July 26, 2025 • 14 mins
In this intriguing volume, Elbert Hubbard takes us on an intimate tour through the homes of remarkable women who left their mark on history. Exploring the residences of authors, poets, social reformers, and other esteemed figures, Hubbard delves into how their environments could have shaped their lives and work. This book is a unique blend of biography and insightful commentary on the subjects life and creative output. Featured women include Elizabeth B. Browning, Madame Guyon, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Rosa Bonheur, Madame De Stael, Elizabeth Fry, Mary Lamb, Jane Austen, Empress Josephine and Mary W. Shelley. The volume also features a poignant introduction by Hubbards son, Elbert Hubbard II, penned shortly after his fathers passing. This is Volume 2 in a series of 14 enlightening books.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section nineteen of Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women.
This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Maria Slovagna. Little Journeys
(00:20):
to the Homes of Famous Women by Elbert Hubbard. Jane Austen,
Delaford is a nice place. I can tell you exactly
what I call a nice, old fashioned place, full of comforts,
quite shut in, with great garden walls that are covered
with fruit trees, and such a mulberry tree in the corner.
(00:41):
Then there is a dovecote, some delightful fish ponds, and
a very pretty canal, and everything in short that one
could wish for. And moreover, it's close to the church
and only a quarter of a mile from the turnpike road.
Sense and sensibility. It was at cambrig which England I
met him, a fine intelligent clergyman. He was too. He's
(01:05):
not a varsity man, said my new acquaintance, speaking of
doctor Joseph Parker, the world's greatest preacher. If he were,
he wouldn't do all these preposterous things You know he's
a little like Henry Irving. I ventured, apologetically true, and
what absurd mannerisms did you ever see? The like? Yes,
(01:27):
ones from Yorkshire and the others from Cornwall, and both
are Philistines. He laughed at his little joke, and so
did I, for I always try to be polite. So
I went my way, and as I strolled, it came
to me that my clerical friend was right. A university
course might have taken all the individuality out of these
(01:47):
strong men and made of their genius a purely neutral decoction.
And when I thought further and considered how much learning
has done to banish wisdom, it was a satisfaction to
remember that Shakespeare at Oxford did nothing beyond making the
acquaintance of an innkeeper's wife. It hardly seems possible that
(02:08):
a Harvard degree would have made a stronger man of
Abraham Lincoln, or that Edison, whose brain has wrought greater
changes than that of any other man of the century,
was the loser by not being versed in physics as
taught at Yale. The law of compensation never rests, and
the men who are taught too much from books are
not taught by deity. Most education in the past has
(02:32):
failed to awaken in its subjects a degree of intellectual consciousness.
It is the education that the Jesuits served out to
the Indian. It made him peaceable, but took all dignity
out of him. From a noble red man, he descended
into a dirty engine who signed away his heritage for Rome.
The world's plan of education has mostly been priestly. We
(02:56):
have striven to inculcate trust and reverence. We have cited authorities,
and quoted precedents, and given examples. It was a matter
of memory, while all the time the whole spiritual acreage
was left untilled. A race educated in this way never advances,
save as it is jolted out of its notions by
(03:17):
men with either a sublime ignorance of or an indifference
to what has been done and said. These men are
always called barbarians by their contemporaries. They are jeered and hooted.
They supply much mirth by their eccentricities. After they are dead,
the world sometimes canonizes them and carves on their tombs
(03:37):
the word Savior. Do I then plead the cause of ignorance? Well? Yes,
rather so, A little ignorance is not a dangerous thing.
A man who reads too much, who accumulates too many facts,
gets his mind filled to the point of saturation. Matters
then crystallize, and his head becomes a solid thing that
(03:58):
refuses to let any thing either in or out, and
his soul there is no guest chamber. His only hope
for progress lies in another incarnation. And so a certain
ignorance seems a necessary equipment for the doing of a
great work. To live in a big city and know
what others are doing and saying, to meet the learned
(04:21):
and powerful and hear their sermons and lectures. To view
the unending shelves of vast libraries is to be discouraged
at the start. And thus we find that genius is
essentially a rural, a country product. Salons, soirees, theaters, concerts, lectures,
(04:42):
libraries produce a fine mediocrity that smiles at the right
time and bows when tis proper. But it is well
to bear in mind that George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte Bronte,
and Jane Austen were all country girls with little companionship,
nourished on picked up classics, having a healthy ignorance of
(05:03):
what the world was saying and doing. It is over
a hundred years since Jane Austen lived, but when you
tramp that five miles from Overton, where the railroad station is,
to Steventon, where she was born, it doesn't seem like it.
