Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720): the other sources for her poetry (2)

A miniature portrait of Anne Finch when still young

You, when your body, life shall leave
Must drop entire, into the grave;
Unheeded, unregarded lie,
And all of you together, die;
Must hide that fleeting charm, that face in dust,
Or to some painted cloth, the slighted Image trust.
Whilst my famed works, shall through all times surprise,
My polished thoughts, my bright ideas rise,
And to new men be known, still talking to your eyes.
— in imitation of a fragment of Sapho’s

Friends and readers,

Well it was on June 30, 2020 that I posted a description of the four major sources of Anne Finch’s poetry as the foundation for my review of the new standard edition of her poetry by Jennifer Keith (and others), the opening of summer and hoped that in a few days I would post a description of the several other sources of her poetry that are known today. It’s now September, end of summer, with days shortening, temperatures dropping some, fall on the way. I have worked on and off all summer on this and (about a month and a half later) another review of an anthology of essays on Jane Austen and the arts. (I did teach and worked on projects, read with friends on line, wrote on the Net daily.) My problem with the review is the same: I have not the second volume, and thus many of the questions I have about the first I am told are answered in the second.

Some fundamental disagreements have led me to go back to all my original material so I can work from these if I must concentrate on just the one volume — I’ve very much enjoyed some of this because I’ve read in Anne’s sources for poetry (she writes many translations, imitations from the French as well as Italian, not to omit the Bible and fables), about women’s plays in the era, poetry by her women contemporaries, a few known to her and a few her friends. These sources will eventually form a third blog. For now the other manuscripts and printed books which contain further poems not found in the major four sources or found in different forms. I re-read and/or skimmed the books and articles I knew of, and read carefully for the first time the articles that have been printed since, especially a couple by Keith (which I found to be very good).

I’m nonetheless especially troubled by Keith’s refusal to accept as by Anne Finch unattributed poems outside the acknowledged sources, even where there is good evidence and several people (besides me) have argued in print are by her. I assume they do not print these at all in the second volume (as they do not print any in the first). On this what I can say is this erasure and refusal makes my site not obsolete; it is and will for some time still perform its original purpose: to add to Myra Reynolds 1903 edition (drawn from 3 sources, MS Northampton or FH 283, MS Folger, 1713 Miscellany, plus what she knew of of the minor others sources) and the Hinnant-McGovern edition of the MS Wellesley what cannot be easily found otherwise.

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Eastwell Manor (as it’s now called) today

The question is, what order should I list these sources in? group them as manuscript and then printed book? and within that, which seems the most important — to include poems clearly by her, some of which are remarkably good and/or interesting? in chronological order insofar as we can tell when they were produced or printed, or insofar as we can tell whether the poems by her found in them are early or late. On my site I attempted chronological order of their production/printing even if the book or ms appeared or was made late and still contains an earlier poem by Finch. I couldn’t tell when a manuscript was begun to finished so if it contained an early poem by her I listed it early. I’ll repeat that though it obscures interesting thematic connections as it’s the least subjective way of doing it.

Click on the links as you go because I have not written out all over again the detailed information on my website but linked it in here. This is the summary of all the findings from the minor sources that I neglected to write up in one convenient place at the time Jim and I built the website and I put all the materials I had on it. You will find some fine poetry by Anne and links to further poetry placed in the alphabetical index on the website.

I begin with a text and source and book I didn’t know of until I began this review, it is one that Keith will not accept as by Anne Finch:

From a modern production of Venus and Adonis — this is a highly sexual sensual work of art (see other images)

1683, an anonymous libretto for John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, a pastoral opera-like masque, French influenced, nowadays an online copy exists; the scholarly edition and everything about this piece you might want to know, especially if you are interested in its probably author, Anne Finch, may be found in James Winn’s “A Versifying Maid of Honor:” Anne Finch and the Libretto for Venus and Adonis, The Review of English Studies, 59:238 (2008):67-85.

1693, The Female Vertuosos by Thomas Wright, with a dedication to Charles Finch, third Earl of Winchilsea (Heneage & Anne’s nephew): 1 song, “For the soft Joys of Love no longer last”

1696 Miscellanea Sacra or POEMS on DIVINE & MORAL SUBJECTS. Collected by N. Tate, Servant to His Majesty. “Tis not that which First we Love,/But what Dying we approve”: Mr. Waller. London. Printed for Hen. Playfor in the Temple Change in Fleet Street. MCDXCVI. 12 poems set off from the others surrounding them by style and topic. After the 6th, the printer suddenly skips the “by the same hand”, and then returns to it for the eighth. Six are found in the manuscripts; I am firmly convinced the 6 others are also by her

1701 A New Miscellany of Original Poems On Several Occasions. Written by the E. of D., Sir Charles Sidley, Sir Fleetw. Shepheard, Mr Wolesly, Mr Granvill, Mr Dryden, Mr Stepney, Mr. Rowe. And several other Eminent Hands. Never before Printed. London. Printed for Peter Buck, at the Sign of the Temple in Fleet Street; and George Strahan at the Golden Ball over against the Royal Exchange in Cornhill. 1701. Attributed to Charles Gilden. According to Cameron, this volume appeared in July 1701. The editor could have equally been Nicholas Rowe, friend to Anne.

A very important and curiously put together anthology (someone has pulled sheets from it). There are 7 poems by her here, one deliberately (mis)attributed to Charles Finch (“The First Edilium of Bion”), and one anonymous (“The Retirement”). 2 more may be by her (To Mr Granville, A Dialogue). Several poems by Rowe, one to Catherine Fleming (Flavia) praising Finch’s “Spleen.” John Irwin Fisher has persuasively argued that the Bion translation from the French is by Anne Finch, “‘In Pity to the emptying Town,’ Who’s Who, Where’s What, and Who’s the Poet,” Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth Muenster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real (Muenchen: Wilhelm Fink, 2008):286-305; Iola Williams, Some poetical miscellanies of the early 18th century, The Library 4:10 (1929):233-37

MS Portland, Vols 19 & 20. Vol 19: 5 poems by Anne, one found no where else, written in her own hand, profoundly depressed (“The long the long expected Hour is come” — the visit was too short, Lady Worsley hurried away). These are earlier or pre=1713 Miscellany poems; this has the better version of “I on Myself Can Live.” Vol 20: 3 by her, possibly a 4th; my guess is these come post-1713 Miscellany or later in her life (when generally more cheerful)

1714 POETICAL MISCELLANIES, Consisting of ORIGINAL POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS by the best Hands. Published by MR. STEELE. LONDON: Printed for JACOB TONSON at Shakespear’s Head over-against Catherine-street in the Strand. MDDCXIV. 7 poems by Anne. Nos 1, 3-5, 7-9. No 11 (an 8th, and Sapho poem) possibly by her, and Nos 6 & 10 also. One poem to Catherine Fleming (Flavia)

MS Additional 4457: 7 poems by Anne. Around the time of the 1713 Miscellany, one dated 1715. This has a better version of the Twelfth Night poem. 2 appeared in Birch.

1717 Poems on Several Occasions, published by Bernard Lintot, London. Reprinted 1935, Pope’s Own Miscellany, edited by Norman Ault. Of 89 poems, 9 are by Mrs. Finch, 1 is placed separately, then 6 (1st calls her Mrs. FINCH, the third Lady WINCHELSEA), then an eighth attributed to her as Mrs. Finch, probably therefore an earlier poem by her which Pope took from a different manuscript collection. 3 to or for Pope. Especially beautiful “An Invocation to the southern Winds inscrib’d to the right honourable CHARLES Earl of WINCHELSEA, at his Arrival in LONDON, after having been long detained on the coast of HOLLAND” By the honourable Mrs. FINCH, pp. 118-123, found nowhere else.

MS Harleian 7316 10 poems by Anne, not all firmly attributed. Nos 1-3, 5, 9-10, 12-15. 3 poems to Catherine Fleming.

MS F-H 282, Heneage’s diary, written into a 1723 almanac. 1 poem. “A Fragment of a dessign’d Poem upon Pitty, found in a little paper written with in her own hand:’Pitty, the softest Attribute Above,’ unfinished, among her last verses. Very touching his copying it out side-ways 3 years after she died.

1724 The Hive. A Collection of the Most Celebrated Songs. Reprinted a number of times. No new poems, but found among others by Finch (attributed elsewhere) are Love’s Relief (also unattributed in 1714 Steele), 1 from M Harleian I find uncertain, and ‘Ye lads and lasses that live at Longleat’, pp. 262-4 (in MS 28101, it resembles her gay ballad to Catherine Fleming).

MS Additional 28101. 1 poem. On a Gentleman’s sitting upon a lady’s Cremona fiddle, pp. 262-64, “Ye lads and ye lasses that live at Longleat …” Possibly by Anne (see directly above).

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One of the source books Anne Finch poured over: Madame Dacier’s brief essay on and translations from what was known of Sappho

At last bringing together these printed books and manuscripts, with attributed and unattributed poems by Anne Finch (and a couple mis-attributed, as by Charles Finch or by a young child) in them all; some found in the major 4 sources or sources here (with attribution material), some found nowhere else; I see that in fact the number is not overwhelming. They are deal-able with. Having made this list in a single page format is firm groundwork, which will help enable me review the Keith volume.

There are 13 volumes, of which 7 are printed books, and 6 manuscripts. My hunch is except for the Bion (which is after all somewhat tedious), Keith will accept and print all the beautiful and fine long poems here not found elsewhere (e.g, and interestingly, all to people Anne cared very much about, To Lady Worsley, to Charles Finch, to Catherine Fleming) but not reprinting in the standard edition some of the shorter lovely lyrics and a couple of the earlier highly autobiographical seemingly religious meditations (especially 2 in the Tate) will be a loss because they help tell us about why she developed into a depressive person.

I could make a blog listing all the anthologies that Finch’s poetry has appeared in over the years and which ones, but I doubt anyone is that interested in the history of the printing of her poems — Keith’s second volume contains an essay which appears to be based on a study of this anthology tradition, which I assume will be accurate.

I will make a blog about her sources, for the sake of bringing out what she read and how large the number of her works are derived from her works (translations). She lived among books and landscapes, imagined and real. She also kept her memories and her latest poetry is embedded in the imagery and art and experience of her youth before and moving into her worst depressive years (mid-1690s to 1702 or so). But there is no hurry on this; it’s not for critiquing the volume though a lack of any realization or feeling for the woman’s real life and the deeply personal sources as well as political allegiances of all her poetry is (I think) also wanting from this new standard edition. That Reynolds did have or she tried for. I shall write about this de-personalization as an insistent erasure that disables us from making a consistent and vivid sense of her work

The Goute and Spider. A Fable. Imitated from Mon sr de la Fontaine And Inscribed to Mr Finch After his first Fitt of that Distemper

When from th’infernal pit two Furies rose
One foe to Flies, and one to Mans repose,
Seeking aboue to find a place secure
Since Hell the Goute nor Spider cou’d endure.
On a rich Pallace at the first they light
Where pleas’d Arachne dazzl’d with the sight
In a conspiccuous corner of a Room
The hanging Frett work makes her active Loom.
From leaf to leaf with every line does trace,
Admires the strange convenience of the place,
Nor can belieue those Cealings e’re were made
To other end than to promote her Trade.
Where prou’d and prosper’d in her finish’d work,
The hungry Fiend does in close Ambush lurk,
Until some silly Insect shall repay
What from her Bowells she has spun that day.
The wiser Gout (for that’s a thinking ill)
Observing how the splended chambers fill
With visitors such as abound below
Who from Hypocrates and Gallen grow
To some unwealthy shed resolues to fly
And there obscure and unmolested lye.
But see how eithers project quickly fails:
The Clown his new tormentor with him trayles
Through miry ways, rough Woods and furrow’d Lands,
Never cutts the Shooe nor propp’d in Crutches stands,
With Phoebus rising stays with Cynthia out,
Allows no respitt to the harass’d Gout.
Whilst with extended broom th’unpittying maid
Does the transparent Laberynth invade
Back stroke and fore the battering Engin went
Broke euery Cord and quite unhing’d the Tent.
No truce the tall Virago e’re admitts
Contracted and abash’d Arachne’ sits.
Then in conuenient Time the work renews
The battering Ram again the work persues.
What’s to be done? The Gout and Spider meet,
Exchange, the Cottage this; That takes the feet
Of the rich Abbott who that Pallace kept,
And ’till that time in Velvet Curtains slept.
Now Colwort leaves and Cataplasms (thô vain)
Are hourly order’d by that griping traine,
Who blush not to Prescribe t’exhaust our Gold
For aches which incurable they hold.
Whil’st stroak’d and fixt the pamper’d Gout remains
And in an easy Chair euer the Preist detains.
In a thatched Roof secure the Spider thrives
Both mending by due place their hated liues
From whose succeeding may this moral grow
That each his propper Station learn to know.
For You, my Dear, whom late that pain did seize
Not rich enough to sooth the bad disease
By large expenses to engage his stay
Nor yett so poor to fright the Gout away:
May you but some unfrequent Visits find
To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind,
Who by a tender and officious care
Will ease that Grief or her proportion bear,
Since Heaven does in the Nuptial state admitt
Such cares but new endeaments ot begett,
And to allay the hard fatigues of life
Gave the first Maid a Husband, Him a Wife.
(MS Folger, pp. 276-77, from La Fontaine,
La Goutte et l”Araignée, III:9, pp. 92-93)

Bifrons Park, Kent, 1695-1700 (unknown artist)

Ellen

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Martha Rosler (born 1943): photographer, profoundly humane, politically enlightened, educator, essayist

Martha Rosler, in front of her most recent exhibit, Irrespective at the Jewish Museum & Yale University

Dear friends,

This is an interim blog, or a blog in progress. I am not ready to write at all adequately, even in a blog form, on the life and work of the American artist, Martha Rosler. I need to read her writing more, see more of her photography as printed in books. I’ve two good books on the way(Culture Class, and a Retrospective catalogue). But having felt so demoralized by recent events in the US public worlds, and today feeling lifted up with some hope for women with Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris for his vice-presidential candidate, and listened to the various podcasts on Rosler’s exhibit online, I want no longer to wait to include in my series of woman artists at long last, someone still alive as well as right now creating art to enable women to uncover, challenge, and subvert the views of them that turn them into powerless sex objects, woman as existing only in relation to men (mother, wife, sister, daughter),and to expose war, homelessness, gender roles, commercialism, inequality, hard labor, desperately abysmal living conditions around the world. She is has been at this for fifty years. She was born and still lives in Brooklyn, taught at Brooklyn college, has been socially engaged with the communities all around.  Her official website.

