Elizabeth Storie
Elizabeth Storie was born in July 1818 in Tradeston, Glasgow, ‘of poor but respectable parents’ (2). As an adult, she supported herself as a milliner and seamstress. She published her autobiography in 1859 when she was 41 years old. Writing in standard English rather than Scots, Storie managed to secure one hundred and five subscribers, which ultimately covered the printing costs of her ‘truth’ that was ‘stranger than fiction.’ While Storie’s ‘truth’ is sadly her only piece of writing, it provides a significant sketch of the complex network of the medical, legal, and ecclesiastical systems of knowledge and power that she was forced to navigate as a disabled and poor working-class woman.
Storie’s hybrid autobiography is composed of a first-person narrative accompanied by letters and testimonies from witnesses, as well as correspondence from lawyers, physicians, and Kirk session members. As a memoir and a petition for justice, Storie shows how she struggled to recover an allegedly lost court order that would compensate her for the permanent medical injuries inflicted upon her when she was four years old by her physician, Dr. Falconer, who was subsequently ordered by the court to pay £1000 in damages. Dr. Falconer relocated, founded a new practice, and refused to pay the court order. Storie thus grew up poor, disabled, disfigured, and barely able to eat, drink, or provide for herself. She desperately needed the funds to pay for the many surgeries she underwent to improve her function. Accessing these rightfully owed funds is the primary subject of Storie’s autobiography. Florence Boos writes that ‘only one copy of the original decree remained on record, and many of Storie’s petitions were to regain possession of this essential document. Falconer’s lawyer had been granted access to “borrow” it. So not surprisingly, it had disappeared.’ Her autobiography details the ‘deceptions, legal quibbles, frustrating delays, and inexplicably “lost” documents which “necessitated” deferral of her suit on technical grounds until the statute of limitations for damages had passed.’
While Storie was never granted justice, her success lay in her ability, as a disabled working-class woman, to openly interrogate the medical, legal, and ecclesiastical systems in place. She moves beyond her status as a victimized working-class woman by using strategies of resistance that include inserting herself into the public sphere and producing this fascinating hybrid autobiography, in which the narrative is supplemented by various forms of documentary evidence and the appropriation of authoritative medical and legal language. As such, Storie suggests that the voice of a poor, working-class, disabled woman is a credible voice and has a place in the public sphere.
Contributed by Dana Graham Lai
Bibliography
Florence S. Boos, “Under Physical Siege: The Early Victorian Autobiographies of Elizabeth Storie and Mary Prince,” in Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
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Books
The Autobiography of Elizabeth Storie (1859)