Lifespan: 1847-1929
Nationality: English
Types of Work: novels, short stories, religious works
Style: works deal with social issues of the day
Other Names: Mrs. G.S. Reaney
Bio:
(From the Oxford DNB)
Reaney [née Edis], Isabella Emily Thomasa [Isabel] (1847–1929), preacher and social activist, was born on 15 July 1847 in Huntingdon, the sixth of seven children of Robert Edis and his wife, Emma Ekin. Her father was a literary bookseller and a well-known man in the town. One of her brothers, Dr Arthur Wellesley Edis (1840–1893), was to become a noted specialist in the treatment of women's illnesses. She was to work closely with him in campaigns for reducing the hours and improving the working conditions of shop-girls. Another brother, Robert William Edis (1839–1927), was an architect especially concerned with interior decoration, ‘healthy furniture’, and sanitary improvements in houses. Isabel Edis was educated at a boarding-school. In her teens she began to work among the poor of Huntingdon, reading and teaching from the Bible. She instituted a cottage service, which soon became so crowded that it was transferred to a large classroom belonging to the local Congregationalists. Eventually attendances were so large that the services were moved to the Institution Hall of Huntingdon, where they attracted the attention of the bishop of the diocese. He criticized Isabel Edis for disturbing the regular order of the church. However, on hearing her reply—that her authority was higher than that of bishops and archbishops, and so she must speak, but that if her work was likely to injure the church she would withdraw from it—the bishop seems to have allowed her to carry on, with his blessing. She continued to hold services there until her marriage on 4 March 1873 to the Revd George Sale Reaney (1838–1901), a prominent Congregational minister in Warrington. She moved her activities there, and conducted Sunday afternoon services in the public hall. Her husband's health having broken down from overwork, in 1876 they moved to a smaller church in Reading, Berkshire, for six years, and then (in 1882) to the East End of London, where he took charge of Stepney meeting-house.
In the East End, Isabel Reaney continued to work among the poor, and also, in emergencies, took her husband's place at meeting, although remaining herself a staunch member of the Church of England. On one occasion she conducted a special service in the City Temple for Dr Joseph Parker. While living at Stepney she worked with Henrietta Barnett to set up a Children's Country Holiday Fund, and she herself established a home for convalescents at Folkestone. When her husband left London to take charge of Dr Parker's former church, Cavendish Street Chapel, in Manchester, she founded a similar home at Blackpool (by 1894 capable of accommodating 130 people), and was a significant figure in the promotion of Blackpool as a winter health resort. In 1890 George Sale Reaney left Congregationalism for the Church of England, disillusioned with what he felt to be the excessive individualism of the Congregational ideal and attracted by the national idea, as propounded by F. D. Maurice (1805–1872) and Samuel Barnett (1844–1913). His wife's example was scarcely less important. He was always totally supportive of her public work, having written in 1886 a memorable riposte to an attack on women preachers, in which he began by observing that: ‘It is always a rather difficult task for men to discuss the true sphere of women. … The truest conception of womanhood can only be possessed by women’ (G. S. Reaney, ‘Preaching women’, 844–5). He served as a curate at Riverhead, Kent (1890–91), and at Bickley, in the same county (1891–3), and in 1893 was appointed vicar of Greenwich, where Isabel Reaney was able to return to the sort of work which she had done in Stepney. She supported the Women's Convalescent Home Association to establish homes providing a fortnight's rest for women employed in factories, warehouses, workshops, and offices, and for the wives and daughters of London workmen. In 1894 she played an important part in getting the baths at the London People's Palace opened in the evenings (on Tuesdays they were opened from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.) for the use of ladies in business. She and her husband held Sunday afternoon services for the people at Good Duke Humphrey's Hall (a temperance restaurant of which Isabel Reaney was the honorary director): G. S. Reaney held the service on the first Sunday of the month for men only, Isabel Reaney conducting all the rest, for men and women. On Thursday nights she organized magic lantern lectures and, on Saturday nights, popular concerts and entertainments.
