Joanna Biggs
New
York, November 2024
Dear Professor Lloyd,
You must get many, many letters like this. I write to you
because I have been shaped by your revolution trilogy, profoundly so. I
grew up in an unimportant suburb of London, far from any sort of
intellectual life. My school was down at heel when I attended but it
was once rich, and the library showed the traces of someone who knew
things were happening beyond our small town. I didn’t act in
school plays or participate in netball tournaments, I read. I read
novels composed of frigid, perfect paragraphs; wobbly, energetic
manifestos; smooth, slick poetry—and then I discovered you.
It’s no exaggeration, in a world full of them, to
say that you have been my companion these twenty years of what I
call—if you’ll forgive me—my intellectual
formation. I don’t flatter myself that you’ll
remember me from your lectures in Geneva. In June, we talked briefly
about women’s role in the late nineteenth-century
revolutions, variously central and irrelevant. It is something I am
interested in.
What is a woman for, I was asking myself then, for myself, for
perhaps the first time. I thought of many answers, but I kept returning
to one idea. I confess I was almost disappointed in it: care. Care in
the widest sense, I came to think, is about expanding our notion of
what should be recuperated, nourished, allowed to grow. What did I want
to see grow in the world? The sense of what a woman can do, certainly,
including respect and even reverence for concerns historically deemed
feminine. I do not have much hope there, globally. But locally,
privately, say?
I am 35, and ripening. I have my books, my students, my cats,
my cottage and garden, my mother and sisters and nieces, and my friends
who are so dear to me. This is enough, more than. I take my nieces to
see things: paintings, buildings, natural environments. Marking
birthdays has begun to feel as important as working on my next paper.
In this way I have been led, like a horse to water. I decided to spend
my years of thinking, reading and saving on a child of my own, and
began IVF.
I am trembling to write it, but I do think this is a rational
proposition. I am seeking a donor, and I would like it to be you.
There, I said it. You’re horrified, aren’t you? Has
the letter dropped from your hand? Pick it up again and let me explain.
At a suburban clinic, in an overlit room with a print of a
hound dressed as a doctor on the wall—hardly
reassuring—I was given a binder of men to choose from. Inside
plastic sleeves each soul was condensed to facts. A childhood photo,
their eye colour, height, ethnicity, medical background and educational
attainments. I had felt inspired until I saw that binder. I sensed I
could only go so far against the established qualities of
humanity—selfish, petty and mendacious as it is. (And short.)
My mind wandered to you. You have no children, I believe.
Shouldn’t one of the greatest minds of our time leave a
genetic trace on earth?
I do not want a deeper relationship than the one I have with
you already. My days are full and would become fuller. I do not need
financial or practical assistance, other than the initial donation, for
which we do not need to meet. I have rented a storage unit inside which
I have placed a fridge set at 20 degrees celsius, the optimum
temperature for sperm motility. And inside the fridge you will find a
sterile plastic cup labelled with your name and academic titles. My
plan is to raise the child in a circle of women, using the wisdom in
your books. No human men will be regularly involved. Those are
conditions for the child’s utmost happiness, I believe.
I’m aware that this letter might in fact dissuade
you by its mere existence. But I make this proposition, an utterly
rational one, with the earnestness my friends tell me is my best
quality. You may only say no, and then I am where I always was, holding
the plastic binder. And you might say yes!
I am visiting Geneva next month and I will attend your
lectures while I’m there. I will wear a red scarf.
Yours, in hope,
Dr Elizabeth Fowler