Her photograph and montages speak for themselves — as pictures should.  From her Semiotics of the Kitchen:

Letter “K” (Knife). Still from Semiotics of the Kitchen, black-and-white video, 1975 — If you had to live here …

From House Beautiful, Bringing the War Home (1962-72); Images of women at home as of Vietnam and the US colonialist wars against the Southeast Asian people (Vietnam, Cambodia)

The Gray Drape

Men at War

The Gladiators

This is one she made of Pat Nixon, as the quintessential American householder:

First Lady, Pat Nixon — it’s hard to distinguish so much phoniness, so flat and abject , so pathetic a consciousness

How beautiful? what make for beauty? Rosler is much influenced by Luce Irigaray’s strategies of apparent aquiescence combine with harsh punishmentas the way of the world towards ordinary people. In her essays on art and the art world, she lays bare the class structures, the privileging, how museums and colleges can work to stifle individuals. Her anti-war work is sometimes wrongly interpreted as being against just one kind of war: the colonialist, far away. But she is ever doing is examining the material bases and left-overs from our daily lives. History and art must be inclusive: take in what’s found at Wall-Mart, low and vulgar as well as high and elegant art.

Here is a good explanation of what her collages and montages are made of:

And here she discusses the conditions of the art world in Lisbon at an exhibit in a museum the 1970s, her own attitudes and how they’ve changed over the years, and what are the conditions an artist who wants to show her work (and occasionally maybe sell it) have to deal with: audience taste, audience tolerance, the financing of art

Ellen

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Highly compromised 18th century abolitionist literature: Inkle & Yarico among many other analogous texts

The cover of one of the many renditions of the Inkle and Yarico stories

Friends,

As a brief follow-up to my blog about the poetry, letters and life of Frances Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford, I have placed on academia.edu, my review of a book published in ECCB: An Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography (Bucknell Press imprint), and link it in here:  Dominique Lyndon’s Imoinda’s Shade:  Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759-1808.

The book (I admit here) seriously angered me, and if I hadn’t promised a friend I would do this, I’d probably never have finished the book. I did a lot of reading around the book too. Then I patiently summarized the contexts of a history of very compromising supposedly abolitionist (the nice word is ameliorist) texts).

If anyone is interested, mine is a very readable review about a book justifying or explaining favorably a history of texts that are dismaying — but teach a lesson about white supremacy, a white outlook — very like Lady Hertford’s Ovidian Heriode in the person of Yarico to Inkle — Inkle has sold Yarico and his unborn child into enslavement and she writes of her continuing love for him. The irony is the man writing this book is African-American, and teaches at Princeton: the charitable interpretation, and partly probable reason for his having written this book is he’s trying his best to find something redemptive or inspiring (!) for modern day African-American scholars.  I don’t see how it seriously could be.

https://www.academia.edu/43655684/Dominique_Lyndon_Imoindas_Shade_A_Review

You have to think about what you are reading, but the analogies with many 20th and 21st century popular texts about African-America and European conflicts are there, including I now realize the very popular Broadway musical Hamilton (about which a blog will be forthcoming).

On Frank Felsenstein’s English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race and Slavery in the New World, see the comments to the previous blog.

This discreet drawing accompanied the first publication of the Yarico and Inkle story in middle class literature: there are far more salacious ones I don’t care to reprint

Ellen

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Frances Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford (1699-1754): the kindest of women, she created counter-worlds

Frances Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford by Allan Ramsay

Come calm Retirement! Sylvan Power!
That on St Leonard’s lov’st to Walk,
To lend along the thoughtful Hour
And with the gentle Hertford talk …
— James Thomson

Gentle readers,

I don’t know how many years ago it was, probably nearly forty when, having fallen (so I thought) in love with the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and come across a poem by her, to her niece, Lady Hertford (shorthand for the above longer form), so grateful for encouragement, companionship, and Lady Hertford’s love of poetry and poets, that I bought from a catalogue an old-fashioned biography by Helen Sard Hughes, The Gentle Hertford: Her Life and Letters. When the old then sturdy blue book with its yellowing pages, and (to me then) delightful content arrived, I couldn’t put it down. It is made up of hundreds of documents, mostly letters and journals written by, shall we call her Frances or Seymour (that would be the modern style) to her mother, sister, friends, poets she supported, and many of theirs to her, which altogether transmit to the reader one of the kindest of women, gentle Hertford indeed, beloved (it seemed) by mother, husband, Algernon Seymour, Earl of Hertford, beloved son, George (who alas, died at age 19), and her long-lived daughter, Elizabeth (who eventually became a Duchess of Northumberland).

An early 19th century print, picturesque framing of St Leonard’s Hill, Windsor

Although a more moral set of people (as presented in these letters) you would have a hard time finding, the letters are not sentimental, foolish, or ignorant, but filled with wit, and the lively activities of an intelligent group of people living out the privileged lives of aristocrats in early to mid-18th century England. What I especially enjoyed were Lady Hertford’s letters to and from her friends, Henrietta St John Knight, Lady Luxborough (a quietly sceptical, proto-feminist picturesque poetry writing amusing women (who dared to leave her husband (who accused her of having an affair) and live for a while in a house without glass windows or closed doors, a poet in her own right, sister to Bolingbroke, and member of the Shenstone circle; and Henrietta Louisa Fermor, Countess of Pomfret, much duller, a seemingly boring woman, but for reasons I didn’t quite understand (I wasn’t there when they were face-to-face) very well liked by Frances and eliciting from her all sorts of trusted confidences. These women also exchanged verse epistles.

I did promise myself one day I would write about Lady Luxborough, and if I never wrote the essay she deserves (she has to her credit five sparkling poems, & one longish accomplished Georgic), I wrote a foremother poet blog where I reprinted of her three poems (she was called Asteria) you won’t find in print elsewhere, two of which are beautiful and filled with a rare depth of emotional intelligence. And I wrote about Lady Hertford and Lady Pomfret’s creation of a counter-universe, places for them to resist gender and other pressures, not an alternative life but a life inside a shared community of private identities.

Tonight I want to re-create the foremother poet blog for Frances (or Seymour, or Lady Hertford) I can no longer reach (until such time as I remove my ad-blocker). I began with her two best poems, first her rightly best known and savagely (or tragically ironic) story of startlingly cruel betrayal. It is even relevant for it is based on primal racial injustice: Inkle is European, rescued by Yarico, who is African as the tale begins:

Story of Inkle and Yarico: A Most Moving Tale from the Spectator (No 11).

A YOUTH there was possessed of every charm,
Which might the coldest heart with passion warm;
His blooming cheeks with ruddy beauty glowed,
His hair in waving ringlets graceful flowed;
Through all his person an attractive mien,
Just symmetry, and elegance were seen:
But niggard Fortune had her aid withheld,
And poverty th’ unhappy boy compelled
To distant climes to sail in search of gain,
Which might in ease his latter days maintain.
By chance, or rather the decree of Heaven,
The vessel on a barbarous coast was driven;
He, with a few unhappy striplings more,
Ventured too far upon the fatal shore:
The cruel natives thirsted for their blood,
And issued furious from a neighbouring wood.
His friends all fell by brutal rage o’erpowered,
Their flesh the horrid cannibals devoured;
Whilst he alone escaped by speedy flight,
And in a thicket lay concealed from sight!

Now he reflects on his companions’ fate,
His threatening danger, and abandoned state.
Whilst thus in fruitless grief he spent the day,
A negro virgin chanced to pass that way;
He viewed her naked beauties with surprise,
Her well-proportioned limbs and sprightly eyes!
With his complexion and gay dress amazed,
The artless nymph upon the stranger gazed;
Charmed with his features and alluring grace,
His flowing locks and his enlivened face.
His safety now became her tend’rest care,
A vaulted rock she knew and hid him there;
The choicest fruits the isle produced she sought,
And kindly to allay his hunger brought;
And when his thirst required, in search of drink,
She led him to a chrystal fountain’s brink.

Mutually charmed, by various arts they strove
To inform each other of their mutual love;
A language soon they formed, which might express
Their pleasing care and growing tenderness.
With tigers’ speckled skins she decked his bed,
O’er which the gayest plumes of birds were spread;
And every morning, with the nicest care,
Adorned her well-turned neck and shining hair,
With all the glittering shells and painted flowers
That serve to deck the Indian virgins’ bowers.
And when the sun descended in the sky,
And lengthening shades foretold the evening nigh,
Beneath some spreading palm’s delightful shade,
Together sat the youth and lovely maid;
Or where some bubbling river gently crept,
She in her arms secured him while he slept.
When the bright moon in midnight pomp was seen,
And starlight glittered o’er the dewy green,
In some close arbour, or some fragrant grove,
He whispered vows of everlasting love.
Then, as upon the verdant turf he lay,
He oft would to th’ attentive virgin say:
‘Oh, could I but, my Yarico, with thee
Once more my dear, my native country see!
In softest silks thy limbs should be arrayed,
Like that of which the clothes I wear are made;
What different ways my grateful soul would find
To indulge thy person and divert thy mind!’;
While she on the enticing accents hung
That smoothly fell from his persuasive tongue.

One evening, from a rock’s impending side,
An European vessel she descried,
And made them signs to touch upon the shore,
Then to her lover the glad tidings bore;
Who with his mistress to the ship descends,
And found the crew were countrymen and friends.
Reflecting now upon the time he passed,
Deep melancholy all his thoughts o’ercast:
‘Was it for this,’ said he, ‘I crossed the main,
Only a doting virgin’s heart to gain?
I needed not for such a prize to roam,
There are a thousand doting maids at home.’
While thus his disappointed mind was tossed,
The ship arrived on the Barbadian coast;
Immediately the planters from the town,
Who trade for goods and negro slaves, came down;
And now his mind, by sordid interest swayed,
Resolved to sell his faithful Indian maid.
Soon at his feet for mercy she implored,
And thus in moving strains her fate deplored:

‘0 whither can I turn to seek redress,
When thou’rt the cruel cause of my distress?
If the remembrance of our former love,
And all thy plighted vows, want force to move;
Yet, for the helpless infant’s sake I bear,
Listen with pity to my just despair.
Oh let me not in slavery remain,
Doomed all my life to drag a servile chain!
It cannot surely be! thy generous breast
An act so vile, so sordid must detest:
But, if thou hate me, rather let me meet
A gentler fate, and stab me at thy feet;
Then will I bless thee with my dying breath,
And sink contented in the shades of death.’

Not all she said could his compassion move,
Forgetful of his vows and promised love;
The weeping damsel from his knees he spurned,
And with her price pleased to the ship returned.
(1726)

The second I take from another perhaps too long (to modern tastes) epistle, this to the Countess of Pomfret, describing Frances’s life with her husband at their country estate called Richkings, in Colnbrook, Buckinghamshire (acquired 1739)

We sometimes ride, and sometimes walk,
We play at chess, or laugh, or talk;
Sometimes besides the crystal stream,
We meditate some serious theme;
Or in the grot, beside the spring,
We hear the feathered warblers sing.
Shakespeare perhaps an hour diverts,
Or Scott directs to mend our hearts.
With Clarke’s God’s attributes we explore;
And, taught by him, admire them more.
Gay’s Pastorals sometimes delight us,
Or Tasso’s grisly spectres fright us:
Sometimes we trace Armida’s bowers,
And view Rinaldo chained with flowers.
Often from thoughts sublime as these,
I sink at once and make a cheese;
Or see my various poultry fed,
And treat my swans with scraps of bread.
Sometimes upon the smooth canal
We row the boat or spread the sail;
Till the bright evening-star is seen,
And dewy spangles deck the green.
Then tolls the bell, and all unite
In prayer that God would bless the night.
From this (though I confess the change
From prayer to cards is somewhat strange)
To cards we go, till ten has struck:
And then, however bad our luck,
Our stomachs ne’er refuse to eat
Eggs, cream, fresh butter, or calves’-feet;
And cooling fruits, or savoury greens
‘Sparagus, peas, or kidney-beans.
Our supper past, an hour we sit,
And tlk of history, Spain or wit.
But Scandal far is banished hence,
Nor dares intrude with false pretence
Of pitying looks, or holy rage
Against the vices of the age:
We know we were all born to sin,
And find enough to blame within.
(written 1740)

From an old print of a Canaletto like painting (18th century) — called Green Park — as an example of the kind of picturesque painting Lady Hertford’s circle would enjoy

This is probably as much of her longer verse epistles as anyone today cares to read in one sitting. You see how she writes in the 18th century idiom for social verse and grave narrative. She imitates Pope, the popular verse styles of her time, at the edges belongs to the age of sensibility.  She was well-read in the poetry of her period; she will quote popular poems in her circle, refer to known characters in plays (Ariosto, Otway). Also the Bible. Further below, there are some examples of her “nature poetry.”

As to her life,

She was born and brought up at Longleat, child of the children of Thomas Thynne, first Viscount Weymouth (1640-1714), very close friends to (and sometimes monetary support of) Heneage Finch, later 4th Earl of Winchilsea, and husband to Anne Finch. Their son, Henry Thynne married Grace Strode, and Frances was one of their two daughters (the other was named Mary). Henry Thynne died young (1708), and his wife, Grace, went to live near Leweston, where among others, she was friendly with Elizabeth Singer Rowe (another poet of the era). All I have read about Algernon Seymour leads me to see him as a gentle sensitive man (he was later friends with Anne Finch’s husband, very patiently enduring Druidical names as he followed Heneage about in archeaological digs with William Stukeley, a respected 18th century “natural philosopher” also interested in depressive and hysterical states of mind) and I can quite see Algernon falling in love with Frances. While the high rank and political connections of the family in general would attract, their was not much money, and Hughes and others agree that Algernon’s parents loathed their daughter-in-law. They were probably intensely into ambition, prestige, and wanted much more money that she brought. They also resented very much that she would not send her son to a public school, brought him up tenderly lovingly at home – she refused to make a macho male of him.

