Remembering Frances Yates

Throughout the BBC series Sherlock, the updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) can be seen visiting his “mind palace,” an imaginary building where, mentally, he stores great quantities of information. Sherlock often adapts bits of Conan Doyle’s late-Victorian adventure yarns to the 21st century—making Sherlock Holmes a chronic texter and turning Watson’s narratives published in the Strand into blog posts, for example—but a mnemonic feat like this doesn’t occur in the original stories. Conan Doyle’s Holmes compares his mind not to a palace but to an attic, an orderly one stocked only with essential data like how to identify the various types of tobacco ash, while Watson’s is a jumble of irrelevant junk like the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun. The Victorian Holmes is less the castle-ruling monarch of memory than its Martha Stewart.

Besides, Conan Doyle’s Holmes wouldn’t have had a “mind palace”—or, to use the more common term, memory palace—because this ancient technique for recalling vast quantities of information was all but forgotten at the time the original Holmes stories were written. Sherlock’s creators appear to have picked up the concept from British illusionist Derren Brown and author Thomas Harris’ serial-killing antihero, Hannibal Lecter, who uses memory palaces in both Harris’ novels and the current TV series that bears his name. Follow the motif back to Harris, and he will, at last, give credit (in the acknowledgements of Hannibal) to the remarkable and unconventional historian responsible for reintroducing the memory palace to Western culture: Frances Yates.

Yates was the author of The Art of Memory, a 1966 title that remains oddly obscure despite having been named by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books published in the 20th century. Many well-read people have never even heard of it, yet tendrils of Yates’ ideas are entwined through contemporary culture—not just wrapped around Hannibal Lecter and Sherlock. Those who have read The Art of Memory tend to become obsessed with it, and the list of contemporary authors inspired by the book is impressive: Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman, Penelope Lively, Harold Bloom, and Madison Smartt Bell, to name just a few. John Crowley wrote a four-novel series, Aegypt, based on The Art of Memory. (OK, I realize you may not know who John Crowley is, either, but you should—and Bloom will back me up on that.) The latest writer to use Yates’ learned and beautifully written book as an imaginative springboard is the British philosophy professor Simon Critchley, whose new novel, Memory Theater, is the faux memoir of a philosopher who believes he has learned the exact hour, place, and cause of his own death.

Yates, who was born in 1899 and wrote most of her major works in her 60s, had no formal education until she enrolled at the University College London in the early 1920s. (Her father, a shipbuilder, was also self-educated, having taught himself to read.) After getting an M.A. in French, she worked as an independent scholar, publishing books on Renaissance history and culture while caring for her ailing parents, until she found an intellectual home at the Warburg Institute, an interdisciplinary research institution loosely affiliated with the University College. “Warburgian history,” as Yates called it, sought to transcend nationalism by emphasizing pan-European ideas and culture. This unifying dream was exactly what Yates needed, in her head and in her heart. The two world wars had traumatized her—her brother was killed in the first, and her father during the Blitz, while Yates herself volunteered as an ambulance attendant—exacerbating her already melancholy temperament.

Yates’ illustrious friends included the likes of Franz Boas, Ernst Gombrich, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, as well as several close female companions, but she never married or had any romantic relationship that we know of. (Her diaries contain oblique references to an early devastating “event.”) A former student remarked, “It wasn’t an interesting life in the emotional or physical sense, only in the mental,” but Yates’ biographer Marjorie Jones disagrees, describing Yates as a solitary yet “passionate” figure who fits in “the long line of independent women historians of the Victorian Age who researched and wrote history on their own, outside the constraints of formal education from which they usually were excluded.” Yates, Jones also writes, was a “depressive, moody, frequently unhappy woman whose salvation until her death was incessant work and an intense spiritual life.” She died in 1981. ...