Rural England does not change much. Great fleecy clouds roll
lazily across the blue overhead, and the hedge grows are
(05:26):
full of twittering birds that you hear but seldom see.
And the pastures contain mild faced cows that look at
you with wide open eyes. Over the stone walls, and
in the towering elm trees that sway their branches in
the breeze, crows hold a noisy caucus. And it comes
to you that the clouds and the blue sky, and
the hedge grows, and the birds and the cows and
(05:48):
the crows are all just as Jane Austen knew them.
No change. These stone walls stood here then, and so
did the low slate roofed barns, and the whitewashed cottages
where the roses clamor over the doors. I paused in
front of one of these snug, homely, handsome, pretty little
cottages and looked at the two exact rows of flowers
(06:10):
that lined the little walk leading from the gate to
cottage door. The pathway was made from coal ashes, and
the flower beds were marked off with pieces of broken
crockery set on edge. Twas an absent minded, impolite thing
to do to stand leaning on a gate and critically
examine the landscape gardening, evidently an overworked woman's gardening at that.
(06:34):
As I leaned there, the door opened and a little
woman with sleeves rolled up appeared. I mumbled an apology,
but before I could articulate it, she held out a
pair of scissors and said, perhaps, sir, you'd like to
clip some of the flowers. The roses over the door
are best. Three children hung to her skirts, peeking round
(06:55):
faces from behind, and quite accidentally disclosing a very neat ankle.
I took the scissors and clipped three splendid jacques minnos
and said it was a beautiful day. She agreed with me,
and added that she was just finishing her churning, and
if i'd wait a minute until the butter came, she'd
give me a drink of buttermilk. I waited without urging,
(07:16):
and got the buttermilk and as the children had come
out from hiding, I was minded to give them a
penny a piece. Two coppers were all I could muster,
so I gave the two boys each a penny and
the little girl a shilling. The mother protested that she
had no change and that a bob was too much
for a little girl like that. But I assumed a
big bonanza air and explained that I was from California,
(07:39):
where the smallest change is a dollar. Go thank the gentleman, Jane.
That's right, Jane Austen, come here and thank me. How
did you know her name was Jane Austen, Jane Austen Humphries.
I didn't know. I only guessed. Then little missus Humphreys
ceased patting the butter and told me that she named
(08:00):
her baby girl for Jane Austen, who used to live
near here a long time ago. Jane Austen was one
of the greatest writers that ever lived. The rector said, so,
the Reverend George Austen preached at Steventon for years and years,
and I should go and see the church, the same
church where he preached and where Jane Austen used to go,
(08:21):
and anything I wanted to know about Jane Austen's books.
The rector could tell me, for he was a wonderful
learned man. Was the rector kiss the gentleman Jane. So
I kissed Jane Austen's round, rosy cheek and stroked the
tousled heads of the boys by way of blessing, and
started for Steventon to interview the rector, who was very wise,
(08:42):
and the clergyman who teaches his people the history of
their neighborhood and tells them of the excellent men and
women who once lived thereabouts, is both wise and good,
and the present rector at Steventon is both. I'm sure
of that. It was a very happy family that lived
in the rectory at Stephen from seventeen hundred seventy five
to eighteen hundred one. There were five boys and two girls.
(09:07):
The younger girl's name was Jane. Between her and James,
the oldest boy, lay a period of twelve years of
three hundred and sixty five days each, not to mention
leap years. The boys were sent away to be educated,
and when they came home at holiday time, they brought
presents for the mother and the girls, and there was
great rejoicing, James was sent to Oxford. The girls were
(09:30):
not sent away to be educated. It was thought hardly
worthwhile than to educate women, and some folks still hold
to that belief. When the boys came home, they were
made to stand by the door jam, and a mark
was placed on the casing with a date, which showed
how much they had grown. And they were catechised as
to their knowledge, and cross questioned, and their books inspected.
(09:54):
And so we find one of the sisters saying once
that she knew all the things her brothers knew, and
besides that she knew all the things she knew herself.
There were plenty of books in the library, and the
girls made use of them. They would read to their father,
because his eyesight was bad. But I cannot help thinking
this is a clever ruse on the part of the
(10:15):
good rector. I do not find that there were any
secrets in that household, or that either mister or Missus
Austin ever said that children should be seen and not heard.
It was a little republic of letters, all their own,
thrown in on themselves, for not many of the yeomanry
thereabouts could read. There was developed a fine spirit of
(10:36):
comradeship among parents and children, brothers and sisters, servants and visitors.