Algernon Seymour, Earl of Hertford, later 7th Duke of Somerset by John Vanderbank

She was only 16 when she married him, but proved to be up to the demands of saloniere (a political as well as poetical one). Her husband had served in Flanders in the army, become the a Lord of the Bedchamber for the Prince of Wales, and she was an apparent success (well-liked as usual) as Lady of the Bedchamber to the princess, late Queen Caroline. Although she could manage life in London, she preferred what was called “rural retirement.” The poets she was patron to included James Thomson (The Seasons), and Richard Savage: she intervened to help save his life when he was (rightly) charged with murder. Isaac Watts dedicated one of his pious volumes to her. There exists a playful poem by Anne Finch protesting against Lady Hertford’s orders to the minor poet Laurence Eusden (“Hartford, ’tis wrong … “) commanding him to write a poem about a wood which includes only Aspin trees and King-cup flowers. After Caroline died, Lady Hertford spent more time in the Seymour’s country residences (they had it seems three), and she became more religious after her son died (I mentioned this above), from small pox in during his Grand Tour in Bologna. Her letters to her son are all a woman could be to a son, and knowing he died, they read to me so poignantly. She appears to have disliked violence, and war. There are several extensive correspondences: she loved imaginary friendship through letters. She was loyal to her friends and great-aunt.

“Italian light on English walls” (a line by Wm Cowper): this is a Canaletto reprint of the type this milieu of people might not have chosen — there are no upper class well-dressed groups of people socializing — I reprint it for the light

Are there any shorter poems? Here are some of her verses on the natural world. She uses the artificial poetic diction of her time but I think real feeling and seasonal change, the passage of diurnal time, comes through.  One Hughes quotes written in tetrameter for autumn contains these stanzas:

The changing leaves fall fast away
And all its pride is in decay.
Where blossoms deckt the point thorn
Now hangs the wintry drop forlorn …

Along the last enamel’d mead
No golden cowslip lifts its head;
Scarce can the grass its spires sustain,
Chill’d by the frost, or drench’s with rain.

She wrote Lady Pomfret during a period of illness (1741), some verses entitled To the East Wind, which include the lambs

But shiv’ring now and dull are seen
Bleating beside the racks for hay:
The blossoms from my pear-trees fall,
And naked leave the western wall.

That wall, which us’d to charm my sight
With varied blossoms adorn’d and gay
Can now afford me no delight,
Whilst you its glories sweep away:
If in my borders v’lets blow,
You bury them in flakes of snow

And as a last pair of couplets: Verses Occasion’d by Seeing the River Kennet Frozen Over:

Poor stream! held captive by the Frost
They current numb’d, thy Brightness lost;
Compell’d thy journey to delay,
And on these desart shores to stay …

Gentle reader, you owe this foremother poet blog-essay to a maddening incident that happened to me the other day. Studying Anne Finch’s poetry as I now am, and coming across her poems to Lady Hertford, I tried to reach the foremother poet column (I’ll call it) about her that I had put on a festival of poets sponsored long ago by a listserv called Wom-po, and found that I am cut off from my own work. Yes, the site these postings now appear on goes dark, puts a rectangle in front of me, which demands I remove my ad-blocker before I go any further.

I know that Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford is not a remarkable or wonderful poet — she was a warm, eloquent and supportive letter writer and friend. She was very much a woman of her era, from the Whig liberal super-rich circles. Hughes’s book about her is a labor of love as is this blog — for who she was, and for the values she lived by as seen in her letters and journals. I wish I had a friend such as she was to hers.

Letter to the Honorable Mrs Knight,
September 7th, 1731

Say, can you seriously intend
To deal unkindly by your friend,
And hasting from the peaceful Down
Return to sea-coal and the town
Without a transient visit paid,
To Marlborough’s neglected shade?
You know how welcome you would be
To all the house, but most of all to me.

Without you come you can’t conceive
How solitary here we live;
Yet cheerfulness we still maintain
Nor of the tedious hours complain.
When breakfast’s over out we rove
Around the terraces and grove,
Where flaunting woodbines spread around;
We lift their branches from the ground,
And tie them to some neighboring lime
Round which they may securely climb;
Or end the rose-trees, and divide
The suckers from their parent side.
Sometimes, where slow the river creeps,
And Babylon’s sad willow weeps,
To see if the new turf will grow
With anxious eyes along we go;
But when we find a sod is dead
Against the bank, or where we tread,
We grieve as much to see it fade
As toasts who find their charms decayed.
Thus we divide our morning cares
Till nine; then come in to Prayers.

Next to my closest we retreat
Where, after each has chose a seat,
I’m busies at my tent, the rest
Still sit or work, as the like best,
While Clavering reads the Gardener’s Toil;
When he should plant, when mix the soil;
The various kinds of flowers and fruits,
Which rise from seeds, and which from shoots,
Sometimes an author more sublime
Amuses and improves our time …

When Clavering till he’s tired has read,
We part, and next I comb my head
Then Beachy comes with careful look
To sing a Psalm and learn his book.

Again at two to dine we meet,
Our fare is plain, our dinner neat;
No seasoned dish allures our taste
To surfeit on the rich repast.
When we have dined we sit and talk,
Our walk concluded in we come
And each go to our sep’rate room.
We seldom work by candlelight,
But read, perhaps, and sometimes write;
Till called again to join in prayer
That God would make our souls his care,
Keep us from sin and all distress,
And our approaching slumbers bless.

Then sup, and with a cheerful heart
Converse an hour and so we part.

Now if our pleasures are not great,
You’ll own at least our life sweet ….
— Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford (1740)

Paul Sandby, Englefield Green, near Egham — this is typical picturesque plus shows us how this group of people liked to see themselves …

Ellen

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The Rector’s Wife: Joanna Trollope’s re-creation of Anthony Trollope’s Rev & Mrs Crawley: a disconcerting liberation

Anna Bouverie (Lindsay Duncan) waiting for Flora, her daughter’s school bus to arrive

Rev Peter Bouverie (Jonathan Coy) waiting to be called in to be told whether he’s to be promoted or not

“the suffering spirit cannot descend from its dignity of reticence. It has a nobility of its own, made sacred by many tears, by the flowing of streams of blood from unseen wounds, which cannot descend from its dais to receive pity and kindness” (Trollope of Mrs Crawley, in Last Chronicle of Barset, “Lady Lufton’s Proposition,” Ch 50)

Dear friends and readers,

I was first riveted by this tale, Joanna Trollope’s first strong success (in every way) when, as I read, I realized she was re-creating two of her renowned ancestor’s most powerful characters, the Rev Josiah Crawley and his wife, Mrs Mary Crawley.  Joanna recreates a closely analogous pair of troubled lives in the story of the highly intelligent and well-meaning but underpaid, mildly disrespected, and therefore deeply humiliated, proud, inwardly raging the Rev Peter Bouverie, and his (up to this point) selfless, compliant, overworked and not paid at all wife, an equally intelligent talented and loving wife, Anna Bouverie.  Change the vowel sounds and you have Emma Bovary.  The allusions underline the idea this kind of story — the wife seeking independence is bored and what she needs is titillating erotic romance and seduction is misogynistic.  What Anna craves is liberty, time and energy to be and find herself. My latest re-reading of The Last Chronicle of Barset left me with a newly aroused-to-anger and hurt-for Mrs Crawley. To me she was the disregarded tragic figure (all the worse since she bought into her obedient enslavement to a will and decisions against her own) and I thought to myself, this is how Joanna Trollope saw Anthony Trollope’s frequently silenced, half-starved wife.

Joanna Trollope has given some very disingenuous interviews where she says when she began to write, Anthony Trollope (she found) meant nothing to her (Trollope, Joanna, and David Finkle. “Joanna Trollope: Family Plots with Untidy Endings.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 186, Gale, 2004. Gale Literature Resource Center).  The plot of her first novel, published with a pseudonym, Caroline Harvey, Parson’s Harding’s Daughter, and other of her early historical romance pastiche novels (using the same pseudonym), the literal happenings are very different from anything her ancestor wrote (Joanna’s colonialist, taking place in India); but names, character situations, motifs are taken from Anthony Trollope’s Barcestershire. In this one of her break-away from Harvey books we meet a Miss Dunstable, are in the familiar clerical world with caste and money problems.  I have to wonder what is gained by such denials.

To me much is lost. By reading the book as a re-write ( or post-text or sequel), Anna’s quest not just to be independent, but to stop being defined and controlled in her behavior by a category (the rector’s wife), or (generalizing out) one of many women supporting a male institution with work & a life no male would do or live — makes more sense. Joanna is objecting to the patriarchy. In the most searing and startling moments in the emotionally effective TV series (written by Hugh Whitemore, directed by Giles Forster), Anna is told she is not seeking individual liberty, to find herself, to carve out space for her to achieve some time for an identity apart from Rector’s wife & a mother). If she wanted that she would take a job more commensurate with her abilities  — as she does at the end of the book & TV series when she becomes a German & French teacher in the private Catholic school that has taken her daughter in.

No, she chooses to be a clerk in a supermarket to reveal to the world that the church establishment is refusing to pay her husband adequately, exploiting and preying on his silenced loyal family. Her closest friendship is with a woman deacon, Isobel Thomson (Gabrielle Lloyd) who confronts her with disloyalty to the church and God. Joanna’s book is a commentary on Anthony’s books & characters as her Sense and Sensibility is a commentary on Austen’s novel. It is a seriously intended depiction of people who take religious faith and their church seriously — if talking to God, discussing and acting for the church’s interests, trying to identify these are not just filler – and they are not.

Anna pushes back hard against the Deacon Isobel Thomson

It is also until near the end a defense of Trollope’s much distressed and half-maddened Josiah. We study or follow Peter becoming more and more rigid, more destructive of his own marriage, as he demands his own way and obedience to his will. He requires that Anna quit the job, refuses to because there is nothing to discuss.  He enlists sycophantic women to show Anna up. Finally he takes the extraordinary step of quitting for her.  He offends the people who work in the supermarket by implying the work his wife does is demeaning,somehow disgraceful distasteful work. Still as acted by Jonathan Coy he is suffering so strongly, aching with hurt and disappointment.  (A major theme for Joanna Trollope.)  We feel for him when he realizes he need not write a sermon this week for this is now the new Archdeacon’s job.

Anna with Jonathan (Stephan Dillane) on a bench near the Archdeacon’s home

I say until near the end, for in the close both book & movie go off the rails of a proto-feminist Trollopian fable: after all Anna falls into an adulterous love affair with the new archdeacon’s younger brother, a sexy idle university student (or lecturer), Jonathan (Stephan Dillane looking like a rock star from the 1970s), grief over which drives Peter to a half-suicide. Anna goes along with the church ceremonies but these over, professes herself so quickly (& to the archdeacon too) much relieved; it’s easier to be fonder of Peter now! She now assume her attitude, the choice of boyfriend will have little effect on her relationship with her children or their memories of their father. The last scene but one of book and movie has her sitting on her husband’s grave telling him it has all been for the best, and if he doesn’t think so he needs to be in paradise longer. The last phrase precludes the idea she is getting back at him for taking it upon himself to hand in her resignation. But there is a disconcerting lack of remorse.

Eleanor confiding in Anna during a visit, after a dinner party

Later that morning, Anne back home, waiting (again) for the bus, thinking

She now becomes a kind of guru or model to emulate for her friend, Eleanor Ramsey (Pam Ferris), a successful but bitter novelist who leaves her much berated despised husband. Brutish insensitivity characterizes other characters early on (her female rivals, her friend’s bullying ways); a kind of hard shell forms around the by this time over-serene Anna. As with her novel on adoption, Next of Kin, I felt embarrassed by the seeming unself-conciousness lack of shame with which her characters talk so explicitly and casually about their hitherto unthinkable hurtful behavior. People may think these things, but don’t often say them. I felt a oblivious selfishness and complacency in Anna’s behavior. How else escape? I don’t know.  I agree that Peter would not talk to her or respond to her overtures. I liked Anna thrusting a glass of water over Peter’s head when he continues to refuse to talk, to compromise, but can feel why so many critics and thinking readers are made uneasy by events in her novels.

Joanna Trollope has a Don Juan character, Patrick O’Sullivan (Miles Anderson) who mistakes her for an Emma Bovary and Anna lashes out more than once at him (as he does not give up easily) as arrogant and indifferently playing with her and other women. Trollope’s is a apt concise analysis of the cold egoism of the traditional rake. But her Anna is disconcerting too as she slipped very quickly into finding a lover in Jonathan. Peter is now dismissed facilely by all as having been sick — the community is let off the hook. Trollope registers her awareness that she has undermined her own book by having a comically cheerful singing rector and inflexibly bounce-y new Rector’s Wife take over after the funeral.

All this said, there is another aspect to this novel and the film adaptation that makes me want to read and see more of Joanna Trollope. The woman at the center of this novel and the film, as so beautifully enacted by Lindsay Duncan, embodied a reality and feel for a woman’s life with an unconscious self-enriched on-goingness I loved entering into. She is essentially good-natured, loving (which is why she has become the go-to person for everything in the parish and her home). The character does not look down on, is amused by what is different from her even when she sees it is someone living from a limited point of view or absurd behaviors (like the way she must stack cans on a shelf). In the film Duncan adds a sense of comfortableness in nature, with the things of society. She is so beautiful too.  I wanted to re-watch her the way I do Caitronia Balfe (in Outlander) and re-read scenes.

