Orphan Girl by Anna Stanisławska (review)

Anna Stanisławska (1651–1701), who also took the name of her third husband, Zbaska, is considered to be Poland's first woman poet, although as with any such classification, this is only partly true. There had been other Polish women writers before, yet Stanisławska has the privilege of bearing the title as the first one known by name whose life and career are well documented. Stanisławska's literary credentials rest on one long poem: A Transaction, or an Account of the Entire Life of an Orphan Girl by Way of Plaintful Threnodies in the Year 1685. Barry Keane has now translated and edited the poem, or rather its first and most famous part, under the shortened title of Orphan Girl. The poem is a fascinating piece of autobiographical writing in which Stanisławska gives an account of the personal tragedies that befell her when, as a teenager, having lost her mother in early childhood, she was quickly married against her will to a rich and well-connected, although insane, nobleman. The marriage had been arranged by her father, who must have seen his daughter as a burden to his political career; he first sent her to a Dominican convent and then got rid of her by pushing the girl into the hands of a wealthy aristocrat. On one or two occasions in the poem, Stanisławska calls her father "beloved," but it seems more a conventional phrase than one meant sincerely. In other passages, she speaks of having to "pluck up the courage" to approach him, hoping in vain that "he may / just feel some pity for his prey" (28). The young poet was fond of hunting, evident in her frequent use of hunting imagery and the skill with which she writes about it. Yet the reference to "prey" in the lines quoted above perfectly captures the kind of destructive relationship she had with her parent.

The original copy of Stanisławska's poem was discovered in St. Petersburg in 1890, two hundred years after its composition in Poland. It remained in Russian and Soviet hands until an exchange of manuscripts in 1934 ensured its return to Poland. Only then was it published in its entirety in a scholarly critical edition. The politically turbulent times of the 1930s were not, however, conducive to its wider reception. Having survived the turmoil of the First World War, the manuscript perished during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Several recent reprints have appeared of the twentieth-century scholarly edition. It has thus become one of the crucial texts in the ongoing process of rewriting the history of Polish literature that includes previously "invisible" women writers. Indeed, one can reasonably argue that Stanisławska's Orphan Girl, though still not well known, is an important contribution to the history of women's world literature.

What makes the poem so unusual is the uncompromising honesty with which Stanisławska writes about her disastrous marriage. She thereby makes her personal story, "the days of my bondage," an example of the fate suffered by many of her female contemporaries. Arranged marriages, aimed at creating alliances between aristocratic families and merging their estates, were common practice. The women involved were neither consulted nor listened to when patriarchs did business, as happy or suitable unions were not the goal, and a woman's preferences or even her objections were rarely taken into account. Stanisławska's marriage was one of extreme incompatibility. To begin with, she found her husband physically repulsive: in her poem, she calls him Aesop after the Greek poet famous for his deformity. Yet ugliness proved to be a minor problem; her husband was deranged, or as she described him, "soft in the head" (48). Although his madness involved acts of violence and sadism, Stanisławska manages to describe her husband's illness with detachment and irony, characterizing his behavior in a series...