That is a joy to contemplate. Before the days of railroads,
a visitor was more of an institution than he is now.
He stayed longer and was more welcome, and the news
he brought from distant parts was eagerly asked. For nowadays
(10:58):
we know all about everything, all before it happens. For
yellow journalism is so alerted that it discounts futurity. In
the Austin household had lived and died a son of
Warren Hastings. The lad had so won the love of
the Austins that they even spoke of him as their own.
And this bond also linked them to the great outside
(11:19):
world of state craft. The things that elders discussed were
the properties, too, of the children. Then once a year
the bishop came came in knee breeches, hob knelt shoes
and a shovel hat, and the little church was decked
with greens. The bishop came from Paradise. Little Jane used
to think, and once to be polite, she asked him
(11:41):
how all the folks were in heaven. Then the other
children giggled, and the bishop split a whole cup of
tea down the front of his best coat, and coughed
and choked until he was very red in the face.
When Jane was ten years old, there came to live
at the rectory, a daughter of Missus Austen's sister. She
came to them direct from France. Her name was Madame Fenelaide.
(12:05):
She was a widow in only twenty one. Once, when
little Jane overheard one of the brothers say that Monsieur
Fenelaide had kissed Mademoiselle Guillotine, she asked what he meant,
and they would not tell her. Now Madame spoke French
with grace and fluency, and the girls thought it queer
that there should be two languages, English and French. So
(12:26):
they picked up a few words of French too, and
at the table would gravely say mercy Papa, and sivou
play mamma. Then mister Austin proposed that at the table
no one should speak anything but French. So Madame told
them what to call the sugar and the salt and
the bread, and no one called anything except by its
(12:47):
French name. In two weeks, each of the whole dozen
persons who sat at that board as well as the
girl who waited on table had a bill of fair
working capital of French. In six months, they could converse
with ease, and science, with all its ingenuity, has not
yet pointed out a better way for acquiring a new
(13:08):
language than the plan the Austins adopted at Steventon Rectory.
We call it the Berlitz method. Now Madame Vanelat's widowhood
rested lightly upon her, and she became quite the life
of the whole household. One of the Austin boys fell
in love with the French widow, and surely it would
be a very stupid country boy that wouldn't love a
(13:28):
French widow like that. And they were married and lived
happily ever afterward. But before Madame married and moved away,
she taught the girl's charades, and then little plays, and
a theatrical performance was given in the barn. Then a
play could not be found that just suited, so Jane
wrote one, and Cassandra helped, and Madame criticized, and the
(13:51):
reverend mister Austen suggested a few changes. Then it was
all rewritten. And this was the first attempt at writing
for the public by Jane Austen. End of Section nineteen.
Recording by Maria Savanna
Section nineteen of Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women.
This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Maria Slovagna. Little Journeys
(00:20):
to the Homes of Famous Women by Elbert Hubbard. Jane Austen,
Delaford is a nice place. I can tell you exactly
what I call a nice, old fashioned place, full of comforts,
quite shut in, with great garden walls that are covered
with fruit trees, and such a mulberry tree in the corner.
(00:41):
Then there is a dovecote, some delightful fish ponds, and
a very pretty canal, and everything in short that one
could wish for. And moreover, it's close to the church
and only a quarter of a mile from the turnpike road.
Sense and sensibility. It was at cambrig which England I
met him, a fine intelligent clergyman. He was too. He's
(01:05):
not a varsity man, said my new acquaintance, speaking of
doctor Joseph Parker, the world's greatest preacher. If he were,
he wouldn't do all these preposterous things You know he's
a little like Henry Irving. I ventured, apologetically true, and
what absurd mannerisms did you ever see? The like? Yes,
(01:27):
ones from Yorkshire and the others from Cornwall, and both
are Philistines. He laughed at his little joke, and so
did I, for I always try to be polite. So
I went my way, and as I strolled, it came
to me that my clerical friend was right. A university
course might have taken all the individuality out of these
(01:47):
strong men and made of their genius a purely neutral decoction.
And when I thought further and considered how much learning
has done to banish wisdom, it was a satisfaction to
remember that Shakespeare at Oxford did nothing beyond making the
acquaintance of an innkeeper's wife. It hardly seems possible that
(02:08):
a Harvard degree would have made a stronger man of
Abraham Lincoln, or that Edison, whose brain has wrought greater
changes than that of any other man of the century,
was the loser by not being versed in physics as
taught at Yale. The law of compensation never rests, and
the men who are taught too much from books are
not taught by deity. Most education in the past has
(02:32):
failed to awaken in its subjects a degree of intellectual consciousness.