Joanna Trollope’s aim to give her female reader a character and experience to revel in vicariously is expressed reflexively in the character of Marjorie Richardson (played pitch perfectly by Prunella Scales), wife of a Major who has spent with him much time “in the colonies.”  Marjorie is seen by Anna as a snob, as critical of Anna, and superficially condescending from what Marjorie says and does — taken aback by finding Anna working as a clerk in a supermarket (!), saying aloud how glad she is that Peter doesn’t mind not being promoted (of course he will say that). But I noticed how the camera continually captures her standing behind Anna in church, near her here and there. After Peter’s death, she has her husband offer Anna a cottage to live in for free — a puzzling offer since it’s deep in the country, away from the town where the children go to school and lively social life goes on. Anna does not have a car after Peter totals his. This is never satisfactorily explained since when Anna comes to say no, Marjorie only says she wouldn’t want it either.

Marjorie (Prunella Scales) opening up to tell of her life

Again, after now renting her own flat — for herself and children

It functions as an excuse to provide Marjorie with an opportunity to open up to Anna for the first time. Anna learns that Marjorie gets through the day by drinking the occasional gin, and has led a frustrated non-life of the type Anne was trapped in as the novel opened. Marjorie was a category, a follower of male institutions, and now it’s too late for her to build her own life. Marjorie tells of her daughter, Julia, who, after giving her all for years during the war while her husband was away, found herself deserted and with no money when he came back and went off with another woman – and his salary. Marjorie wants Anna to meet Julia (or the other way round) and tells Anna she will be watching her in her new job and new flat enjoying from afar what she didn’t dare.

There is also some personal self-reflexivity in the film in the way Eleanor Ramsay’s books are marketed. Her name across the top, a cartoon figure of an over-feminized woman at the center, her picture at the back. In the book Anna has two girlfriends who became successful professionals, and details there suggest Joanna Trollope.

Yes it is a fantasy, wish-fulfillment, comfort novel. At the same time it is accurate to see the book and its heroine as in the tradition of 19th century domestic realism novels. Sarah Rigby writes of Anna Bouverie that she

takes a supermarket job because she needs money for her children. She could, more respectably, have chosen to teach, but the shop job seems less burdensome. The entire village (including her husband, the vicar) sees this as an act of betrayal and defiance; she neglects the church flower rota and her parish duties, and is no longer considered capable of ministering to her family’s needs. Alienated, she succumbs to one of many fascinated men, and by doing so precipitates a chain of events which leads to the death of her husband. She makes some money, moves to a smaller house, refuses all offers of help, and reconstructs her identity, to the frustration of her lover, who wants to rescue her himself, and who, ‘when he looked back … saw … her standing in a cage surrounded by people who were either longing to rescue her or determined that she should not escape’. Literature has many such heroines, trapped in stasis and admired as symbols all the subjects of male rescue attempts. Isabel Archer is one, with her sense of marriage as a safety net which would nevertheless trap her as ‘some wild, caught creature in a vast cage’.

It goes without saying that Trollope’s view of the world is not nearly as complicated as James’s, but the attraction to that security and the simultaneous reaction against it is one of her main preoccupations. As her own use of the cage image is developed, it is also subverted: ‘And then suddenly … the cage was empty and Anna had eluded all those people and had run ahead of them. … It was almost, now, as if she were in hiding, and they were all looking for her, guided only by bursts of slightly mocking laughter from her hiding place’ (Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 186, Gale, 2004)

Trollope does break taboos, while keeping her heroines safe by placing them in anachronistic environments. I don’t know if the religious belief in this one is common; there is another good mother superior nun to provide a place for her daughter, a job for her (reminding me of Mother Hildegarde in Outlander). Her heroine’s struggle is that of other heroines of women’s novels, of her readership, and dramatizes their compromised solutions too. In The Rector’s Wife, Trollope is at her best in wry undramatic dramatized moments, as we feel for her characters and ourselves getting through the anxious hard moments of our lives. In this TV series the material is the strongest in the confrontational scenes, and evocative in including shots of landscapes of southeastern England. We are meant also to revel in the loveliness of rural suburban worlds, small towns, with a sense of embedded histories of which this story is just one.

Concluding stills — Anna leaning down in the grass over her husband’s grave, and then walking back to her flat in town

I had wanted to read a book by Joanna Trollope for ever so long; her talk for the Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival got me to do it. I have her Other People’s Children, Next of Kin, and Sense and Sensibility (which I tried and now want to try gain), all picked up at used book library sales, and have now put Other People’s Children on my nightstand – next to Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard, another novelist who I may now be able to find time and room for as I have stopped spending hours driving places in my car. Middle of the night reading when I need easy company. Have I mentioned what an deft writer Joanna is, concise effective, putting us into the situations she imagines before we are at the bottom of the first page.

Ellen

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Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival (2 of 2)

Drawing Room at John Murray, 50 Albemarle Street, London

Bee Rowlatt, Dear Mary, In Search of Mary Wollstonecraft

Dear friends and readers,

I continue my account of the talks and interviews variously recorded at the Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival last weekend. We’ve covered Friday and half of Saturday, May 15th and 16th; today we’ll have the second part of Saturday and Sunday, the 16th through 17th.

I have a new observation to apply to all the proceedings: as I watched and listened I began to notice that almost all the women (all the speakers but two were women) had remarkably similar backdrops. At first, the tasteful cream-white room with its bookcase on one side, perhaps a window on the other seemed real, but a while, it could not be that all the people would be in a room with a bookcase to the side, all the rooms of a light creamy-white.

What fools you at first is they are not exactly alike. Some women seemed to be sitting and looking down at notes from time to time; others seemed to be standing up. Some people didn’t have it — Caroline Jane Knight didn’t — she came across appealingly in the way upper class Brits know how – she can tell seemingly charming/frank stories of this house as she grew up in it, and perhaps it was thought more piquant to give her as background a room in Chawton House; Devoney Looser didn’t conform either. But most did.

I now also add the titles of fiction and a brief description of one of the talks about fiction that were part of this festival in the comments to this blog — as I can see people are reading these blogs.

I began with Alison Daniells, whose YouTube went on line at 3 pm British summer time. She talked of Elizabeth Knight, who, very unusually for a woman, owned Chawton House and the surrounding properties in the earlier 18th century. She was not the elderly Knight woman who was kind to Jane Austen, but an ancestress (1674-1737) who, unlike most women at the time, inherited a vast property and its income. Despite the law of coverture (explained by Daniells) and primogeniture, sometimes a woman could end up owning a family’s property – basically when there were no direct sons or sons-in-law and when there was no entail put on the property (as became popular in the later 18th century).

We were told of Knight’s two marriages and then her pro-active behavior on behalf of controlling her property, doing with it as she wanted, and also exercising a right to vote. Apparently a woman could vote in some circumstances in the later part of the 17th and early 18th century.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) by John Opie

Louisa Albani. 5:00 pm British summer time, is an artist who created a short video where she expressed through visual pictures Mary Wollstonecraft’s experience of Paris and during a visit to Versailles in 1792. She was directly followed by Bee Rowlatt, interviewed by Clio O’Sullivan.

Rowlatt has written imitation of Richard Holmes (who literally followed in the footsteps of his biographical subjects in a book called Footsteps): In Search of Mary Wollstonecraft Rowlatt tells of her trip following Wollstonecraft as Wollstonecraft reports in her brilliant travel book, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Rowlatt did some research (though she said that was not her emphasis) and her book includes why Mary was there –- not clearly told in the superb, melancholy, and picturesque book; Mary was working for her ex-lover, Gilbert Imlay. American, then smuggling silver and goods stolen perhaps from aristocrats. She had had a baby by him, which baby she took with her, and also a maid (whose name is never mentioned). She had tried to kill herself when Imlay left her and her baby, took up with another mistress and resumed his amoral peripatetic existence. She was partly trying to maintain contact with him, but also trying to build a new life for herself, to rescue a relationship, and to explore Scandinavia, which Rowlatt did too and describes. Mary never found the silver (which had, ironically justly) been in turn stolen; the captain won a legal battle in court. Imlay was also smuggling arms out of Paris – working all ends this unscrupulous man.

Rowlatt read aloud some of the beautiful pieces of peaceful description in the book. Mary did recover her health. Rowlatt talked of Godwin’s biography, how it functioned to hurt Mary’s reputation for a couple of hundred years – myself I think she would have been erased altogether if not vilified so that Godwin’s book is not what was to blame. Rowlatt remarked that the suffragette Millicent Fawcett was the first person publicly to defend Wollstonecraft after a century of sustained vituperative misogynistic attack. Men & the upper classes in general (she was a socialist for her time, very like Paine in her outlook) must’ve seen in her book real danger.

A Valancourt book

Devoney Looser, a Professor of English at Arizona State, at 6:00 pm, “All the Janes.” She is writing a dual biography of Jane West (1758-1852) and Jane Porter (1774-50). Looser pointed out that in Austen’s era thousands of books were published and hundreds of them by women, who often wrote novels, but not that much fewer than men (men 300 to women 295). Women more prolific than men. She did not say if all these were in English.

Everyone knows about West’s A Gossip’s Story, where one of the dual heroines is called Marianne. What was interesting to me was that Jane West may also have written a another novel influencing Austen’s beyond Sense and Sensibility. (Looser never mentioned Caroline de Lichtfield, but I didn’t expect it – she may have mentioned de Stael). West though also wrote a novel called Ringrove (1827), which seems to be an imitation of Emma, the motherless rich heroine. Devoney has published an essay with someone else “Admiration and Disapproval before Jane Austen: Jane West’s Ringrove, Essays in Romanticism, 26 (2019): 41-54.

Jane Porter was much better known than Austen during Austen’s lifetime and since, especially for her children’s books and for adults The Scottish Chiefs (1810). Where she lived is now crumbling down or flattened altogether. Her sister, Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832) wrote historical fiction too. Jane Austen wrote her brother Edward about this sister’s book, The Lake of Killarney. Stainer Clarke, the librarian (the one so easy to despise for presuming to encourage Jane Austen) encouraged Jane Porter to write the same romance for the royal family and she did, Duke Christian of Luneberg.

Looser suggested had Austen lived maybe she would have changed her mind, because she liked money (the pewter comment was trotted out). To me to say this is to misunderstand the source and nature of Austen’s art. She couldn’t write such a romance as her whole stance towards life, towards what kinds of writing she could do that was valuable and she enjoyed doing, her determination to ground herself in moral comic truth by writing of what she knew, precluded such book.

*****************************

On the third night I started earlier in the evening (US EST time). Perhaps it is well to recall here that research in this library and museum from a scholarly standpoint is far more about 18th century women writers or the 18th century matters affecting women in general. For fans it’s a shrine for Austen but in the library room she is rightly and naturally among dozens of women.

A promotional photo

Caroline Jane Knight, 11 am 4th great granddaughter of Edward, 5th great niece of JA, began the day. She is probably the present heir to the house, and seems (since Sandy Lerner pulled out) to be shaping what the house will become — much more popular in orientation. She told us of how she grew up in the house, its rituals; she stressed that her family didn’t feel rich, and many branches of the Knights lived in the house at one time, each with its own living quarters, rather like a rabbit warren. Since the opening of this house to the public after the Jane Austen Society became involved and Sandy Lerner endowed it so richly for many years (herself paying for the hugely expensive restoration), the house is becoming a local community and British public community space as well as place for AGMs, Austenian and other 18th century women.  There was little about Austen’s books —  I wondered if she had read them much until lately.

In her talk she made it clear she knows she lived a privileged life. Nonetheless, the house as described by her sounded like some castle where there’s a court and everyone in lives in little crowded corners. It is true that these mansions were at times turned into the equivalent of hotels or apartment houses. She looked very strongly made, and I wondered if she rides? (is a horsewoman). She was very upbeat. See my blog on Devoney Looser’s review of her book, Jane and Me.

Caroline Knight was followed by Martin Chaddick, at noon, telling us of the supposed secrets of Chawton House –- he had photographs of the house before it was restored. First built in 1583-1590; the Knight family failed to provide an heir after Sir Richard Knight; it was passed to other branches of the family where the owner would change his named to Knight as did Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Austen, after he was adopted. He said he was researching house and its actual occupants, and started with how many had this first name and that; his work was that of a genealogist. You can read the literal history of the place at wikipedia.

In a third connected talk (about the neighborhood), at 1:20 Katie Childs and Lizzy Dunford discussed the village around the house in a similar practical local history fashion.

To turn to Austen’s contemporaries and other women writers, Kimberley James, began at 1 pm; she is the Collector and Manager at Gilbert White house. She spoke about the friendship of Hester Chapone and Gilbert White as seen through their letters. We learned of how they met through Hester’s brother, John Mulso, who was at Oxford when Gilbert White arrived. All three very intelligent people; White trained as a barrister. The two men became very close and from ages 20-70 Mulso wrote letters to White and there we find the history of this pair of people as friends. In 1745 Mulso brought White to meet the Mulso family, and Hecky and White hit it off. Gilbert tried to pursue a career at Oriel, Oxford and gardened. Hester married in 1760 but her husband (Chapone) died soon after, and she had the liberty and desire to live in London middling society where she met Elizabeth Carter who introduced her to Elizabeth Montagu; she became part of several circles of learned ladies, among them one surrounding Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa and Grandison. Mulso died in 1790 and until then his letters describe these groups of people as Hester and Gilbert interacted with them. Then there is silence.

Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind went through 6 editions; his Selbourne is a nature writing classic. I was disappointed in this talk because there was little on the content of either book, not even any quotations from White’s delightful poetry-in-science.

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We come now to the two best talks of the last day: first, with no pictures: EJ Clery, 2 pm. Professor at Uppsala and author of a biography of Henry Austen. Clery said she had come to discuss literary societies. “All great writers need a gang” she began. Literary societies are about nostalgia, purpose conservation, they have archives, a shared love of books. The Jane Austen Society (of Britain), however, began 80 years ago, with the aim of restoring the small house Jane Austen lived in with her mother, sister, and friend, Martha Lloyd, and the throwing out of a grate from a fireplace. In 1949, we find an inscription on Chawton, which commemorates when the society and hopes for restoration began. Basically we owe the existence of the house still to Dorothy Darnell (1877-1953), who founded the society in 1940; it was at first a small gathering. Dorothy Darnell was also an artist (1904-1922), studied with Nicolson and exhibited in Royal Academy of Paris; she painted portraits; Emily, a sister, married (1856-1949), went to the Royal College of Music. We are in the period of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Dorothy’s sister, Alice Beatrix Darnell (1873-1995) was made chairman. A Rev Darnell was involved too. Carpenter who paid for an estimation; the Duke of Wellington at the time agreed to have his name used in the restoration of the small building.

