The end of May Kendall’s life was tragic. When she died in 1943, it was in a public assistance institution and in poverty. Records say that she died with dementia and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her friends and collaborators, the Rowntree family, paid for her funeral.
There is not much to suggest what she was like as a person, but there are certain things you can glean from the little information known about her. Her progressive feminist views, the fact she lived independently and that she did not write under a male pseudonym as many female authors felt the need to in that era, all show that she was astute and independent. Her history of collaboration, particularly with successful men, meant she must have demanded a good deal of respect from them and by her publishers in order to secure these partnerships and make a success of her talents. She was a woman ahead of her time.
There is one other way that May Kendall was ahead of her time—her interest in science fiction. As previously mentioned, in That Very Mab, there were science fiction elements, but her interest in it extends further than this. In 1895 she wrote a poem called “A Pure Hypothesis: A Lover, in Four-Dimensioned Space, Describes a Dream” in which, a lover (in an imaginary world of four-dimensioned space) dreams of a world of only three dimension—namely, our own. Here are the first three stanzas.
AH, love, the teacher we decried,
That erudite professor grim,
In mathematics drenched and dyed,
Too hastily we scouted him.
He said: “The bounds of Time and Space,
The categories we revere,
May be in quite another case
In quite another sphere.”
He told us: “Science can conceive
A race whose feeble comprehension
Can’t be persuaded to believe
That there exists our Fourth Dimension,
Whom Time and Space for ever balk;
But of these beings incomplete,
Whether upon their heads they walk
Or stand upon their feet—
“We cannot tell, we do not know,
Imagination stops confounded;
We can but say ‘It may be so,’
To every theory propounded.”
Too glad were we in this our scheme
Of things, his notions to embrace,—
But—I have dreamed an awful dream
Of Three-dimensioned Space!
In another poem, “Woman’s Future”, Kendall urges women to do something extraordinary and break the boundaries of society – to use their imaginations and “invent a new planet”. Perhaps it’s a little anachronistic to suggest, but it sounds like she’s encouraging women to write science fiction! After all, inventing new planets is the bread and butter of many science fiction writers.
On Fashion’s vagaries your energies strewing,
Devoting your days to a rug or a screen,
Oh, rouse to a lifework—do something worth doing!
Invent a new planet, a flying machine.
Mere charms superficial, mere feminine graces,
That fade or that flourish, no more you may prize;
But the knowledge of Newton will beam from your faces,
The soul of a Spencer will shine in your eyes.
If May Kendall had been born into our time, with the genre of science fiction at her disposal, who knows what wonderful new planets and flying machines her extraordinary imagination would have invented.
Andrew Lang. Alas, we couldn’t source a photograph of May Kendall.