It is the education that the Jesuits served out to
the Indian. It made him peaceable, but took all dignity
out of him. From a noble red man, he descended
into a dirty engine who signed away his heritage for Rome.
The world's plan of education has mostly been priestly. We
(02:56):
have striven to inculcate trust and reverence. We have cited authorities,
and quoted precedents, and given examples. It was a matter
of memory, while all the time the whole spiritual acreage
was left untilled. A race educated in this way never advances,
save as it is jolted out of its notions by
(03:17):
men with either a sublime ignorance of or an indifference
to what has been done and said. These men are
always called barbarians by their contemporaries. They are jeered and hooted.
They supply much mirth by their eccentricities. After they are dead,
the world sometimes canonizes them and carves on their tombs
(03:37):
the word Savior. Do I then plead the cause of ignorance? Well? Yes,
rather so, A little ignorance is not a dangerous thing.
A man who reads too much, who accumulates too many facts,
gets his mind filled to the point of saturation. Matters
then crystallize, and his head becomes a solid thing that
(03:58):
refuses to let any thing either in or out, and
his soul there is no guest chamber. His only hope
for progress lies in another incarnation. And so a certain
ignorance seems a necessary equipment for the doing of a
great work. To live in a big city and know
what others are doing and saying, to meet the learned
(04:21):
and powerful and hear their sermons and lectures. To view
the unending shelves of vast libraries is to be discouraged
at the start. And thus we find that genius is
essentially a rural, a country product. Salons, soirees, theaters, concerts, lectures,
(04:42):
libraries produce a fine mediocrity that smiles at the right
time and bows when tis proper. But it is well
to bear in mind that George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte Bronte,
and Jane Austen were all country girls with little companionship,
nourished on picked up classics, having a healthy ignorance of
(05:03):
what the world was saying and doing. It is over
a hundred years since Jane Austen lived, but when you
tramp that five miles from Overton, where the railroad station is,
to Steventon, where she was born, it doesn't seem like it.
Rural England does not change much. Great fleecy clouds roll
lazily across the blue overhead, and the hedge grows are
(05:26):
full of twittering birds that you hear but seldom see.
And the pastures contain mild faced cows that look at
you with wide open eyes. Over the stone walls, and
in the towering elm trees that sway their branches in
the breeze, crows hold a noisy caucus. And it comes
to you that the clouds and the blue sky, and
the hedge grows, and the birds and the cows and
(05:48):
the crows are all just as Jane Austen knew them.
No change. These stone walls stood here then, and so
did the low slate roofed barns, and the whitewashed cottages
where the roses clamor over the doors. I paused in
front of one of these snug, homely, handsome, pretty little
cottages and looked at the two exact rows of flowers
(06:10):
that lined the little walk leading from the gate to
cottage door. The pathway was made from coal ashes, and
the flower beds were marked off with pieces of broken
crockery set on edge. Twas an absent minded, impolite thing
to do to stand leaning on a gate and critically
examine the landscape gardening, evidently an overworked woman's gardening at that.
(06:34):
As I leaned there, the door opened and a little
woman with sleeves rolled up appeared. I mumbled an apology,
but before I could articulate it, she held out a
pair of scissors and said, perhaps, sir, you'd like to
clip some of the flowers. The roses over the door
are best. Three children hung to her skirts, peeking round
(06:55):
faces from behind, and quite accidentally disclosing a very neat ankle.
I took the scissors and clipped three splendid jacques minnos
and said it was a beautiful day. She agreed with me,
and added that she was just finishing her churning, and
if i'd wait a minute until the butter came, she'd
give me a drink of buttermilk. I waited without urging,
(07:16):
and got the buttermilk and as the children had come
out from hiding, I was minded to give them a
penny a piece. Two coppers were all I could muster,
so I gave the two boys each a penny and
the little girl a shilling. The mother protested that she
had no change and that a bob was too much
for a little girl like that. But I assumed a
big bonanza air and explained that I was from California,
(07:39):
where the smallest change is a dollar. Go thank the gentleman, Jane.
That's right, Jane Austen, come here and thank me. How
did you know her name was Jane Austen, Jane Austen Humphries.
I didn't know. I only guessed. Then little missus Humphreys
ceased patting the butter and told me that she named
(08:00):
her baby girl for Jane Austen, who used to live
near here a long time ago. Jane Austen was one
of the greatest writers that ever lived. The rector said, so,
the Reverend George Austen preached at Steventon for years and years,
and I should go and see the church, the same
church where he preached and where Jane Austen used to go,
(08:21):
and anything I wanted to know about Jane Austen's books.
