Anne Home Hunter (1742-1821): Foremother Poet

As Angelica Kauffman’s depiction of Anne Home Hunter as a pensive muse:

is no more accurate than George Romney’s of Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton) as Ariadne:

I’ve led with them both as the Ariadne has become an image used for Haydn’s settings of Anne’s lyrics in a recent CD (sung so beautifully by Carolyn Watkinson, with Glen Wilson a moving accompaniment on the piano forte) to signal not to present women accurately or in terms of cliched designed to erase reality was as de rigueur or common in the 18th century as today

Dear friends and readers,

I realize that with Vic Sanborne I wrote a blog on Anne Hunter some years ago as a foremother poet, and cannot say it was inaccurate in any of its details, but since spending a couple of months on and off reading all the poetry I could find by Hunter, mostly what’s available in Caroline Grigson’s The life and poems of Anne Hunter: Haydn’s Tuneful Muse (by no means all of what she wrote at all); some essays on her collaborations with Joseph Haydn (1732-1809 (much of it beyond my musical ignorance); and two important books on her extraordinary surgeon-scientific genius husband, John Hunter (1728-1793), John Kohler’s The Reluctant Surgeon, and Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man

John Jackson’s engraving of Hunter after Joshua Reynolds’s painting (now lost),

I’ve concluded that what we wrote was nonetheless for wife and husband wholly inadequate. I’ve also concluded that although recently satisfactory attempts have been made to account for the husband’s work, Anne’s as a poet and muse for Haydn, and (it goes without saying) Haydn; this trio and especially the partnership of the non-mannered solipsistic husband and in social circles elegant wife has to be understood before sense can be made of her life, writing, poetry — the latter of which is profoundly passionate, romantic, deeply melancholy, a product of her early life as an isolated reading girl with a few friends (she lived apart from her mother and with her army-surgeon father for years in London), of Scots traditions of women’s poetry (from Charlotte Smith to Joanna Baillie), and of her years of agonized struggle alongside her husband, and his early death (brought on by enemies whose traditional power-niches he threatened). She stirred Haydn deeply. As with all great writers, what matters is the texts she left and yet to understand these one must understand what they sprung from, her psyche in reaction.

Paradoxically, this sort of thing, the deeply melancholy universally angled lyric that Haydn and other composers set to pianoforte and art songs, which to anyone who knows about her life recognizes as about her grief:

Time may ambition’s nest destroy,
Though on a rock ’tis perch’d so high,
May find dull av’rice in his cave,
And drag to light the sordid slave;
But from affection’s temper’d chain
To free the heart he strives in vain.

The sculptur’d urn, the marble bust,
By time are crumbled with the dust;
But tender thoughts the muse has twin’d
. For love, for friendship’s brow design’d,
Shall still endure, shall still delight,
Till time is lost in endless night.

In spite of time methinks I see
Eyes once so fondly fixed on me;
I hear that voice, whose magic sound
My soul in soft enchantment bound;
Again the shadowy image flies,
And every sense but sorrow dies.

is easier to account for than her multi-various oeuvre, with individual lyrics empathizing with radically reforming genius outcasts (James Barry), bluestockings (Elizabeth Carter and Anne were good friends) and numerous women writer friends, and a list of dates as titles clearly referring to a political or social quagmire of the era. “November 1784” and “Carisbrooke Castle” are poems as strong and public as anything Anna Barbauld wrote. There are numerous poems to friends, acquaintances, many upon people’s deaths. Her father had been a surgeon in the military services, she was friends or related to people working originally in areas as disparate as classic studies, painting, music, various sciences, radical Scottish thought, women’s songs. I’ve gone into Anne Grant and other Scots women writers of life-writing and prose; the writers of verse are often so stereotypical the “gentle heart.” Anne is fierce, more like Austen in that; the idiom she knew was that Jane Fairfax sings; yet as seen in Austen’s letters it was Anne Grant’s quiet conventionalism, her prosaicism, her travel writings and love of the countryside, that made what appeal Hunter had for the public: Austen never mentioned Hunter, she at least in her usual way mentions and half-derides Grant who she is reading. Anne Home Hunter’s songs were appreciated in vacuums, in song books and separately; not always recognized as hers; Anne Grant was seen as a whole and her work appreciated as by her and about her. So all the talk about circulation of Hunter’s poems means nothing as they were not understood in their true context; only superficially I’d say.

