Simone Weil 1909-1943

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. “

Simone Weil was a French mystic and social philosopher, whose posthumously published works had particular influence on French and English social thought. Intellectually precocious, Weil also expressed social awareness at an early age. At five she refused sugar because the French soldiers at the front during World War I had none and aged 10 she declared herself a Bolshevik. After completing her studies in philosophy, classical philology, and science, Weil taught philosophy in several girls’ schools from 1931 to 1938 and often became embroiled in conflicts with school boards as a result of her social activism.

Simone Weil, 2018 Oil on Canvas 200x170 cm (Available for Sale)

To learn the psychological effects of heavy industrial labour, she took a job in 1934–35 in a Renault car factory, where she observed the spiritually deadening effect of machines on her fellow workers. In 1936 she joined an anarchist unit called the Durriti Column near Zaragoza, Spain, training for action in the Spanish Civil War, but after an accident in which she was badly scalded by boiling oil, she went to Portugal to recuperate. Soon thereafter Weil had the first of several mystical experiences, and she subsequently came to view her social concerns as “ersatz Divinity.” On returning to Paris, Weil continued to write essays on War, Peace, Labour and Management.  She was one of the first to identify a new form of oppression not anticipated by Marx, where élite bureaucrats could make life just as miserable for ordinary people as did the most exploitative capitalists

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After the German occupation of Paris during World War II, Weil moved to the south of France, where she worked as a farm servant. She escaped with her parents to the United States in 1942 but then went to London to work with the French Resistance. The exact cause of her death remains a subject of debate. Malnutrition and overwork led to a physical collapse, and during her hospitalization she was found to have tuberculosis. She died after a few months spent in a sanatorium.

Some claim that her refusal to eat came from her desire to express some form of solidarity toward the victims of the war. Others think that Weil's self-starvation occurred after her study of Schopenhauer who in his chapters on Christian saintly asceticism and salvation, had described self-starvation as a preferred method of self-denial.

Simone Weil, 2018 Oil on Paper 28x28 cm (Available for Sale)

Weil’s writings, which were collected and published after her death, fill about 20 volumes. Though born of Jewish parents, Weil eventually adopted a mystical theology that came very close to Roman Catholicism. A moral idealist committed to a vision of social justice, Weil in her writings explored her own religious life while also analysing the individual’s relation with the state and God, the spiritual shortcomings of modern industrial society, and the horrors of totalitarianism.

Harriet Martineau 1802-1876

“You better live your best and act your best and think your best today, for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.”

Martineau wrote many books and a multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic, and perhaps most controversially, feminine perspective; she also translated Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed, 2 vol. (1853). Martineau said of her own approach to writing: "when one studies a society, one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She believed a thorough societal analysis was necessary to understand women's status under men.

Harriet Martineau 2018, Oil on Canvas 140x120 cm (Available for Sale)

Martineau began losing her senses of taste and smell at a young age, becoming increasingly deaf and having to use an ear trumpet. It was the beginning of many health problems in her life.  In 1839, during a visit to Continental Europe, Martineau was diagnosed with a uterine tumour.  She moves to a house in Tyneside to be near her brother-in-law, Thomas Michael Greenhow, who was a celebrated doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne.  Immobile and confined to a couch, her illness caused her to literally enact the social constraints of women during this time. Whilst there she wrote three works including Life in the Sickroom, considered to be one of Martineau's most under-rated works. It upset evangelical readers as they "thought it dangerous in 'its supposition of self-reliance'".

In 1845 she left Tynemouth for Ambleside in the Lake District, here she designed herself and oversaw the construction of the house called The Knoll, Ambleside, where she spent the greater part of her later life.  Diagnosed with fatal heart disease in 1855, Martineau began her autobiography in 1855 (it was published posthumously in 1877), but she lived another 21 years, producing eight more volumes of serious work, and became England's leading woman of letters, holding a kind of court at her tiny estate in Westmoreland, where she died on June 27, 1876.

Harriet Martineau 2018, Oil on Paper 28x28cm (Available for Sale)

The subsequent works offered fictional tutorials on a range of political economists such as James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Martineau relied on the works of Thomas Malthus to form her view of the tendency of human population to exceed its means of subsistence. However, in stories such as "Weal and Woe in Garvelock", she promoted the idea of population control through what Malthus referred to as "voluntary checks" such as voluntary chastity and delayed marriages. Historically she is remembered as a tough-minded writer who fought great odds to achieve a distinguished literary career.