In myriad ways, both parenting and academic work depend upon calendars.  Both parents and academics must rely on daily, weekly, and semester-long schedules to manage and mark time.  Both groups also must observe long-term calendars, attending to the daycare and schooling schedules that tend to shape infancy and childhood in the Western world while also abiding by the timetables established by graduate programs, job-search cycles, and tenure and promotion processes.  Those of us who attempt both roles simultaneously must take special care in managing our calendars, including not only the day-to-day scheduling of classes, practices, deadlines, and play-dates but also the long-term aligning of family growth with career development.  These two sets of calendars seldom align easily.  Moreover, as abstract representations of time, both kinds of calendars all too easily vary from embodied experiences of time.  Our bodies simply do not adapt fully to the schedules we expect them to follow. 

In my own experiences as a professor and a parent, I regularly find myself tasked with adapting my daily, weekly, and semester-long schedules in order to accommodate both sets of responsibilities.  I have had reason as well to ponder the flexibility—or inflexibility—of those longterm calendars that shape the profession.  Like many others who are both professors and parents, I had my children during the same period of time when I was seeking and then establishing myself in a permanent academic position. While I received many thoughtful pieces of advice about how best to navigate this interval, all more or less recommended the following: I must be able to demonstrate uninterrupted professional development.  Meanwhile, my children needed care, and I needed sleep. Yet neither professional nor family commitments allowed much space for compromise. 

But what if the problem were not my failure to adapt—and adapt to—my professional and family schedules?  What if the issue were, at least in part, with time itself?  More specifically, what if the problem were that the particular linear temporality represented by professional calendars simply fails to accommodate lived experiences?  In recent years, the nature of temporality has begun to attract critical scrutiny,1 especially among queer theorists engaged in defining and exploring queer temporality.2  As Elizabeth Freeman observes, “temporality is a mode of implantation through which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts,” obscuring other possibilities (160).   To be sure, the concerns of queer theory must remain, above all else, with the queer community and the circumstances of its members.  Their work affirms, however, the historical nature of time itself, that our temporalities have specific languages and histories. 

Writers in my own field of study—late-Victorian women’s poetry—make visible the historical nature of temporality.  As I have pondered my own efforts to adapt to professional timelines, I have had in mind two such writers, the late-Victorian poets and essayists Alice Meynell and Dollie Radford.  Both defined themselves as professional writers during a time when authorship came into its own as a professional institution, and both did so while also caring for their families. Rather than simply resigning themselves to uncompromising professional calendars and adapting to the linear understanding of time they represent, these two writers speculate about the possibility of reconceptualizing time and their relationship to it. For those of us in the twenty-first century, facing the challenges posed by complicated and unforgiving calendars, their approach merits attention: it points to alternative possibilities for managing time. 

I.

Meynell and Radford both wrote during the British fin de siècle, a time Linda Peterson identifies as the moment when “authorship came of age as a profession” (50).  To be sure, writers had defined themselves as professionals since the eighteenth century.  Yet during the nineteenth century, according to Peterson, the expansion of the commercial press “made possible the modern man and woman of letters” (3).  She observes, of course, that writers at the time still debated whether “writing should be pursued in the leisure hours after fulfilling the obligations of a traditional, learned profession (or in the case of women, domestic duties) or whether it should be a full-time occupation” and source of income to “maintain a middle-class life” (3, 2).  But by the 1880s, developments like the founding of the Society of Authors and advances in copyright law show that authorship had coalesced as an institution.  Writers like Meynell and Radford, whose early careers coincided with this development, accommodated increasingly standardized professional expectations while also maintaining their domestic commitments.

The mother of eight children, seven of whom survived into adulthood, Meynell developed a successful career as a Victorian woman of letters.  Having published a slim volume of poetry in her youth, Meynell took up magazine writing and editing alongside her husband, Wilfrid Meynell, shortly after their marriage in 1877.  Both saw in their work a way to support themselves and their growing family.  “Journalism was the pleasant and constant occupation of both my parents,” writes Meynell’s daughter, Viola, albeit with ambivalence: “at the time of her marriage, it committed its act of confiscation for ever of leisure from my mother’s life” (61).  Throughout the 1880s, both Meynells worked together on editing The Weekly Register and Merry England while Alice Meynell regularly contributed essays and reviews to other periodicals including The Spectator, The Saturday Review, The Scots Observer, and The Art Journal.  In late 1892, she collected many of these essays together, publishing them as The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays alongside a volume of her poetry, titled Poems (largely a revision of her earlier volume, Preludes).  As Meynell’s daughter writes, these two books “made [Meynell] famous in the literary world” (79)—indeed, her name circulated as a potential successor to Tennyson as poet laureate.4

