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Saint Clare November: 3500 / 50 000 words
Author’s Note:
This post started in another space as I tried to explain why I’m listening, over and over, to a playlist made especially for the Saint Clare world, how it’s constructed and why having it is important to the way I write and my ability to recapture the story’s moods. I’ve been using some version of this playlist (it started with Appalachian Spring something I’ve listened to and has been a favorite for as long as I can remember) since I returned to Saint Clare this past summer. For me, specific music creates and guides headspace, especially when it comes to writing. So this post has become a reflection on how music, for girls historically and for me personally, moves between structure and freedom—discipline as both enclosure and release.
So…
Imagine I’m standing at the gates of Saint Clare looking in. The key to entering is letting go of my academic voice and reclaiming and embracing Mija’s — one that’s curious, playful, and unhurried, that knows this is far more about the journey than the destination. This post is a kind of meta reflection, written as a map as I try to find a path back into the Saint Clare world, imagine it leading to a different sort of writing practice, one that can generate hundreds of thousands of words. Writing fiction at this scale isn’t only about research or structure — I’m terrible at structure. Instead it’s about mood, and sound. For me, that begins with an album or playlist that I play every time I want to be in that headspace. 1That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing These notes on music and discipline are about creating a state of calm focus, a rhythm — one where research and scholarship become texture for Saint Clare rather than, as they would with academic writing, constructing an argument. In this space, joy and rigor can share the same page — one, ideally, of discipline, structure, and pleasure.
These days when I think about the world of Saint Clare, I don’t begin with geography, plot, or even period. I begin with a sound. Not the bell (though there are bells enough in Saint Clare’s world) but a bow against a violin string — specifically my grandmother’s violin. The two told stories of how, when they first married (in the 1930s) she played for my grandfather in the evenings after dinner. While there was radio available, they didn’t have one yet. Nor any sort of record player. There was only the music she carried from her girlhood. She wasn’t especially musically gifted, though my grandfather claimed otherwise. Her father had been the true amateur musician, trained at Eton and Oxford, an organist and choir director who played faithfully for every parish he served. From him she inherited not virtuosity but devotion: the belief that to play faithfully, however simply, was a kind of gift and prayer.
Less than a hundred years ago that was what one did in the evenings: read aloud, practice music, keep culture alive by hearing it, playing it, creating it physically, and sonically. The bow against string, the pause before the note — gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention. Then too, in this world, silence still had somewhere to sit. I think of that quiet, live music as a discipline — the same sort that, in my imagination, fills the corridors of Saint Clare’s School for Girls. These gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention are precisely the point where structure meets possibility: the body obeys, but the mind has freedom and space to wander and imagine.
The Sound of Education
As I’ve said before, I’m not a visual person or thinker. Saint Clare manifested in my head as voices, music, not by what I imagined seeing, but hearing. The hum of a slightly out-of-tune piano before morning prayers mingled with the crack of hockey sticks on frost. The girls’ school, I realised, wasn’t merely an institution; it was an instrument, an intergenerational sonic landscape.
Victorians would have approved. When writing about education, they treated young girls and young, unmarried women as if they were violins in need of constant tuning to a pitch of virtue writ large. Erasmus Darwin (a less famous Darwin, quite enthusiastic about female education rather than beetles) proposed that girls could be improved through art and music.2 Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797. Nearly a hundred years later, his theory is further refined with Isabella Tod, suggesting that a good education should teach girls “self-government.”3 Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013. An attempt to depict these ideals inspire and resonate in at Saint Clare, where musical and moral instruction have echoed one another across decades. Change comes to Saint Clare slowly.
- 1That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing
- 2Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797.
- 3Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013.