Clery gave portraits of other early members of the JA British Society. Dorothy knew the writer Elizabeth Jenkins (1905-2010), Cambridge educated, wrote novels, 6 biographies, a very retiring, who destroyed her first novels. Elizabeth the Great is her best known book; she worked for Victor Gollancz during the war years, and chronicles her society in her writing and editing. She had no money, but was connected to upper class people and in Oxford, Mary Lascelles (1900-1995), one of the first scholars to produce a solid close reading of Austen, involved herself, RW Chapman (1881-1960) worked with Jenkins; they wrote Catherine Mecalf, that they need trustees, wanted to give prize, to produce annual reports In 1950 came the first one: 8 pages. 1938 appeared the first published articles about Jane Austen that became the traditional article in the journals (edited by Jenkins). At some point, Edward Knight agreed to sell his house for 3000£. The rooms became shrines, but meticulous research went into the making of them.

As to the Jane Austen Society journal reports, it is regularly published, each on average 100 pages, 10 articles, reports of talk (with much solid antiquarian research), reports from groups. David Selwyn edited them at first, and slowly a house of research was built: it’s from these reports Clery’s first information about Henry Austen> TABCorley and Clive Kaplan: Corley was an economic historian, had 4 children, a widower; Caplan involved with founding of JASNA. (My biography of Henry Austen as a blog is based on these men’s essays). Then Brian Southam and LeFaye built and expanded the society more to become what it is today. She told us where we may access the volumes nowadays: http://www.janeaustensocietyfreeuk.com/index.html and memsec@jasoc.org.uk

Now a YouTube of Gillian Dow, where she speaks for herself, but I’ll add a description too in case you want some notes:

Gillian Dow, who used to be the manager of Chawton House, has returned to Southampton University, and is writing a book on John Murray II (1778-1843) and his female authors, supporters, his networks. The Office at 50 Albemarle Street is above (the top of this blog). Bryon’s memoirs were burnt in that fireplace. She went there where literary gatherings once held (and Byron’s Memoirs deliberately burnt, Germaine de Stael once there, Scott too); also did research at the National Library of Scotland. She calls these women his 4 o’clock friends. JM2 was the son of John Murray I, who started the business in 1763. Gillian Dow read the letters of the women whose books he published or who tried to be published. David McClay published a good book just on Murray in 2018.

The story: 1793 JM2 inherited the business; he established The Quarterly Review in 1809, published landmark works, among them Byron and Austen. Egerton had published Austen’s first 3 novels; 1815 she resolved to go to Murray (much more prestigious, a publisher of literary books), and was offered 450£ for Emma with copyrights for S&S and MP; she and Henry refused (calling Murray a “rogue” in one letter), and published on commission, paying for production and distribution costs. Murray also published (1804) Genlis’s Duchess de la Valliere; radical women’s books, novels, listened to Caroline Lamb; went on with travel books, Heman’s poetry, an early woman scientist’s books; Susan Fevrier, Frankenstein; he was a supportive man. So it turns out Murray was no rogue (and Henry not such a good businessman); they made much less than 450£; 530 were remaindered at 2 shillings. The women he was involved with include Maria Graham (1785-1842), Sarah Austin (1793-1867), who followed her husband to Germany, kept in touch, provided Murray with a sort of readers’ reports, for example on someone she is asked to translate (1830). A third woman, Louis Swanton Belloc (1796-18881), who wrote a 2 volume biography of Byron; she was a translator, turned Cranford into French, Maria Edgeworth. She supported her husband and 3 children, was aggressive asking Murray to support this or that woman.

In the zoom period answers to questions included: unlike Austen most of these women did not work with brothers or come with male relatives on their behalf; yes, women are more likely to be translators. Very fashionable French readers liked to read English. Yes the women knew one another.

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Joshua Reynolds, The Ladies Waldegrave (sewing), 1780

Janine Barchas, 5 pm. The lost books of JA. Prof Barchas went over cheap reprints, embarrassing covers, lousy translations (mostly French, Italian and Spanish), and unreliable texts of Jane Austen’s novels. She presented herself as caring for these books and this readership but her tone was one of laughter. She showed mawkish covers and titles, saying we should regard these books as beacons in the darkness to readers left out, readers who need a chance to rebel. She was implying ideas about the readership of such books about which we know very little. The covers amused her, as did small grotesque female dolls called bobble heads (almost memorably ugly they are so distasteful) which she interspersed with the covers. I thought about her book on Northanger Abbey from where she claims to unearth as places she argues central to NA for which there is no evidence in the book, none; they are described as seriously chilling gothic places though are in fact highly problematic sensationalized tourist attractions.

Jennie Bachelor 6:00 pm, who was the first Chawton House fellow, and is now a professor of English at Kent University. Together with Alison Larkin, she has published a part craft, part critical and historical reading book on Jane Austen and Embroidery. Wollstonecraft regarded the perpetual sewing activity by women as oppressive, but many women (she said) did and do not. Austen appears to have taken pride in her sewing, and showed an avid interest in clothes.

Bachelor went over the kinds of materials you find in (considered as a type) Ladies Magazines: novels reviews, foreign news, advertisements, fashions, plates, poetry, but also frequently patterns for embroidery, but endlessly cut out for use (with no instructions — you were expected to know what to do). Her dissertation and an article she published includes some of the kinds of fiction found in these books: in one from 1790s, tale of shipwreck, we read of a Mrs Brandon attached to a Mr Willoughby; in 1802 a Case of Conscience has a Mr Knightley who marries an obscure orphan boarding at a school. Charlotte Bronte one of the later subscribers. These issues would be bound up (rather like single plays) – they were never meant to be kept.

Bachelor said she was very frustrated because she could find so few patterns, hunted for them, and then one day came across an issue with six. She started a Great British Stitch-in –- devised craft projects for all levels of ability, skill, some patterns for historically minded, others mixed media. She showed us a reticule made from embroidery. Among those who contacted her was Alison Larkin, from Yorkshire, they met and dreamed of a book. Sections organized with histories, biography, novels – an embroidery muff makes her think of Tom Jones. Well the book happened and she was here to show it to us.

The festival for me concluded with Hilary Davidson, at 7:00 pm, telling us of her Dress in the Age of Jane Austen. She traced the changes from exaggerated fashions of mid- to later 18th to a new apparent simplicity of dress for a while, until again a new set of exaggerations emerged (1830s). Sewing was very important; these were social acts. She studied women’s account books. They bought and wore differently textured clothing. How did women keep warm: they wore flannel underwear, a riding habit, woolen dress and habit, shawls, mantles, a pelisse, a spenser. Cossack trousers came in 1810 as armies crossed Russia and vice versa. From India lace-making, net machines, silk slips. She looked at Edgeworth’s Belinda’s depiction of assembly carefully. She showed us and analysed one of the covers on Margaret Drabble’s many women’s novels of our own era.

How did people use clothes in the Regency period and just after was the kind of question she asked herself and tried to answer. What exactly was stylish and why? What is meant by vulgar? Were you self-creating or ludicrous? Clothes represent complex identities are represented: she wanted to know how women experience these identities and the clothes that projected them?

And so it ended.

Ellen

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Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival (1 of 2)

Emma (Autumn de Wilde, 2020, Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma)

Wendy Moore, Endell Street, The Suffragette Surgeons of World War One

Dear friends and readers,

Last week I was able to attend a series of mostly enjoyable and instructive lectures, talks, discussions from Chawton House for three long nights. I did not have to get on a crowded plane (for oodles of money), travel to Chawton, obtain lodging nearby (ditto), nor did I need to have a paper accepted, which to my mind for years has been a sina qua non for deciding whether to go to a conference, as I want not to wander about belonging to no one. Now I could skip that too.

It’s not that I would not have preferred to experience the place, some of the events and talk that would have gone on all around, but I have once been to Chawton, for three days, for a Charlotte Smith conference (about as perfect an experience as I’ve ever had), with Izzy, and feel I know it from years of reading, not to omit following a Future Learn on Jane Austen done at Chawton House a couple of years ago now.

Further, for me the core of what I go to these conferences for are the papers, the sessions. You see above, two of the delightful books I heard described, and the one Austen film that, together with the history of illustrations for Emma and earlier film visualizations that was included in the three day program. For today I will cover the best of the first day in England (which I experienced at night) and part of the second (ditto). At the end I’ve a video of a thoughtful revealing talk by Joanna Trollope about what actuates her when she writes her novels. I did not listen to all the talks on any of the days: there was too much to take in. You can find videos for many of those I describe below on YouTube. Don’t just skip these, if you love Austen or women’s writing and are fired into enthusiasm or (sometimes) despair at studying women’s lives.

Lockdown Literary Festival

On the first day there were 6 YouTubes, some twitter Q&As, and one or more zoom groups either for a presentation or an afterwards.
Telling hard truth: they are desperate: they lost 80% of their regular funding a couple of years ago now when Sandy Lerner in a huff (angry over something and not justifiably for real) left and took her money with her; now closed, the first speaker tells you their income is down 60%. So this is by way of showing their stuff — their place — there is a place to donate. They showed the strengths of what is available at Chawton House Museum, house, and libraries.

First, very early in the day, the Executive Director of Chawton, Katie Childs, telling briefly all about Chawton House, what she does, and their financial straits. There were two of these creative writing workshops where people are supposedly teaching those who paid for this (limited space) how to write poetry (Clair Thurlow, and Sinead Keegan). She came back later to tell of how hard the job is, about caring for this historical house (once owned by Edward Austen Knight, Austen’s luck brother, adopted by rich relatives, the Knights), the estate, the museum, the library, the events … All that was left out was the grounds.

Then Emma Yandel — All About Emma. Ms Yandel began by telling the viewer that the recent Emma is interesting for its use of costuming, for the visual presentation which breaks with traditions yet yet brings new meanings &c&c. About 16 minutes were filled with information and insight about the history of illustration: the earliest, 1833, Bentley’s edition, very sentimental, normalizing, especially revealing is the choice of scene: Mr Knightley proposing to Emma. Emma is not primarily or even at all a conventional emotional heterosexual romance; with Hugh Thomson’s comic illustrations are the first to break away into real scenes of women (which the novel is filled with), with some irony, then the 20th century took the reader somewhat further. She talked of a 1946 a stage play in London, which was all sentiment and unreality and then was moving on to the most conventional Emma (1996, McGrath, with Gweneth Paltrow) and one of the break-aways, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, when, aargh!, the YouTube broke off and some other YouTube managed to block the rest of this talk …. I have seen the new Emma, and analyzed and described it as a hollow parody in the first half, and emotionally drenched heterosexual romance in the second.

Then a superb talk by Kim Simpson, she takes care of the two libraries and teaches at Southampton University. She told of the early women’s books the Chawton House owns, showed the two rooms of 1000s of books, and then gave a talk on the development of women’s rights as a concept and reality through focusing on seven women writers whose books she curated an exhibit in 2019 about — and including their associates, books they were responding to, and other books along the way. Each of these women that she chose was carefully selected and her work presented intelligently: Jane Austen, Persuasion was quoted (the pen has been in men’s hands), Bathsua Makin (a midwife), An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), Sarah Fyge Egerton, The Female Advocate, written when she was just 14; Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1700, though she wrote a lot about setting up a college for women, on behalf of educating women, Mary Chudleigh (1655-1700), A Defense of Women; Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) for her letters and for founding a sort of society of bluestockings, Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, A Journey through every stage of life (1754), Madame de Genlis (1746-1830), the books that Jane Austen read or mentioned; Catherine Macaulay (1731-91, Her Letters on Education (1790).

The intellectual treat of the day was Wendy Moore whose books I have read and admired: especially Wedlock about the abusive marriage Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore endured. Moore writes eloquently, insightfully, passionately. Her talk was on the first women’s hospital at Endell Street, which was created by two courageous women doctors during the first world War in London. At first rejected, then after much struggle and using what connections they had from their education and background, they were allowed to set up a hospital that became one of the best hospitals in London — staffed entirely by women. They were there for the Spanish flu. Then in 1818 ruthlessly disbanded, the women driven away back to their homes. A tragic waste after their heroic admirable successful endeavour. She has been interested in all her work in the history of medicine and exposing violence inflicted on, and exclusions of women from any money, power, ability to choose a life. The suffragettes were done justice to — ironically no longer done in many accountings of suffragettes. They were violent! how could they? only suffragists are nowadays spoken of as acceptable. A rare spirit pushing back is Lucy Worseley. Moore provides the solid research. I quote from Anne Kennedy Smith’s review of the book in The Guardian:

In 1920, as part of an exhibition on women’s war work, the Imperial War Museum planned to display a sketch of a busy operating theatre at Endell Street Military Hospital in London. The hospital’s commanding officers, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, were furious, convinced that the depiction of a discarded splint and other clutter would damage the future professional reputation of women in medicine. “We would rather have no record of our work than a false record,” they raged.

One hundred years on, this compelling book at last gives Endell Street its due. It’s the story of the remarkable wartime contribution of two medical women who, as active suffragettes, had previously been enemies of the state. Life partners Murray and Anderson were qualified doctors who met while waging a women’s war against the British government. Anderson refused to pay tax and spent four weeks at Holloway prison after smashing a window in a smart part of London in 1912. Murray risked her medical career by speaking out against the force-feeding of suffragette prisoners.

The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave them the opportunity to take a different sort of radical action. Together they organised the Women’s Hospital Corps and set up a hospital in a luxury Paris hotel. There, amid the chandeliers and marble, they operated on wounds caused by shell fire, used primitive x-rays to locate bullets and shrapnel, and treated gas gangrene and trench foot. The taboo on female doctors treating men vanished overnight. Reports of the women’s success reached the War Office, and in early 1915 Murray and Anderson were invited to establish a large new military hospital in central London.

There was a comedienne, Alison Larkin, who made me laugh; then a writer of Austen post-texts, Natalie Jenner. It was too late at night to listen to her; I’ve since read about her book and discuss Jenner in the comments to my second blog.