Meynell combined her professional and domestic responsibilities closely, leaning on her role as a wife and mother to define her public persona.  As Talia Schaffer points out, Meynell cultivated her persona as an exemplary Victorian “Angel of the House.”  Her actual parenting methods involved a bit more complexity than her persona would suggest.  For Meynell, parenting took place immediately alongside her professional work.  The Meynells conducted their professional labor at a table in their home, at times joined by other writers.  “At her place at the library table,” wrote her son Everard, “the penciling mamma would sit at her work, the children at scrap-books on the floor or perhaps editing a newspaper under the table. . . . We were at once the most befriended of children, yet the most slighted; we fitted into the literary life and business of the household” (qtd. in Viola Meynell 89).  His sister Viola concurs, recollecting her parents’ single-minded concentration on their work: “They were commonly so absorbed when we were with them that we even temporarily lost our names, and were all called ‘Child’” (91).  At times, Meynell struggled to complete her work; Vita-Sackville West describes Meynell locking herself in the bathroom, “as she was frequently compelled to do in the attempt to write for a few hours undisturbed,” and even fleeing her house, and her pursuing children, in a “hansom cab she could ill afford to take” (15).  Yet Viola Meynell also recalls fondly the games their mother played with her children, including elaborate games of hide and seek or another game they called “Signs,” whereby the children would insist that their mother leave them a sign of her checking on them while they slept.  Thus they would wake in the morning to find “a shoe hanging on the wall, a chair turned upside down, a sweet or fruit by our beds” (92). 

Radford likewise combined caregiving with professional commitments and, like Meynell, earned a reputation as a feminine writer, although she ocassionally resisted this reputation.5  Even when her three children were infants, reports her granddaughter Ann MacEwen, Radford “continued trying to earn money by her pen” (30).  The daughter of a tailor, Radford had gone to school and befriended other young intellectuals like Olive Schreiner and Eleanor Marx.6  She published her first poem in 1883 as “C. M.,” for her given name of Caroline Maitland, but several months later began using the name Dollie Radford when she married Ernest Radford, who shared her interest in poetry and socialist politics.  Dollie Radford became “a vital participant in the vibrant political life of fin-de-siècle London,” explains LeeAnne Richardson, while also publishing her poetry in magazines like the Athenaeum, The Nation, McClure’s Magazine, and The Yellow Book (109).  Earning glowing reviews for her first collection, A Light Load (1891), she followed it with several more poetry collections, story collections for children, and a novel, among other writings.  She never earned quite the same renown as Meynell; she did not write as frequently or regularly as her fellow writer and acquaintance.  Moreover, her husband’s reputation as a poet tended to overshadow her own during her lifetime.  Yet Radford cultivated her own following, earning positive reviews and appreciation from writers like Arthur Symons and George Bernard Shaw.7

An admirer of William Morris, Radford blended the life of the poet with the life of the household over which she presided.  Describing the Radford household, David Garnett—a friend of their son, Maitland—recalls

a charming little house in East Heath Road, . . . always overflowing with people. . . . At tea-time the drawing-room was always full of poets and poetesses, artists and musicians, and it was seldom that the family sat down to a meal without laying one or two extra places for friends who had dropped in or had to stay on because they were in the middle of an aesthetic discussion which could not be interrupted.  (125)

As her principal responsibility, Radford focused on her children; their concerns, needs, and accomplishments are at the center of her correspondence with her husband and her friends.  But her caregiving also extended to her husband, who suffered from mental illness for many years.  Following a breakdown in 1892, when their children were still young, he spent time in an asylum but never fully recovered.  Garnett recollects Dollie Radford as an “attractive, vivacious creature” but saw Ernest Radford to be “a great contrast to her. . . . Usually he seemed only half-awake, and most visitors must have thought him unconscious of the sparkling conversation and bursts of laughter going on all around him” (125).  As a consequence, management of the household and its affairs fell almost entirely to Dollie Radford.

Given the demands on their time, both Meynell and Radford managed complicated calendars, organizing their publishing, family, and social activities.  Viola Meynell recalls the pressure her parents felt to produce each issue of The Weekly Register: “one of the things the childhood of all the young family was chiefly aware of was the indescribable effort and struggle against time on those Thursdays, with both parents silent and desperate with work” (66).  When Meynell later began writing a column for the Pall Mall Gazette each Friday, her week’s rhythm shifted.  But according to her daughter, the discipline of this weekly calendar helped Meynell’s writing: while her earlier essays “had been written at her own prompting,” these essays for her column “were written in obedience to Friday, and the result is a book to be read with greater ease, with very original and delicate impressions rather than thought-out ideas” (124-25).