The rector could tell me, for he was a wonderful
learned man. Was the rector kiss the gentleman Jane. So
I kissed Jane Austen's round, rosy cheek and stroked the
tousled heads of the boys by way of blessing, and
started for Steventon to interview the rector, who was very wise,
(08:42):
and the clergyman who teaches his people the history of
their neighborhood and tells them of the excellent men and
women who once lived thereabouts, is both wise and good,
and the present rector at Steventon is both. I'm sure
of that. It was a very happy family that lived
in the rectory at Stephen from seventeen hundred seventy five
to eighteen hundred one. There were five boys and two girls.
(09:07):
The younger girl's name was Jane. Between her and James,
the oldest boy, lay a period of twelve years of
three hundred and sixty five days each, not to mention
leap years. The boys were sent away to be educated,
and when they came home at holiday time, they brought
presents for the mother and the girls, and there was
great rejoicing, James was sent to Oxford. The girls were
(09:30):
not sent away to be educated. It was thought hardly
worthwhile than to educate women, and some folks still hold
to that belief. When the boys came home, they were
made to stand by the door jam, and a mark
was placed on the casing with a date, which showed
how much they had grown. And they were catechised as
to their knowledge, and cross questioned, and their books inspected.
(09:54):
And so we find one of the sisters saying once
that she knew all the things her brothers knew, and
besides that she knew all the things she knew herself.
There were plenty of books in the library, and the
girls made use of them. They would read to their father,
because his eyesight was bad. But I cannot help thinking
this is a clever ruse on the part of the
(10:15):
good rector. I do not find that there were any
secrets in that household, or that either mister or Missus
Austin ever said that children should be seen and not heard.
It was a little republic of letters, all their own,
thrown in on themselves, for not many of the yeomanry
thereabouts could read. There was developed a fine spirit of
(10:36):
comradeship among parents and children, brothers and sisters, servants and visitors.
That is a joy to contemplate. Before the days of railroads,
a visitor was more of an institution than he is now.
He stayed longer and was more welcome, and the news
he brought from distant parts was eagerly asked. For nowadays
(10:58):
we know all about everything, all before it happens. For
yellow journalism is so alerted that it discounts futurity. In
the Austin household had lived and died a son of
Warren Hastings. The lad had so won the love of
the Austins that they even spoke of him as their own.
And this bond also linked them to the great outside
(11:19):
world of state craft. The things that elders discussed were
the properties, too, of the children. Then once a year
the bishop came came in knee breeches, hob knelt shoes
and a shovel hat, and the little church was decked
with greens. The bishop came from Paradise. Little Jane used
to think, and once to be polite, she asked him
(11:41):
how all the folks were in heaven. Then the other
children giggled, and the bishop split a whole cup of
tea down the front of his best coat, and coughed
and choked until he was very red in the face.
When Jane was ten years old, there came to live
at the rectory, a daughter of Missus Austen's sister. She
came to them direct from France. Her name was Madame Fenelaide.
(12:05):
She was a widow in only twenty one. Once, when
little Jane overheard one of the brothers say that Monsieur
Fenelaide had kissed Mademoiselle Guillotine, she asked what he meant,
and they would not tell her. Now Madame spoke French
with grace and fluency, and the girls thought it queer
that there should be two languages, English and French. So
(12:26):
they picked up a few words of French too, and
at the table would gravely say mercy Papa, and sivou
play mamma. Then mister Austin proposed that at the table
no one should speak anything but French. So Madame told
them what to call the sugar and the salt and
the bread, and no one called anything except by its
(12:47):
French name. In two weeks, each of the whole dozen
persons who sat at that board as well as the
girl who waited on table had a bill of fair
working capital of French. In six months, they could converse
with ease, and science, with all its ingenuity, has not
yet pointed out a better way for acquiring a new
(13:08):
language than the plan the Austins adopted at Steventon Rectory.
We call it the Berlitz method. Now Madame Vanelat's widowhood
rested lightly upon her, and she became quite the life
of the whole household. One of the Austin boys fell
in love with the French widow, and surely it would
be a very stupid country boy that wouldn't love a
(13:28):
French widow like that. And they were married and lived
happily ever afterward. But before Madame married and moved away,
she taught the girl's charades, and then little plays, and
a theatrical performance was given in the barn. Then a
play could not be found that just suited, so Jane
wrote one, and Cassandra helped, and Madame criticized, and the
(13:51):
reverend mister Austen suggested a few changes. Then it was
all rewritten. And this was the first attempt at writing
for the public by Jane Austen. End of Section nineteen.
Recording by Maria Savanna
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