Most difficult of all, how account for Anne’s relationship with Hunter whom she seems as far from in her social aspirations as he seems close to Darwinian insights — and it was noticed the evolutionary implications of all he discovered about animals. We can observe that this unusual pair and the home they had partly led to deeply unconventional lives for her children: she writes moving poems to her daughter upon that daughter’s first forced marriage (the girl and she needed the money to support her:

Dear to my heart as life’s warm stream
    Which animates this mortal clay,
For thee I court the waking dream,
    And deck with smiles the future day;
And thus beguile the present pain
With hopes that we shall meet again.

Yet, will it be as when the past
    Twined every joy, and care, and thought,
And o’er our minds one mantle cast
    Of kind affections finely wrought?
Ah no! the groundless hope were vain,
For so we ne’er can meet again!

May he who claims thy tender heart
    Deserve its love, as I have done!
For, kind and gentle as thou art,
    If so beloved, thou art fairly won.
Bright may the sacred torch remain,
And cheer thee till we meet again!

but the girl never loved the husband it seems, soon learned to dislike him and returned to said mother; she married again, happily, but in the end she was mentally ill and isolated (John Hunter’s injecting himself with syphilis to learn about the disease destroyed their chances of healthy descendants). Anne writes her son lovingly too, to him at each stage of his life, a fine poem, but after a brief career in the military, he went to France and no longer was part of the world the mother had been; he lived with a slave (it’s said). The mother, Anne, after the father’s sudden death suffered badly from years of bankruptcy, became a governess to upper class people’s daughters for a while) until influential people helped her sale her husband’s valuable collection to an institution; her own brother plagiarised her husband’s papers and then destroyed them to protect himself.

It is this material I’ve been reading, listening to, contemplating, putting together for the last few weeks. I felt I had a clue when I began to read Violet Paget aka Vernon Lee’s studies of 18th century culture (emphasizing the arts and Metastasio’s lyrics), music and psychology. The intense imaginative reality embodied in her lyrics inspired Haydn and other composers (her work was set to other music than Haydn’s) to express and give body to the deepest currents of our being. Her fibres were the strings Haydn played upon and the combination radiates out to reach our blood pressure so the systole and diastole enact the harmonies and hard-won order the music enables us to follow.

Her husband’s spirit speaks to her: The Spirit’s Song

Hark! what I tell to Thee,
Nor sorrow o’er the tomb!
My spirit wanders free,
And waits till Thine shall come.

All pensive and alone,
I see Thee sit and weep,
Thy hand upon the stone,
Where my cold ashes sleep.

I watch Thy speaking eyes,
And mark each falling tear,
I catch Thy parting sighs,
E’re they are lost in air.

Hark what I tell to thee, &c

Then there’s The Wanderer

To wander alone when the moon faintly beaming
With glimmering lustre darts thro’ the dark shade
Where Owls seek for covert, and night birds complaining
Add sound to the horror that darkens the glade.

‘Tis not for the happy come Daughter of sorrow
‘Tis here thy sad thoughts are embalm’d in thy tears
Where lost in the past, disregarding tomorrow
There’s nothing for hopes there’s nothing for fears.

I think the way in for an argument and story is to pick up a thread and it comes from the area in her soul coterminous for what Hunter, Haydn, James Barry, and Elizabeth Carter turned to her for. Hieratic life-writing by a woman who had the idiom of Scott (wild landscape) and classical pastoral (mixed through Renaissance idioms as in Anne’s Laura to Petrarch) available to her. I carry on typing Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde and am aware of the contemporary deeply personalized romantic lyrics of the era, but Hunter appears to have kept shy of outright Revolutionary-reform idioms.

James Barry’s Distribution of the Society of Arts

I have read or am aware of all the relevant materials alluded to above, but lack some perspective beyond her as a woman poet deeply involved with her husband and family and friend’s lives. If anyone can make a suggestive, especially in a line connecting her to other women poets, Scots writers and aspects of her husband’s work I’d be very grateful. This is a blog meant to be working out preliminary thoughts. Did I say I was invited (asked if I would) write an essay on Anne and Haydn for the Haydn journal and have until March to come up with something?

Ellen