Last Joanna Trollope — I’d never seen her before. How personable she is, how she knows how to make herself appealing, I thought. She tells of her motives and what more deeply actuates her in writing the kind of realistic domestic romances of family life in contemporary life that she has for some 30 years. Her first commercial success was apparently The Rector’s Wife (which I am now reading, as a result of listening to this talk). She did real justice to the genre she writes in. I so appreciated this. She then told of her most recent novel, Mum and Dad.

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On the second night I meant to watch or listen just to two talks, and I ended up listening to almost all of them – though not in the order they were put online. In my judgement there were several highlights as talks and for the content in this earlier part of the second set of talks, especially Rebecca James and Julia Wheelwright. At the end of the day/night Devoney Looser (like Gillian Dow), as something of a Janeite star, I’ll save for the second blog. For entertainment and charm on the second day, I’ll focus pick Bee Rowlatt “following in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft.” So here I’ll stop at Wheelwright, moving for the second blog to the later sessions of the second day featuring both Rowlatt and Looser; and for the third day Gillian Dow and Emma Clery. This time I got the time down they spoke.

Theresa Kiergan, a Northern Irish poet, and Lisa Andrews, a journalist who has worked in TV. 11:0 am British summer time. They met while both were working on 26’s 100 Armistice Project. This was about poetry inspired by women refugees, and Kiergan’s has researched and written about the exodus of Belgian into Northern Ireland in the 1940s. 16,000 people, and they were welcomed (a far cry from today). KIergan singled out one woman who did embroidery; one piece of this material she did has survived. Many of the women would have been lace makers

Clio O’Sullivan, communications and publications manager at Chawton, noon British summer time. She told of an exhibit she curated, which she was heart-broken over when it was about to be made public and all was locked down (March): “Man Up! Women who Stepped into a Man’s World.” The title and the way it was described would have put me off but she was such a good interviewer that I was curious to begin her talk. It turns out it is an excellent exhibit and they have done all they can to make it available online. She researched and produced materials (books and other artefacts) about “Miss Betsy Warwick, the Female Rambler,” the “Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke” (daughter of Collie Cibber who disowned her – O’Sullivan did not bring in her family), Hannah Snell who joined the army and navy by dressing as a man. Elizabeth Knight (see below – a property owner), George Sand (O’Sullivan has an interesting image of Sand I’d never seen before – very austere, man-like but yet a woman), Mary Ann Talbot, who joined the navy (another cross dresser), the Brontes, Mary Wollstonecraft and a reverse case where a man, Chevalier d’Eon dressed as a woman, Mademoiselle de Beaumont. Hers were stories of soldiering, piracy (!), duelling, acting, ballooning, — and writing. Without the writing we would not know of them. She showed pink as a background to defuse or change the stigmata surrounding the colors.

Rebecca James, at 20 after 12 British summer time. Hers and the next talk were the two best of the whole of the second day. I am so glad that I did listen to O’Sullivan or I might not have gone on to these two. They are not frivolous or silly or popular unrealities. James’s topic was titled: “Women Warriors of the Waves.” The actual subject was the literature of piracy in the 18th century, which she has been studying (half a century ago Richetti wrote about the popular literature on this topic, with no women mentioned). Her two central women are Mary Read and Ann Bonny. There are printed books about these women and documents which repay study: She first discussed The Tryals of Jack Rackam and Other Pirates (printed in Jamaica 1721). In this book the woman are described as disguised like men, but clearly women in disguise, the pictures show their bodies, their breasts. They are presented as fierce, ruthless, violent, unafraid. Then, A General History of Pirates, 1724, with the central characters being “the remarkable Actions and Adventures of Mary Read and Anne Bonny. It’s said to be by Charles Johnstone, perhaps a pseudonym. She talked of the subsections in which we find the stories of these two women. In these the women are really trying to pass as men and behave as men and today one can read these stories about as about women who wanted to have sex with other women. Mary’s story (as told) begins with her entering the male world, but Anne Bonny’s with her in childhood; both story matters emphasize that the girls were when young dressed as boys, and to an extent it is implied they cross-dressed at first due to the circumstances of their families. They were arrested and accused of enough crimes so they could be executed, but both successfully pled their “bellies” (they were pregnant?) and escaped the gallows. She cited one article, Sally O’Driscoll, “The Pirate Breast,” The Eighteenth Century, 53:3 (?):357-79.

Claire in The Search (Season 1, Episode 12, Outlander), one of my favorite sequences where she dresses like a man and sings and dances and rides through the Highlands in her search for Jamie with Murtagh (his best friend, a father-figure) by her side

One of the most striking things about James’s illustrations is how the women were depicted reminds me of the way women in action-adventure costume dramas are depicted today. She showed pictures from a series called Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag on Starz. This is the first time I’ve seen any show that resembles Outlander in any way also on Starz. On a channel called Ubisot, the women are deadly and fierce. Since I’m an addict of Outlander it fascinated me to see that for the first two seasons and part of the second when Claire (Caitriona) dresses as a man it is always clear she is a woman and the way she is costumed recalls some of the images James showed; she is disguising herself for protection; she can be violent and fierce in self protection but by the end of the second season she is working as a nurse caring for all people. By contrast, although in the last episode of the 5th season of Poldark, where Debbie Horsfield has no source whatsoever she attempts to turn Graham’s far more “womanly” heroine Demelza into violent male-dressed woman (it doesn’t work) until then Demelza never looks like any of this material although the circumstances of the costume drama include scenes at sea, and violent scenes of class warfare.

Julia Wheelwright at 2:00 pm British summer time. Her topic was “Masquerade: women of the 18th century dressed up for profit, adventure, liberty.” This too was not the actual theme. Her book is titled Sisters in Arms, and it covers women’s history from classical times past the 18th century. I can’t begin to include all she said or suggested. She too made central use of the lives and stories told about Mary Read and Anne Bonny. I was very interested in her accounting for the myth of the Amazons: she suggested it was a result of Greeks whose writings were transmitted to Western culture, coming upon tribes of peoples (Scythians) where the women did have male fighting roles, and so astonished were they made the stories into something supernatural, glamorous. She told of how Mary Read was Irish originally; not only did she dress as a boy, but she eventually married, had children, went to Jamaica. Mary Read we know died many years later, but Anny Bonny just disappears from history. Hannah Snell was a real woman, she was on the stage for some time, she had brother-in-law names James Grey, she seems to have dressed as a male to escape the roles she was given as well as her family; she would desert after a while. Her biographer, Martha Steevens (?) says the Duke of Cumberland pensioned Hannah; she was married 3 times, had children, but ended in mental illness, in Bedlam, died a pauper in its hospital. Mary Anne Talbot, another told stories about: her details are not born out by documents Best documented from the 18th century is one Mary Lacy, a female shipwright,and chandler.

I donated $50, bought a used copy of Endell Street, and found (with a friend’s help) the 1990s BBC series on YouTube, The Rector’s Wife, with one of my favorite actresses when she was young, Lindsay Duncan in the role of heroine, Anna Bouverie.

(To be cont’d & concluded in my next blog)

Ellen

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Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun (1755-1842): ancien regime artist-networker par excellence, a traveling mother-daughter act, memoirist

One of many self-portraits

“I have to work like a slave to keep myself, my daughter, her teachers, the maid, a domestic, a carriage, a cook, a household and, finally, to cover the perpetual expense of travelling. What would I have done without my work? If I had been ill, you would have let me starve; since instead of saving money you have spent it on women who deceived you, you have gambled and lost, Monsieur; a thousand and one people have told me that you see me in your own image, but I am not you. I will neither let my fortune fall into the hands of strangers, since it has been too hard to earn and I do not know a single person low enough to profit by it, nor will I take advice from anyone.”

“[I] cared so little for money that I scarcely knew the value of it … my closest friends all know that M. LeBrun took all the money I earned, on the plea of investing it in his business. I often had no more than six francs in my pocket … the Princess Lubomirska remitted twelve thousand francs to me, out of which I begged Mr LeBrun to let me keep forty; but he would not let me have even that, alleging he needed the whole sum for a promissory note … “

Friends and readers,

In her fine aesthetic and feminist study, Mary Sheriff labels our heroine The Exceptional Woman, with a subtitle pointing us to “the Cultural Politics of Art” (University of Chicago Press). This in a period where we find successful professional woman artists (Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Angelica Kauffman, Ann Vallayer-Coster, Mary Beale, Maria Sybilla Merian, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Rosalba Carriera, to name only a few and keep within the 1660-1815 tranch. Even in this rich Enlightenment interlude for women, Vigée-LeBrun’s output of paintings (in the hundreds), her extensive network of well-known patrons, supporters far flung across Europe, the money she clearly made to support a very comfortable upper class life-style, and unashamed self-promotion, makes her exceptional and important.

Yet there are similarities: in common with a number of women artists, early on she assumed an independence from her husband, in effect lived the life of a single woman (even if she had a husband in tow she was the money-earner). The woman with a career, the professional was often a woman with no husband to support her.  She exploited (did not thwart or ignore or defy) stereotypes of ideal womanhood:   she acted out myths (the genius child, treated as an equal by aristocrats, self-taught, it was her father who encouraged her). As with her portraits of herself, those of her with her daughter, Julie, are very much posed, & transparently pointed, so I’ve chosen one just of Julie as less common:

Just Julie LeBrun (eventually Nigris)
The mirror image resembles Elisabeth’s face closely

She frequently flattered her clients, especially women where she repeatedly gives them expressionless un-individuated faces (to the point, they can look like dolls and could have been left blank)

Caroline Murat (wife of King of Naples, one of Napoleon’s generals, 1806) — often LeBrun gives women hefty arms whose structure shows a lack of anatomical care

If I seem hard on her, it’s because I believe we do an artist no favor except we offer careful analyses. She is a wonderful colorist, and can capture psychology in a face when she wants to, is especially acute painting male artists she sympathizes with,

Hubert Robert (1788)

She suffuses those she loves with deep sensuality, her brother’s skin breathes at us

Etienne LeBrun, Portrait of the Artist’s Brother (1773)

If you want to see just what a genius in the areas she is superb in, look at this album of images from Female Artists in History: a number are not well-known

Daughter of the actor, Caillot, 1787

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What differentiates her — almost unique for women as such from before the 19th century: she wrote and published herself before she died, a 2 volume autobiography, Souvenirs, and once the revolution “hit,” and she fled, discovered liberty and enjoyment in traveling about (rather like a tourist at times). If this blog can contribute to the numerous articles and some book-length studies (don’t miss Gita May’s; a third is Angela Gooden’s The Sweetness of Life, which I have not read), and catalogues from exhibits, I can point out to those just discovering her, the readily available Memoirs of Madame Vigée-LeBrun translated by Strachey, is a very much abridged, censored (expurgated) and poor translation of the Memoirs.  Avoid it.  Souvenirs must be read whole to appreciate the artist and woman: in the original French, Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, Souvenirs (1 & 2), ed. Claudine Hermann (Des Femmes, 1986), Englished by Sian Evans and published in the UK in two volumes (Camden Books, 1989, ISBN 0948491396).

If you obtain and the whole two volumes (whether in English or her French), you emerge with understanding and appreciation of the real hardships the woman knew (however she denies this), and how she can show real insight into all sorts of situations (from a young age), places, landscapes. Her book opens with 12 letters to a trusted friend, Princess Kurkan, then 32 chapters of a chronological life, 9 letters to another woman friend, a Polish princess, Helene Massalska (married into Potocka family), 3 more chapters bringing us up to the last phase of her life (she was 80 when she wrote the book), and closing with ten witty portraits, notable personalities (Benjamin Franklin, Talleyrand, Madame de Genlis, Voltaire, David among them).

The story line of the middle chapters of the book are travel literature under pressure. She flees the revolution across the Alps, across Northern Italy (Venice, Milan), until she gets to Rome where she tries to recreate the life she had known in Paris (complete with salon and hard work in a studio) then, without much explanation for the move, south to Naples, where she met and painted Emma Lady Hamilton,

Lady Hamilton as Sybil (this is typical work for LeBrun)

There follows a long interesting time in Russia where she made many friends (St Petersburg and Moscow), and finally (when it was safe), home to France, but not to stay put as yet: she then has an interlude in England where she again meets the gifted, rich, intelligent (a delightful section, evoking London), and re-starts her career once again, and finally back to France for retirement in Louveciennes (yes where the Impressionists settled and painted later in the 19th century), with trips to Versailles. Here is just one of the countless portraits she did (she would have liked to do landscape she said, but there was no money in it) during her travels:  the brilliant: Count Giovanni Paisiello, seeming rapt while in mid-action at the clavichord

Giovanni Paisiello, 1791

As with so many other women artists of the 18th century, her art is as good early on as it ever gets to be.

She had gotten along very well with Marie-Antoinette, painted her numerous times — why her life was in significant danger. It’s not a feat for her values are the values of these aristocratic women and men — that’s why starting in the 1790s she floats through Europe almost at times as if there had been no revolution — while taking advantage of it – she divorced her husband in 1794.

Just be careful to take with a grain of salt some of her assertions and some of the more spectacular scenes. She mis-characterizes most reactionary people, with an eye continually to dismiss anything smacking of reformism. She does have encounters with the destitute: there is a graphic description of poverty in Letter 10, where Vigee-Le Brun writes about visiting the poor with her friend, the middle-aged and increasingly eccentric Mme Dubarry, who, Le Brun says, was herself from “the bottom of the social ladder”.

“We often went together to visit some poor unfortunate, and I still remember her righteous anger one day when she came upon a wretched woman about to give birth with nothing to alleviate her suffering. ‘How is this!’ cried Mme Dubarry. ‘You have neither linen nor wine nor broth?’ ‘Alas! Nothing at all Madame.’ Straightway we returned to the chateau; Mme Dubarry called for her housekeeper and other servants who had not carried out her orders. I cannot begin to describe the fury with which she spoke, while ordering them to pack a bundle of linen for the poor sick woman as well as some soup and Bordeaux wine.”