While Meynell found the discipline of publication calendars enabling to her work, given the demands she had on her time, Radford strained to keep up with them while also caring for her family.  As Latham observes, “She wrote little while coping with her husband’s dementia during the last dozen years of her life.”  It might be possible to conclude that the demands of caregiving simply prevented Radford from achieving her potential, that she—like the sister of Shakespeare Virginia Woolf describes—succumbed under the burdens patriarchal culture places on women to care for others before themselves, barring their access to the creative life.  Certainly, Radford’s poem “What Song Shall I Sing?” raises this possibility.  In this short lyric from A Light Load (1891), the speaker asks a silent listener what song might she sing, now that their children are in bed.  She recognizes that  “Many singers now, / Sing their new songs in the land” (7-8); likewise, many new writers have written new “books to understand” (9).  These new works mean little to her, however:

But I can sing, these evening times,
Only the children's songs and rhymes.
All the day they play with me,
My heart grows full of their looks,
All their prattle stays with me,
And I have no mind for books,
Nor care for any other tune
Than they have sung this golden June. (11-18)

With her head full of her children’s songs, and her day taken up with their care, this potential singer cannot keep up with the new songs being sung or the new books being published.  Even when she completes her day of caring for her children, she must attend to the needs of her seemingly inert listener, whom she entertains with songs and books.  By this reading, it’s possible to see this lyric as an expression of frustration from a speaker—or poet—unable to pursue a creative life.

Yet it’s also possible to read this poem as an affirmation of her layered commitments.  After all, she concludes the poem with her heart “full of their looks” and her mind resonating with their “songs and rhymes.”  She has, in other words, a unique source of inspiration, generating song for her “this golden June,” distinct from the nameless singers and nameless writers and their undistinguishable mass of songs and books.  While parenting fills her days, perhaps complicating her ability to record her lyrics, it also provides her an important source of creative inspiration. 

II.

In their daily lives, Meynell and Radford both employed typically Victorian technologies for managing and marking their time, including calendars, diaries, and letter writing.  Both recognized the significance of the calendar as an object that attests both to the ephemerality and to the monumental nature of the passing moment.  Photograph portraits of both appeared, for instance, in the “Modern Poets Calendar” of 1897, produced by Marcus Ward and Company and featuring twelve renowned poets of that year (Meynell in February and Radford in October).  Moreover, both kept copies of this calendar in their papers, now housed in their respective archives, showing their sense of its significance in marking their stature as poets: the calendar identifies their work with larger movements of time itself as it moves into history.8  In their work, Meynell and Radford both contemplate not just the measuring of time but also—even more fundamentally—its theorization.  That is, each explores the ways in which time gets conceptualized, proposing alternative, cyclical understandings of time in their essays and poetry.

Meynell writes about time and temporality most explicitly in her essay “The Rhythm of Life,” a short piece she originally wrote in 1889 for the Scot’s Observer and that later appeared as the title essay of her first collection.  Here, Meynell contemplates the passing of time, suggesting that it moves not in linear fashion but in a circular manner.  “If life is not always poetical,” she announces in the essay’s opening line, “it is at least metrical” (78).  She explains: “periodicity rules over the mental experience of man,” such that our periods of happiness, illness, sorrow, and joy come and go according to “the tides of the mind” (78).  Shelley and Thomas à Kempis knew of these patterns; “[b]oth souls were in close touch with the spirits of their several worlds,” Meynell argues, “and no deliberate human rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept them from the knowledge of recurrences” (79).  Certain saints and poets have also shared this knowledge, as have certain “tribes” that worship the moon.  “The individual man either never learns it fully, or learns it late;” however,  “[l]ife seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold—intervals between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep” (81).  She concludes by suggesting that many would find peace in “knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all things—a sun’s revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity” (81).

