“So, which of these 20 women you conversed with did you find the most remarkable?” asked my friend Phil, picking up a copy of my new book Conversations of Remarkable Women from the display stand. It was a good question and one to which I kept returning.
I could hardly fail to be impressed with the multi-talented Marie Stopes. She acquired an international reputation as a palaeontologist and abandoned it to provide free birth control advice and establish the world’s first free clinics. So great were her literary outpourings of books, pamphlets, correspondence, and research papers that, when she died, a ten-ton lorry was required to transport all the material to a museum for classification. The librarians were still at it several years later.
Equally, Catherine the Great of Russia struck me as truly memorable. She started as a minor German princess and became one of Europe’s most influential and enlightened rulers. Her long-running correspondence with the international thought leader Voltaire revealed a woman doing her best to bring some sense and direction to the sprawling Russian empire. With the support of her romantic partner and possible husband, Prince Potemkin, she made many changes that improved Russia, though she failed to implement his advice to free the serfs.
My friend, who had asked the question, returned the book and impatiently demanded: “Come on, make up your mind; which of the twenty women did you find was the most remarkable? There must have been one that was most outstanding?” As Phil repeated the question, an answer surfaced unbidden: Andreas Von Salomé, who made sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy and declared that “God is dead”. She precipitated an explosion of interest in his thinking across Europe. No wonder the grateful philosopher wanted to marry her and announced: “I am dynamite.”
Salomé had a magnetic impact on all she encountered. She inspired the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to rise to creative heights he had never previously achieved. Freud was enchanted by Salomé, who encouraged her to train as one of the first female psychiatrists. He so valued her intellect that he sought her approval for his lectures and was reluctant to start without her presence.
Discreet, insightful and fiercely independent, Salomé refused to be dominated by any man or relationship. Instead, she devised threesomes, which she compared to a mobile where the parts constantly move around each other in a fixed arrangement.
When I finally told my friend Phil which of the twenty remarkable women impressed me the most, his puzzled look told me all I needed to know. “I’ve never heard of Salomé,” he admitted, picking up my book again and flicking the pages until he arrived at my conversation with her. I think I’ll start with her then,” he announced, “she sounds fantastic.” Salomé was precisely that.
Contact:
Andrew Leigh can be contacted at: remarkable@btinternet.com
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