This is a Lady Bountiful scenario, but the “anger” and “fury” does show an awareness of the social problems, and there isn’t much feeling that the broth and wine will put anything right. For herself, her misfortunes (in Russia) are physical: she cannot bear and makes us feel the cold — or noise when it disturbs her concentration when working and needed sleep. Whenever she finds someone who is pro-revolutionary and can point to where some aristocrat gave him or her a present, or bribe or job, she points this out. The whole point of the revolution was to destroy this way of getting on and substitute meritocracy, skill, education, to get rid of this kind of rottenness.

Some examples: There are the parties she puts on or attends where the conversation is always of the highest order. She claims to be the originator of a few new hairstyles and or fashions. The adoption of green veils in Naples quickly imitated. She invents novel entertainments for her guests which are well received.

In Venice when the Doge drops a ring into the water, we are told a thousand cannons fire “instantly.” Did Venice possess a thousand cannons. Venice itself was not fortified though there may have been surrounding forts. The Mediterranean powers did not use the large warships like the British, French, ans Spanish in the open Atlantic, which could carry 80 guns. They mostly used comparatively small galleys (oared with a single mast and sail). No matter how the cannons are arranged, it is not possible for them to be situated in such a way that all gunners could see and immediately respond to the Doge’s action. It’s unlikely more than one side of one ship could easily see the Doge’s action. Even without projectiles in the cannons, you don’t want to be in front of them when they are fired. Ships would need to be lined up end to end or be quite widely spaced. If land forts were involved there would be separations measured in miles. Most likely one ship would be close to the Doge with either the bow or stern nearest and an officer relaying an order to fire. Other ships or forts would react to the muzzle blasts or sounds of the first cannons fired. We all know about the delay of thunder from lightening strikes. If there were a really large number of cannons, the first volley or two would be fairly distinct, given human reaction time, but would quickly build to a cacophony as more distant cannons were fired.

Her daughter is nothing less than a genius of exceptional merit. If it wasn’t for these revolutions coming along and spoiling things (and the inferior husband), her life is at times near perfection.You must be alert to the reality she is not reliable. But like Angelica Kauffman, Vigee-LeBrun shows more or less truthfully how professional women artists had to present themselves, to avoid accusations of sexual transgression. As a woman living apart from her husband, she was accused of having affairs, early on with Charles Alexander de Calonne who looks very sweet-tempered here.

Charles-Alexander de Calonne, 1784

We might think maybe she did; but I get the feeling she is too cunning and hard to let go in this way, even if for those who knew how, contraceptive techniques of various were available (just kidding). For a reading of these Memoirs, see Jean Owens Schaefer, “The Souvenirs of Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun: The Self-Imaging of the Artist and the Woman,” International Journal of Women’s Studies, 4:1 (1980):35-49.). We must not attribute too much calculation or control: hers was a life of wandering exile and self-containment, with a daughter by side, and later (when the daughter was estranged) two nieces by her side, Caroline de Riviere, Etienne’s daughter, and Eugenei Le Franc, who showed a talent at portraiture. She outlived many of her friends as well as her daughter.

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Out of the literature about her, I pick two strains or themes an observer or reader might follow. First, many art critics are taken by her work and write beautiful art criticism, pleasurable to read. Julian Barnes puts me in mind of Diderot: from an exhibit he saw at the Grand Palais (quoted from the London Review of Books:

She was very accomplished, excellent at flesh and all the varieties of material that covered it: the muslin and lace, the satins and silks, the straw hats and the flowers that lodged in them; she was good at and with children. She was also very professional, knowing how to disguise physical fault and accentuate any hint of beauty; she knew the most winning relationship between parted lips and visible teeth. She pleased her sitters; her sitters pleased her. She was expert at a kind of formal informality. In this, she resembles Cecil Beaton at the court of the young Elizabeth II: both produced a very highly worked art whose intended effect was of naturalness. She was very French. She spent three years in England, much of it – from Matlock to the Isle of Wight – reminding her of Switzerland. When visiting Bath she thought the city’s effect from a distance was ‘immense’; but up close, you realised its architecture ‘was not in good taste’. She also complained of Reynolds’s art that it was somewhat ‘unfinished’. Her own painting is always, always finished.

A tension between artifice and naturalness: this is where her art comes from, and what it delivers. The clothes are loose, the hair usually unpowdered, the pose informal, the smile of just the right size. All her aristocrats look noble, all her mothers devoted, all her children cute; even the background furnishings and fittings are loyally supportive. The charm is tremendously calculated. And charm is dangerous, double-edged. Take one of the century’s most famous portraits of a child, her Alexandrine-Emilie Brongniart of 1788, now in the National Gallery in London. This seven-year-old girl is all in white, a pocket minuet of muslin and silk, while her auburn curls escape from a knotted white scarf. She is rummaging in a sewing bag from which she has just removed a red ball of wool. Naturally – or rather, ‘naturally’ (since she would ‘normally’, i.e. in ‘real life’, be looking where she is rummaging) – she fixes us with big round eyes and a cautious, disarming half-smile. There are no two ways about this picture. Either you want to adopt this adorable bundle of girlhood; or else you want to strangle the knowing little moppet.

I don’t have copies of these, but invite my reader to contemplate this remarkably warm picture: the lady has suspended her reading for “a few moments of thoughtful reflection” (see May, pp 136-38). Look at her dress, the colors, the textures of things, the symmetry of relationships

Princess Catherine Dolgorouky (1796?)

Her relationship with her daughter repays study as well. What we discover counters or contradicts the continual pairing in LeBrun’s paintings of the two as intertwined lovingly A brilliant essay by Katherine Ann Jensen, Marriage, and Nostalgia: Mother-Daughter Relations in Writings by Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 19:2 (Autumn, 2000):285-313, traces the early devoted relationship of mother and daughter, an apparent deep bonding. The assumption is that Julie will mirror her mother, and her life be shaped by her mother’s values. In fact, Julie broke away rather early, defying her mother’s choice of a husband for her and hard-working way of life. LeBrun wanted to validate her success through making her daughter secure, by marrying her to rank, money, high gifts; she saw Nigris, the secretary of a family friends as “un homme sans talent, sans fortune, sans nom.”

Perhaps LeBrun was trying for Julie, to lead her to create an independent sense of self through a partner who would place her high in society and enable her to thrive there, create a self as she, Elisabeth, had; or, she wanted to retain control over the girl by marrying her to her own candidate. Her husband sided with Julie; she could not convince the girl herself that Nigris would not make a good partner, would not bring happiness. LeBrun felt bitter, blamed the governess, blaming reading romantic novels (Nigris looked like a “pale” melancholy hero). And so they parted, mother and daughter. But the girl did not build a different self. Nigris turned out to be a man much like her father: gambled, went to prostitutes. What we should pay attention to (I think) is the misfortune did not eventually bring mother and daughter together as sometimes happens or might have been expected. Julie did not try to re-join her mother, she left her husband seven years later, and stayed proudly away; we are told that fifteen years later (at age 39), she somehow grew sick (lost weight) and died.

The interest for Jensen is that in what actually happened insofar as we can judge it does not cohere with Freudian style paradigms of parent-child symbiosis; the mother-daughter paradigm so typical of women’s art, women’s writing is still somehow central but we have not understood it for real, the true nuances of developing relationships.

This is Elisabeth’s study, a drawing of Marie Antoinette’s baby for the famous picture of Antoinette as mother in grandiose dress with her children all about her

There is so much material, so many pictures to explore and to learn, just add diligent work in archives and/or studying the art and norms of France and other women artists and writers in this spectacularly changing era. Gentle reader, as Goodden doubtless suggests, Elisabeth is great fun, and you will have much pleasure, learn a lot about a woman’s life, art, and this era.

Ellen

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Catherine Clive (1711-85): singer-actress & writer, a woman immersed in the theater worlds of her era

Catherine Clive as Mrs Riot by Peter Van Bleeck (in the Garrick Club) (detail enlarged)

Friends and readers,

I am delighted to be able to say I’ve put onto academia.edu, a review I wrote a couple of months ago of Berta Joncus’s Kitty Clive, or the Fair Songstress . I had hoped to attend the ASECS meeting in St Louis this past March, and was looking forward to seeing it published in the spring 2020 issue of the Intelligencer — right around the time of the conference. I was also to give a paper on historical fiction in the 18th century: Wheelchairs and Vases (on Daphne DuMaurier’s The King’s General and Susan Sontag’s Volcano Lover), but like all the world (it seems), in the interests of protecting literally thousands and thousands of lives from a deadly and high contagious virus, the meeting was called off and I have been “sheltering in place” since March 13.

An 18th century illustration, said to be the house in Twickenham where Clive lived out her later years

Seven years ago I wrote a blog on Clive as an actress and writer, a woman who built a highly successful career in 18th century theater: I hope I have now deleted that blog because I realize how inadequate it was: for a start, I did not realize to what extent Clive built her success on her singing and musicianship. The blog was part of series of blog-essays on actresses, artists, and women poets, which I resumed doing a couple of months ago, and now add a much shortened (& corrected) version of.

If my reader has read the review, and is (I hope) going to get the book and read a few of the essays of and by Clive available, perhaps the thing I can do here is add to it a sense of Clive’s inner life at its charming best: on stage. To convey her the persona or personality her audience supposed was hers I begin with two epilogues written for and/or by her. It was a central convention of the era for star-actresses to address the audience before or after the play in ways that introduced or satirized the play they had seen, presenting an ironic under-self, a hidden laughing sub-self who mocked and replayed the character the actress had just personated in familiar (supposedly non-fictional) ways.

We begin with an epilogue spoken at the end of The Apprentice by Arthur Murphy, an 1756 after-piece for Southern’s Oroonoko (tragic-poignant). This one is attributed to a friend (as some of her pieces also were) but is written as if it were by her, identifying the speaker’s attitudes with that of a another hard-working girl. Note how Clive addresses the audience rebarbatively, partly identifies with the milliners, qualified by sharp hard ironies towards women spending their lives in virtuous low paid hard work, and the many ironic and celebratory references to familiar characters of the Shakespearean and 18th century repertoire (some of which she would have played):

EPILOGUE written by a Friend , spoken by Mrs. CLIVE.

[Enters reading the Play-Bill.]
A very pretty Bill,—as I’m alive!
The Part of—Nobody—by Mrs. Clive !
A paltry, scribling Fool—to leave me out—
He’ll say perhaps—he thought I could not spout .
Malice and Envy to the last Degree!
And why?—I wrote a Farce as well as He.
And fairly ventur’d it,—without the Aid
Of Prologue dress’d in black, and Face in Masquerade;
O Pit—have Pity—see how I’m dismay’d!
Poor Soul!—this canting Stuff will never do,
Unless, like Bay’s, he brings his Hangman too.
But granting that from these same Obsequies,
Some Pickings to our Bard in black arise;
Should your Applause to Joy convert his Fear,
As Pallas turns to feast— Lardella’s Bier ;
Yet ‘twould have been a better Scheme by half
T’have thrown his Weeds aside, and learn’t with me to laugh.
I could have shewn him, had he been inclin’d,
A spouting Junto of the Female Kind.
There dwells a Milliner in yonder Row,
Well-dress’d, full-voic’d, and nobly built for Shew,
Who, when in Rage, she scolds at Sue and Sarah ,
Damn’d, Damn’d Dissembler !—thinks she’s more than Zara
She has a Daughter too that deals in Lace,
And sings—O Ponder well—and Cherry Chase ,
And fain would fill the fair Ophelia’s Place.
And in her cock’t up Hat, and Gown of Camblet,
Presumes on something— touching the Lord Hamlet .
A Cousin too she has, with squinting Eyes,
With wadling Gait, and Voice like London Cries ;
Who, for the Stage too short by half a Story,
Acts Lady Townly—thus—in all her Glory.
And, while she’s traversing her scanty Room,
Cries—“Lord, my Lord, what can I do at home!”
In short, there’s Girls enough for all the Fellows,
The Ranting, Whining, Starting, and the Jealous,
The Hotspurs, Romeos, Hamlets, and Othellos.
Oh! Little do those silly People know,
What dreadful Trials—Actors undergo.
Myself—who most in Harmony delight,
Am scolding here from Morning until Night.
Then take Advice from me, ye giddy Things,
Ye Royal Milliners, ye apron’d Kings;
Young Men beware and shun our slipp’ry Ways,
Study Arithmetic, and burn your Plays;
And you, ye Girls, let not our Tinsel train
Enchant your Eyes, and turn your madd’ning Brain;
Be timely wise, for oh! be sure of this;—
A Shop with Virtue, is the Height of Bliss.

The second prefaced a private performance we apparently know almost nothing about, only that prologue survives and was published in one of several miscellanies of prologues and epilogues popularly read at the time in collections of such verse, as by David Garrick, a actor-manager very important in Clive’s life and to her career (as he was to just about all actresses and actors at the time).

A Prologue, upon Epilogues, Spoken at a Private Benefit:

Enter in a black coat, closely buttoned.
Behold me in the usual prologue dress,
Though why it should be black, I cannot guess;
Custom, the law of schools — improvement’s foe,
Has long established that it shall be so:
But, say is slavish custom to control,
The active vigor of my free-born soul;
I”ll break the statute — and her laws deface
[Unbuttoning coat and displaying gold-laced waist-coat]
Behold the glare of deviating lace;
Departing farther from custom’s dream
I bid adieu to prologue’s usual theme;
And while o’er critic rules my rivals doze
A prologue upon epilogues compose.
The epilogue, which always deck’d with smiles
In female accent, tragic care beguiles:
That when exalted thoughts, the mind impress,
A trivial jest must make the pleasure less.
Ludicrous custom, which compels to show,
The cap of folly, in the rear of woe;
Portrays a smile, emerging from a sigh,
And pleasure starting from affliction’s eye;
Makes joy’s bright beam in sorrow’s face appear,
And Quibble dry the sentimental tear.
If when a tragic tale in virtue’s cause,
The soft compassion of the tender draws;
Custom, decrees, our feeling be repressed,
By some vile pun, or some unseemly jest:
By the same rule, when comic swains give birth,
To nature’s dimples, in the cheeks of mirth;
A doleful ditty, should conclude the night,
And rob the audience of their dear delight:
E’er with improvement they can make retreat,
The purpose of the well-wrought piece defeat.
Then sons of genius, be it all your pride,
To throw the codes of prejudice aside:
By custom’s shackles be no more restrained,
Be ev’ry mental faculty unchain’d.
Our bodies freedom, we in birthright find,
Then let’s assert the freedom of the mind.

