "And whatever comes, defeat or

victory, the thrill of triumph or the darkness that is death, there will only be
one vision before me—the cool, grey eyes that looked into my soul and
found something there not wholly unworthy of a woman's love."
"God who gave you to me, protect you," she sobbed, "and teach me to
live through to-day."
And as Saunders strode through the snow to the Marienkastel there was
no fear in his heart; merely a great longing for the reunion which must
come to loyal hearts—here or hereafter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE PARLEY
The Pariserhof, whither Mrs. Saunders betook herself at her husband's

desire, was sufficiently safe, both from its situation and character, to form a
rallying point for non-combatants of both sexes and diverse nationalities.
From its upper stories an excellent view of the hostilities could be obtained,
and in its cellars there was not only efficient shelter from chance missiles,
but a considerable mitigation of the thunder of artillery. The latter
apartments, therefore, were crowded with old ladies and young children,
with a sprinkling of sensitive males who had come to Weissheim to recover
nerve-tone rather than to listen to gun-fire. On the flat roof over the great
dining-hall Mrs. Saunders was standing, field-glasses in hand, surveying the
operations with a steady and critical gaze. Most often her glasses were
directed towards the Marienkastel, against which the forces of the invading
party were being gradually focussed; but no sound passed her lips, neither
did the fine, white fingers that held the field-glasses twitch or tremble in the
least degree. Hers was the curious, irrational pride that prefers to hide its
suffering, though the suffering be doubled by the effort of concealment.
A few adventurous spirits had sallied forth to other points of vantage,

where they could get a better, though less secure, view of the rare spectacle
afforded by the fateful day. But for once the curling-rink and skating-rink
belonging to the hotel were deserted; for once the surface of the ice-runs
was unscarred by the iron runners of innumerable toboggans. Only on
Major Flannel's private rink,—not far from the Marienkastel itself,—the
contest for the Flannel Cup was proceeding as though the day was a day of
sport and not of war. The keenest curlers in Weissheim were there:
"Skipper" Fraser, the sandy Scot, whose perky humour lent such spice and
piquancy to the most tragic moments of the game; Major Flannel himself,
roaring out his commands, reproaches, and encouragements in a voice
which easily made itself heard through the growing din of battle;
Strudwick, the gigantic American, who could always be relied on when a
"knock-out" shot was required; little Hobbs, the Englishman, who sent
down his stones in an unorthodox manner, but always within an inch of
where his "skipper" wanted them, so that a particularly brilliant shot came
to be known, not as a "beauty" or a "daisy," but as a "Jimmy Hobbs."
But all the while Bernhardt had been developing his plans with the
deliberate skill of a born general. He had forced the enemy to unmask the
batteries that guarded the lower part of the town. These he could have
forced at a price, had he willed, for, though cunningly constructed, snow
ramparts are not an effective protection even against rifle fire. But to have
done this would have meant long hours of heavy loss, with the grim
prospect of stern street fighting when the last redoubt yielded to his superior
forces. Could he capture the Marienkastel and establish the few pieces of
artillery he had brought so laboriously with him, the town would be at his
mercy, and he could make,—as he had said,—any terms he wished. By
eleven o'clock the movement against the old Schloss commenced in earnest.
Bernhardt might have brought his guns to bear on the ancient masonry, but
there were sentimental reasons for not reducing the historic pile to a heap of
rubble; nor was he the man to waste time in an artillery duel if the place
could possibly be taken by a coup de main. The Marienkastel must be
restored intact to its rightful owner and peace dictated to the dethroned
monarch before the sun sank to rest behind the western mountains.
So Saunders,—watching the course of operations from a lofty tower,—

perceived imposing bodies of Infantry approaching against him on three
sides. On they came on their skis over the soft snow—Guides in extended
order to the right, Sharpshooters cresting a low bluff to the left, and
throwing up a hasty entrenchment of snow with the evident intention of
holding the hill against any retaliatory turning movement on the part of the
garrison; and in the centre,—clinging to the wooded ground,—came a
powerful force of Guards in their winter fighting garb of white. In the
extreme rear was Gloria with the reserve, guarding the ammunition sleighs
and a battery of field guns.
Between the invaders and the Schloss lay the bob-sleigh run, and
Saunders,—expecting a bombardment of the Marienkastel,—had filled the
track with a strong advance guard of his men. The bob-run made an
excellent trench, and fortunately at this point had but a very slight declivity,
so that the men found no difficulty in retaining their position on its glassy
surface. The track indeed started high up by the Marienkastel, just above
Major Flannel's curling-rink, and began with a tremendously steep S-shaped
curve, known as "The Castle Leap"; then it went straight for a bit and
almost level, then wound round again with gradually increasing steepness,
and so on in a succession of curves and bends till it joined the main road
some thousand feet below, near the hamlet of Riefinsdorf.
But before a shot was fired against the castle a small party was seen
approaching under a white flag. Through his field-glasses Saunders detected
the form of his friend Trafford accompanied by a couple of officers, all on
skis. Instantly Saunders sent out a corresponding party, also under the white
flag. Trafford, having expressed a desire to see the officer commanding the

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Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy

The Liminality of Fairies

The Hawthornden Manuscript of William Fowler and the Jacobean

Women (Re)Writing Milton

To learn more about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/​

Women (Re)Writing Milton

First published 2021

Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/​9780367443047

To My Father, Sameer, who left too soon.

List of Illustrations xii

Introduction: A Life Beyond Life: Milton’s Afterlives 1

1 Lucy Hutchinson’s Irrepressible Eve 17

2 ‘Soaring in the High Region of her Fancies’: The

3 ‘Two Great Sexes Animate the World’: Laying

4 The Return of William Wells Brown: A Heroic Black

5 Emilia Pardo Bazán and Milton’s Spanish Afterlife 91

6 ‘I Am Not “Masculine” I Am Weak’: Ágnes Nemes

7 Milton’s Domestic Life and Tempered Female

8 From Hell to Paradise: Miltonic Presences in Beatriz

9 Milton and Arab Female Authorship in the Age of

10 Beyond Milton’s Daughters: Dorothy Dury, Lady

12 The ‘Paradise Within’: A Post-​Jungian Revisiting of

13 Gendered Reflections on an All-​Day Reading of

14 Other Eyes: Women Artists Rewriting Paradise Lost 230

15 Women Directing Milton: Feminist Stagings of

13.1 All-​day Reading of Paradise Lost at the University of

List of Illustrations xiii

In 1997, Lives of the Monster Dogs, a first novel by young American

Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers xv

xvi Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers

Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers xvii

xviii Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers

Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers xix

xx Foreword by Laura L. Knoppers

I would like to thank my father, Dr. Sameer Al-​Akhras, for always

‘Contributors to this present, ground- breaking volume do not speak

Sharihan Al-Akhras is a journalist who has worked in a number of media

Royalists and Royalism in 17th-Century Literature

To learn more about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9780367443047

12 The ‘Paradise Within’: A Post-Jungian Revisiting of

13 Gendered Reflections on an All-Day Reading of

13.1 All-day Reading of Paradise Lost at the University of

I would like to thank my father, Dr. Sameer Al-Akhras, for always