A seventeen-year-old girl, corseted, bored, bursting with constrained energy, sits at a dining room table amid the clink of teacups and the sounds of male conversation. The year is 1856. The girl is Sarah Goff, Lady Sarah Goff, as she is constantly reminded by her uncle Robert, who has raised her.
Robert is not happy with his ward. Women, he believes, should be beautiful, charming, and gracious. (He means upper class white women, of course, since he seldom thinks about people who are not of his class and race.)
Sarah is none of those things. Her facial features are blunt and ordinary. A childhood disease has left her with a limp and a hump on one shoulder. She doesn’t even try to overcome her “deficiencies” by becoming charming and sociable. When Robert has guests, she jumps into political discussions, boldly stating her scandalous opinions. Worst of all, she has taken to strolling the streets of London, walking among the shops and homes of the working class. “They all look busy,” she writes in her journal. “As if they had something they felt they must do, not like most people in the West End, who look as if they were lounging through their lives.”
What happens to this rebellious young woman, full of yearning, straining against what she calls “the weight of young lady-dom”?
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In 1880, a lone woman travels by horseback across the Transvaal of South Africa, carrying goods farm families need—tea, sugar, sewing supplies, dishes. The life of an itinerant trader is hard and hazardous. She travels long distances across the rugged, lonely countryside. She sleeps on the ground, two revolvers by her side, as growing tensions between the British and the Boers make danger a constant presence. Even when she’s in Johannesburg stocking up on supplies, her life is rugged. She spends her days in a shanty with two rooms, one for herself and one for her horse. Yet, her trading business thrives. She sells her wares to Boer farmers and miners and enters into a successful trade agreement with the Ndebele tribe.
Sarah Goff (she is now Sarah Heckford, having been married and widowed in her twenties), isn’t living this hardscrabble life because she fell on bad times. Back in England, she still has property, a title, and a bank account full of enough money for a lifetime of luxury. She has simply chosen a different path.
In between her suffocating girlhood and the rugged life she lives on the Transvaal, Sarah Goff Heckford scrubbed floors and changed bedpans as a volunteer nurse during London’s last great cholera epidemic.She traveled to India and Italy, learned to paint, wrote a novel, established a hospital for the poor, worked to improve working conditions for nurses, hired herself out as a governess, and tried her hand at farming. When the life of an itinerant trader became too dangerous, she returned to England to speak about women’s rights.
I am always looking for muses. Sarah Goff Heckford offers me a host of lessons, and I go to her often for advice.
What does she tell me?
Define yourself; do not let others do it for you.
Ignore the call to be proper.
Choose adventure over comfort.
Choose independence over status.
Help others, especially those in need.
Speak out.
Do not fear danger.
Leave domesticity, charm, sweetness, and pleasantry behind. They don’t hold a candle to wildness, courage, freedom, and ferosity.
Live wild. Live big.
Who are your muses? Who calls to you from across the years to live life on your own terms?
wow! what spunk…loved reading about her
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