From the time when they moved to Stepney, Isabel Reaney became a great campaigner on behalf of tramcar drivers. Feeling the poverty of ‘mittens and tracts’ as a means of expressing sympathy with their terrible working conditions, she qualified as a shareholder in several metropolitan companies so that she could press their cause more effectively. In 1885 she got Samuel Smith MP to put a question to the home secretary in the Commons about the long hours worked. She also attended a shareholders' meeting of the North Metropolitan Tramways Company, where 70 shareholders out of about 4000 were present. To the sound of shuffling feet and hissing she urged the injustices of the drivers' working conditions. Gaining only six supporters, she proceeded to launch a campaign, canvassing shareholders by pamphlet and mobilizing the press. By the next half-yearly meeting (February 1886) she had a considerable body of support, and, even though her motion was defeated, the chairman reluctantly promised to do something. The press meanwhile drew public attention to conditions in Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, and Leicester—even in Melbourne and Sydney; and under the Revd F. Barclay and others a new union was established in south London. In a powerful article in the Contemporary Review (56, 1889, 649–58), ‘Slave-driving by public companies’, which culminated in a quotation from Mazzini, Isabel Reaney underlined the status of tramway and railway companies as public companies. Since they were under parliamentary sanction, state intervention was justified to ensure that they were run properly. She even urged the advantages of the municipalization of tramways and of the nationalization of railways.
Isabel Reaney was a prominent temperance activist throughout her life, and wrote innumerable temperance stories. Her three-decker novel, Dr Grey's Patient, published in 1893 as part of the Story Book Series, was much more than a temperance tract: it was well paced and compelling, and provoked much discussion. She also published advice manuals for girls and boys (between 1879 and 1882) and a book of devotional texts for the use of girls' schools and colleges, relating religion to everyday life. In English Girls: their Place and Power (1879) she cited John Ruskin (1819–1900) on the need for girls at home to develop a sense of will and drive, including reading for a purpose. She supported higher education for women, but felt that it needed to embrace every aspect of womanhood, training heart and hand as well as head. In February 1892 she founded a popular monthly magazine, Our Mothers and Daughters, which she edited until July 1896 (the magazine continued, becoming a weekly in mid-1897, until October 1898). It cost 1d. and 20,000 copies of the first issue were printed. It was offered to secretaries of YWCAs, mothers' meetings, and Girls' Guilds at a reduced price (and back numbers were subsequently offered free to boost circulation). It was aimed at ‘tired mothers and busy daughters’, and contained a mixture of reports on women's activities, home remedies, recipes, serialized stories, Sunday talks for the use of mothers and Sunday school teachers, and articles by famous guest writers. The tone was very firmly set by Isabel Reaney's strong editorials, and many of the series—for example, ‘The duty of girls in regard to self-education’—were written by her. In issue 4 she poured scorn on well-off women who denied the need for women's rights, and she continually urged women to exercise their influence and not to be afraid to campaign publicly against wrongdoing. In her editorial for the eighth issue she commented:
Mothers are to be commended for impressing upon their daughters the fact that marriage is not the end of a girl's life. … No girl with a fair amount of ability, courage and enterprise, need ever marry ‘for the sake of a home’. She may establish a home for herself. (Our Mothers and Daughters, 1/8, 1892, 133)
She publicized the achievements of professional women and commended new career opportunities, citing one woman who had set herself up as ‘accountant and auditor’ for a large household, charging a sum equivalent to a lawyer's fee for an hour's work. She noted with approval that in America women commercial travellers were being employed in trades concerning exclusively women and children. She urged the need for more women factory inspectors, feeling that women were likely to be tougher on employers of female workforces. She urged women to refuse to buy cheap underclothes, undoubtedly produced by sweated labour, and called for an early shopping pledge (not to shop after 8 p.m.). She publicized the demonstration in a northern town of domestic servants demanding shorter hours and a weekly half-holiday. She commended vegetarianism, supported dress reform, opposed the use of birds in millinery, advertised the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and offered up a paean of praise to the bicycle as part of her promotion of physical exercise for women. She wrote for women whose principal role was to be in the home (and for whom she offered advice in reducing the time spent on domestic duties) as well as for those who were to be doing paid work. She saw no fundamental distinction in that each was to exercise usefulness beyond the minimum requirements of her job. She herself carved out a career which transcended the conventions of her position, and gained widespread respect for so doing.
In 1894 Isabel Reaney achieved the distinction of having her profile published in the magazine Men and Women of the Day (7/74, 1894). The photograph which accompanied it showed a handsome, slim woman with dark, wavy hair and a face, with the crinkles of one who smiled a lot, at once clear-eyed, intelligent, and energetic. Isabel Reaney outlived her husband, whose Occasional Papers, Serious and Otherwise (1902) she edited. She continued to publish on her established themes: Temperance Sketches from Life appeared in 1911, and Daisy Snowflake's Secret in 1913, for example. She died at her home, 26 The College, Bromley, Kent, on 19 June 1929.
Novels:
Rose Gurney's Discovery (1880)
Blessing and Blessed
English Girls: Their Place and Power
Our Brothers and Sons (1882)
Our Daughters
Chippings (1883)
Unspoken Addresses (1883)
Little Glory's Mission (1883)
Found at Last (1883)
Not alone in the World (1883)