As Beth Newman observes, “The Rhythm of Life” has come to be “tacitly regarded in the small but growing body of scholarship on her work as an important articulation of her worldview” (496).  Comparing “The Rhythm of Life” to Walter Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance—perhaps the most famous exploration of temporality at the fin de siècle—Newman argues that Meynell’s essay “is a brief, lyrical, carefully crafted ars vivendi, and, like the conclusion, it is concerned more directly with precepts to live by than with art proper” (496).  But whereas Pater extolls the “intense moments of pleasure in beauty” and urges their continual pursuit, Meynell offers an alternative view of temporality, one that emphasizes an inevitable waxing and waning between activity and rest.  If Pater’s interest in pursuing the epiphanic moments is “an ideal surely impractical even for an Oxford don,” suggests Newman, “[h]ow much more impossible it would be to a writer whose income depended on the constant meeting of deadlines, and for whom the emotional pangs of maternity pierced through the walls of personality even when she sought to isolate herself from them by riding away in a cab or locking herself in the bathroom to write?” (504).  Newman’s analysis certainly makes evident the extent to which “Rhythm” conveys Meynell’s criticisms of Pater’s widely influential conclusion. 

Meynell’s essay develops, then, a feminist critique of Pater’s essay in its alternative view of temporality.  But it also suggests a way of registering time and temporality that draws from the experience of mothering in particular.  This perspective emerges most clearly in the concluding line of the essay, when Meynell identifies the rhythmic nature of time with the “pangs of maternity.”  Throughout, her emphasis on recurrence resonates with the rhythms of parenthood.  Undoubtedly the inevitable fluctuation in moods she sees in “in the mental experience of man” (78)—the certain ebbing and flowing of joy and sorrow—will ring familiar to anyone who has spent an hour with a toddler.  But repetition structures childhood in broader ways, too, in its daily or weekly routines and monthly or annual rituals, no doubt particularly so for a household in which seven children grew to adulthood.  It’s no enormous leap to suggest that Meynell’s experiences of parenting inform her understanding of temporality as articulated in “The Rhythm of Life.” 

Radford, too, shared an interest in recurrence.  In a letter to Radford, her friend Eleanor Marx wrote, “You say, my dear, that you often think that by the time your life is finished you will have learned just enough to begin it well,” warning her, “No, Dollie, we must just live our lives, and what we have missed, who knows?”  As consolation, Marx affirms Radford’s role as a parent: “your children, despite all you can do, will also have to live their lives; to learn their lessons; to have their failures.  But at least what life has taught you, will make more easy and more beautiful their lives” (14 April 1891).   Marx’s letter suggests for Radford a further pattern of repetition, as children follow the precedents set by their parents, repeating them—in perhaps easier and more beautiful ways—for another generation. 

Radford explores such generational repetition in her Young Gardeners’ Kalendar (1904), an illustrated collection of twelve poems ostensibly written as a gardening almanac for children.  Thus the collection opens with January and presents a poem for each month enumerating the activities of a garden—and its gardener—during that month.  As a calendar, it would seem that this text would take on a view of time as linear, transitory, and fleeting, always moving forward into a new day, month, or year to be observed and then discarded.  Yet Radford’s volume defines the movement of time not as a fleeting movement forward but as a permanently ongoing cycle.  Not designed to be tossed away, this calendar comes printed on handmade paper, bound in hardcover, with gold embossed letters on its cover.  Its intricate illustrations, by L. E. Wright, underscore its status as an aesthetic object.  These features also lend it the qualities of a gift, making it the kind of book a parent gives to a child, to keep and peruse repeatedly over generations.

The poems in Radford’s Kalendar themselves emphasize recurrence. While this calendar begins with January, a reader might begin with any of its twelve poems, reading it individually or as part of the larger cycle. Each poem describes an English garden’s appearance during its given month and the activities a gardener must perform during that month, but by doing so they also signal an awareness of the larger cycle of the year.   Thus does January’s poem open the volume by looking toward a garden’s bare trees, “Catkins, on the hazel,” and “snow-drops in a shining row” (5, 7) but conclude with a reminder for its caretakers:

Brush the Old Year leaves away,
Make the New Year garden neat,
Gardeners must not stop for play
Till their labour is complete. (9-12)

The poem at once launches the volume into its cycle of poems, its year in the garden, but also affirms the ongoing nature of this cycle by acknowledging the continued presence of the old year’s leaves.  Elsewhere, these poems also affirm the time to come, as when in “July” the speaker advises the listener to “Pluck sweet lavender and dry / All its tiny flowers for sweetness, / In the winter by and by” (18-20) or as when in “September” the speaker reminds the listener to “Plant crocuses and tulips rare, / To bloom in next Year’s Spring” (11-12).  Each poem then tends to resolve with a timeless imperative.  Thus does “January” conclude: “Gardeners must not stop for play / Till their labour is complete,” yet the cycle of poems suggests an indefinite quality to this labor: the cycle will continue with each month bringing its particular tasks.

The archaic spelling of “Kalendar” in this volume’s title further underscores the ongoing nature of these temporal cycles, identifying the volume with longstanding methods of timekeeping, namely, the agricultural calendar or the almanac.  Indeed, the traditional almanac, a form that dates back to the sixteenth century, similarly names the labor that needs to be accomplished on a given day or during a given month with a view to agricultural cycles.  Additionally, they typically draw from astrology to include prognostications about the future, about what the stars suggest will happen on any given day.9  In this way, they convey a sense of time as both cyclical and enduring.  Perhaps even more interestingly, the traditional almanac also tends to accommodate multiple methods for telling or keeping time, including calendar tables, but also including charts of movements of the moon and stars as well as spaces for their individual users to write notes or keep diaries.10  Perhaps in drawing upon this archaic form, Radford nods to the complexity with which it registers time and with which it conveys a sense of temporality, a method in keeping with a domestic household responsive both to the demands of publication schedules and the routine needs of growing bodies.

In these various ways, both Meynell and Radford challenge the linear methods of time-keeping essential to late-Victorian professional life by exploring alternatives.  Meynell’s “Rhythm of Life” explores a view of temporality in keeping with her own alternations between work and play, between isolating herself with her writing and immersing herself in joyful play with her children.  In her work, Radford articulates a view of time that can accommodate simultaneously work and play, the writing of poetry and the rearing of children.  Each represents an effort to reclaim time according to her own terms, terms themselves shaped by the imperatives of caregiving.

III.

Taken together, Meynell and Radford represent two examples of writers who combined parenting and professional work with a critical eye to the challenges this effort created, many of which continue to this day.  Specifically, they recognized the difficulty of fitting a range of commitments, professional and otherwise, into limited allotments of time and, moreover, of finding their lives increasingly defined according to such allotments.  While they faced this challenge during the time when authorship emerged as a professional institution, today, academics who are parents do so at a moment when the corporate university has come to shape academic life.  For me, Meynell and Radford serve as a reminder of the longstanding nature of this effort to combine not just a professional career but more specifically a creative life, a life of the mind, with the caregiving that comes with being a parent.  Their particular solutions to the problems of time management might not be viable today (with the possible exception of disappearing into a locked bathroom to finish, in solitude, some necessary task for work).  But their scrutiny of their temporalities remains worthy of consideration; their efforts might provide insight into the ways in which twenty-first-century parents and professors might reconsider our relationships with time.

As many an article for Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education observes, the linear career path of the tenure-track or tenured professor has its bends and turns for those—especially women—who also claim family responsibilities. For many of us, the difficulties center on having too little time to accomplish too many tasks.  Even for those of us fortunate enough to establish careers, family care often complicates progress.  Thus a recent MLA study of associate and full professors found “the demands of child rearing, elder care, and other family obligations . . . frequently cited as a hindrance to career progress” (“Standing Still” 13).  Many of us find we simply cannot fit our professional and family commitments into the time into which we must fit them.

Yet the problem of time poverty extends beyond parents and throughout contemporary university culture.  When Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeger consider recent findings about high levels of stress reported among faculty from Canadian universities, they “are struck by how many situations identified as sources of work stress are about lack of time” (7).  As part of the problem, Berg and Seeger suggest that “we increasingly are caught between two temporalities: corporate time and the time conducive for academic work” (25).  As their response, they advocate for their readers to affirm and defend the “timeless time” necessary for creative and critical thinking to take place.11  Ultimately, they see the effort to preserve timeless time for academics as an act of resistance against the corporatization of the American university and the detrimental effects it can have on professors and their students.

The argument Berg and Seeger make, perhaps especially in its focus on competing temporalities, resonates with the ideas Meynell and Radford explored over a hundred years earlier.  Perhaps, like Meynell and Radford, professionals today would do well to maintain a healthy skepticism toward the idea that time must unfold in a single, linear, unforgiving way.  In practical terms, I cannot imagine that the culture of the corporate university will shift any time soon toward valuing interruptions, slow-downs, sprints, or late starts.  But I like to think of such adaptation of time as innovating new ways of approaching our profession.  Rather than adapting to the demands of an unforgiving linear temporality, perhaps we do well to embrace the embodied and often circuitous experience of time that comes with combining work with caregiving.  Doing so might just be necessary for preserving joy and harmony in the daily efforts of teaching, researching, collaborating, writing, creating, and parenting.