This prologue upon epilogues develops a complicated thought and assertion on behalf of liberty as well as containing an insightful critique of how epilogues relate to the genres of plays and play with dramatic conventions. The text is not in ECCO; it’s reprinted in “Garrick’s Unpublished Epilogue for Catherine Clive’s The Rehearsal; or, Bayes In Petticoats by Matthew J Kinservik, Études Anglaises, 49:3, (1996):320-26.

This the full length whole portrait by Peter van Bleeck – -I prefer to reprint this than one of the several prints supposedly of Clive much younger — they are patently false, doll-like rococo faces, Barbie doll bodies, smooth wigs, a shepherdess costume

Her career was so long and complicated, I thought it best to provide a narrative older life from the ODNB (as an alternative to or) filling out Joncus’s portrait from a different register & tone:

“According to William Chetwood’s General History of the Stage (1749), Clive was the daughter of William Raftor, a Kilkenny lawyer of considerable estate who ruined his fortunes by aligning himself with James II during the latter’s campaign in Ireland in 1690. After a period of exile, he was pardoned and returned to London to marry a Mrs Daniel, ‘Daughter to an eminent Citizen on Fishstreethill with whom he had a handsome Fortune’ (Chetwood, 126). Chetwood further claims that the couple had numerous children, but the names of these brothers and sisters are unknown, except for James (*d*. 1790), who joined Kitty in a stage career, and a sister whose married name was Mrs Mestivyer. There is evidence that Kitty Clive supported her father once she was working, so whatever handsome fortune was in place when her parents married evidently dwindled over time.”

In 1728, “A friend of Jane Johnson, the first wife of Theophilus Cibber, Kitty was introduced to both Cibber and Chetwood. They, in turn, impressed with her ‘infinite Spirits, with a Voice and Manner in singing Songs of Pleasantry peculiar to herself’ (Chetwood, 127), recommended her to Colley Cibber, who added her to his list of performers at Drury Lane. Chetwood indicates that she had a few minor appearances in the spring of 1728, but once the full 1728–9 season opened she began appearing regularly in increasingly large and important roles. Throughout that season and those that followed she moved from supporting roles in tragedy to singing in afterpieces and playing the first-ranking characters in the farces popular in the period.”

“The fashion of musical comedy and burlesque suited Kitty’s vocal and comic talents perfectly, and she shone in parts such as Nell in Charles Coffey’s The Devil to Pay, in which she portrayed a cobbler’s wife transformed into the lady of the manor. Henry Fielding wrote several parts for her that highlighted her skills, including Chloe in The Lottery and Lappet in an adaptation of Molière’s The Miser. In the summer of 1732 she was given the most sought-after female role in musical comedy, Polly in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and received a tribute to her portrayal from the Daily Journal, which called her the ‘Darling of the Age’ (25 July 1732). During the rebellion of the players in 1733, Kitty remained with John Highmore’s company at Drury Lane . . . Henry Fielding, who also remained loyal to Drury Lane, praised her acting talents and the alternative view of her character. In his preface to The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), in which she played the title role, he compliments her as ‘the best Wife, the best Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend’ (Fielding) . . . Her best roles were particular comic types: the silly country miss, the wiser and more fashionable version of the same, and the pert and resourceful servant. These remained her strong suit for much of her career.

Few details are known about Catherine Raftor’s marriage to George Clive (*d*. 1780), a barrister and second cousin to Robert Clive ‘of India’ [Joncus suggests he was homosexual and it was a marriage of convenience — to look like heterosexuals], but that she appeared as Mrs Clive in the bills for the first time in October 1733. The name change suggests that the pair had just married or had done so during the summer, when she would not have been performing regularly. Evidence about the couple’s married life is also slight, but the two did not live together for very long, separating some time in 1735. Chetwood, ostensibly declining to comment on marital affairs, declares, ‘I never could imagine she deserved ill Usage’ (Chetwood, 128), implying that was just what she [had] received . . .

Although Clive herself did not contribute to the pamphlet war during the theatrical rebellion of 1733, in 1736 she had reason to believe that the acting manager, Theophilus Cibber, was trying to claim some of her roles for his second wife, Susannah. Clive published her side of the controversy in the press in order to defend her position on the stage.

It is my consolation to think, that as I have always endeavor’d to please them [the town] as an Actress, to the best of my Abilities, whatever has been urged to the contrary by the Malice of my Enemies, will have no weight or Influence upon my Friends. (London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 19 Nov 1736)

When Clive’s appearance as Polly was finally presented, she addressed herself to the house, apologizing for the disturbance and offering to play the secondary part of Lucy instead. This apologetic tone and willingness to appease her audience secured both her popularity and the role of Polly until she herself was ready to bestow it on a younger actress of her own choosing in 1745 . . . Although publicly Clive decried and apparently regretted bringing theatrical matters notoriety in the press, the lesson she learned during the Polly war served her well in 1744.

After the failure of Charles Macklin and David Garrick to open a third theatre to break the monopoly held by the patentees, Clive found herself unemployed. Rather than relying on others to defend her position and livelihood, that October she printed a pamphlet, The Case of Mrs. Clive Submitted to the Publick, explaining her position and that of other performers. Particularly galling to her was the oss of her annual free benefit, a privilege she had held for nine years, and how she discovered her lack of a job—by finding other actresses listed in her roles in the bills. This ‘unprecedented Act of Injustice’ (The Case of Mrs. Clive, 14) did not allow her the time to find work in Dublin, where she had met with success during the summer of 1741. Following the publication of her pamphlet, Clive held a benefit concert at the Haymarket on 2 November by command of Frederick, prince of Wales, and Augusta, princess of Wales. The royal couple had commanded Clive’s benefits in the past, and their continued patronage of her expressed their personal dismay at the lord chamberlain’s ruling in favour of the patentees. Theophilus Cibber confirmed that the audience at the benefit had been a notable one, by describing the affair as having ‘many Persons of the first Distinction … in the Pit and Boxes’ (Cibber, 76). The manager, John Rich, no fool, recognized Clive’s drawing power, and rehired her the next month at Drury Lane, although not at the salary level she had previously attained. As in the Polly war, Clive found that humble approaches to the theatre-going public could push theatrical management to some semblance of civility towards players . . .

David Garrick attained the patent for Drury Lane in 1747, Clive’s career settled down considerably. Printed appeals to the public were no longer necessary, except for a skirmish with the actor Ned Shuter over benefit performances in 1761. She continued to shine in her best venue, the stage. She retained many of the parts that she had made famous, including Nell in The Devil to Pay, but moved out of *ingénue* roles into those more suited to her maturing voice and figure. Flora in Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder, Mrs Cadwallader in Foote’s The Author, the Fine Lady in Garrick’s Lethe, and Lady Wishfort in William Congreve’s The Way of the World were typical of these later roles. Comedy remained her forte, but she also continued her facility in speaking prologues and epilogues.

A dedicated performer, and one with full appreciation for the transience of theatrical life, Clive continued to seek new roles for herself and new ways to supplement her income. She tried her hand at writing farces, which became a feature of her benefits. Her first, The Rehearsal, or, Bays in Petticoats, was first presented at her benefit in 1750. There were scattered additional performances, and it was eventually published in 1753. Clive wrote at least three more farces, Every Woman in her Humour, A Fine Lady’s Return from a Rout, and The Faithful Irishwoman, but none received even the limited fame that her first had done and none was published.

Throughout her long career Clive remained a London actress, and except for the two seasons at Covent Garden (1743–5) she was loyal to Drury Lane. However, at some point in the 1740s it is apparent that she moved her primary residence to Twickenham and lived in lodgings in London during the theatrical season. In that small community, she and Horace Walpole became close friends . . . Soon afterwards she had become a visible and cheering presence in his correspondence, and he gave her a small house on his
property. Reading through the correspondence makes it clear that Walpole and Clive developed a strong, enduring, and almost certainly platonic friendship . . .

In 1768 Walpole mentioned to a friend that Clive was preparing to leave the stage, and the bill for her benefit in April 1769 advertised that it would be the ‘last time of her appearing on the Stage’ (Stone, 3.1401). She performed some of her favourite roles: Flora in The Wonder and the Fine Lady in Lethe. After more than forty successful years on the stage, Clive had earned enough to support herself comfortably in her retirement. In her published Case in 1744 she revealed that she had been making £300 annually, plus her benefit, which in her most successful years could almost double that salary—in 1750, for example, her benefit brought her just over £250. In 1765, in a letter to David Garrick, she commented that her salary remained £300 a year. Although much of her income would have gone to support her professional life (she spent considerable sums on singing lessons and appropriate clothes) she had evidently managed her money wisely.

Her own correspondence, along with that of Walpole and David Garrick, reveals Clive’s retirement to have been carefree, except for bouts of illness and occasional trouble from footpads and tax collectors. Her brother James and sister lived with her, and were, according to Jane Pope, supported by her. She busied herself with ‘Routs either at home or abroad every night [and] all the nonsense of having my hair done time enough for my parties as I used to do for my parts with the difference that I am losing money instead of getting some’ (Highfill, Burnim & Langhans, BDA). Her periods of illness self-described jaundice-—eventually grew more frequent, and after catching a chill at the funeral of Lieutenant-General Henry Lister, she died on 6 December 1785. She was buried in Twickenham churchyard on 14 December. Horace Walpole dispersed her personal possessions among her friends and relatives.

K. A. Crouch”

The actual private lives and characters of actresses were in earlier centuries and still are distorted by the roles they inhabit (which they are partly identified with) and the media which presents them in these roles: the critical reviews, nowadays active fan groups on the Internet. The process is sometimes called specularization (from speculum, Latin for mirror): specularization or mirroring refers to the process whereby the nature of an observer’s gaze shapes and defines what he or she looks at, thereby determining the what is and can be said or thought. In the 18th century actresses were still partly seen as prostitutes, as degraded and demeaned by their work; today to escape or elude this pornification, actresses are now elevated as rich and therefore powerful and successful; they are dressed to be glamorous, beautiful in today’s conventional terms.

Having read Joncus’s book, Clive’s The Case of Mrs Clive and The Rehearsal; or, Bayes in Petticoats, as well as the remnant of her letters left to us, and read and watched a number of her most roles/characters in straight and concert plays, and understood that she was sexually lesbian, I see her as highly ambitious, unusually pro-active for a woman of the era (no lack of agency here), robust, anything but thin-skinned (more like a rhinoceros, at least in public), determined to be respected, to dress well and be the center of her world. She kept a strong guard on her sexuality, but alas was determined to keep a reputation for chastity (and her safety) by attacking other women not as fortunate, more sensitive, less or differently talented than she. She could not find it in herself to empathize and thought they represented a danger to women like her.  She could therefore be ruthless (in the original meaning of the word too), but as Fielding and other long-time relationships (with Garrick) suggest, capable of generosity, loyalty, trust and very hard work. She had a real talent for writing and I can imagine (in effect) collaborated on many of the songs and speeches she gave, was herself a kind of director. Joncus seems to feel she preferred comic roles, and late in life was able to carry on her career after attracting too much envy — and growing old — by caricaturing herself. Her Rehearsal reveals how painful she found this, and how tiresome fools, how weary she could become of long hours and years of work. But she did provide for herself and family until she died. The word I’d use of her at her best is gallant.

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For the sake of the review I watched Christopher Miles’s 1999 film adaptation of Garrick and Colman the elder’s The Clandestine Marriage, re-arranged, made much more plangent, poignant, softened but yet with an undercurrent or robust scepticism about the character’s motives for what they do and appreciation for how they attempt to enjoy their lives.

The play itself had been (in the 18th century mode) ironic and rough-house, everyone blatantly mercenary, innately selfish and would doubtless soon return to being so again. The joy or sentiment comes in erotic bless — the play historically speaking is defying the 1753 Marriage Act as the couple marries in Fleetwood prison) and our heroine is pregnant; beautiful landscape, music effective, acting very well done. Stellar cast, especially Natasha Little as the convincingly sweet innocent Fanny, Nigel Hawthorne (lecherous aging but finally benign Lord Ogleby), Timothy Spall, Tom Hollander (early in his career, Sir John Melville attempting mercenary marriage), Paul Nicholls as the drop dead handsome Lovewell. Trevor Bentham wrote the screenplay.

The brilliant comedienne of the Carry on films, perfect for Lady Bellaston in Tom Jones, Joan Collins took Catherine Clive’s original role — domineering and I felt I went some of the way in trying to imagine Clive on stage. I’ve see the play itself twice at the Folger. Another actress who could take this role is Frances de la Tour. So I’d say she went from a cross between Mae West and Jean Arthur in her earlier years to Frances de la Tour (another actress who could take on Lady Bellaston, Mrs Heidelberg and a Mother Hildegard, the powerful 18th century abbess in Outlander).

Joan Collins as Mrs Heidelberg

Ellen

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On not being comforted by, or able to amuse with, Austen — and turning at last to Anne Finch

Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper) curled up with Pride and Prejudice (2008 Dan Zeff, Guy Andrews, Lost in Austen)

It is a truth generally acknowledged that we are all longing to escape. I escape always to my favorite book Pride and Prejudice. I’ve read it [turning of pages heard] so many times now, the words just say themselves in my head, and it is like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there … It’s become a place I know so intimately I can see that world I can … I see Mr Darcy …. [vanishes, back to present time] … Now where was I? …. (2008 Lost in Austen)

Friends and readers of Jane Austen,

I’ve not written anything on the present COVID-19 pandemic because I was trying to counter the topic; everywhere else just now we are just all COVID-19 all the time; I had in mind one of the marvelous utterances of Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club, when asked by a joining member if they ever read anything other than Austen, Bernadette (Kathy Baker) replies, “oh no, we are just all Jane Austen all the time!” What I wanted to do was dramatically read aloud, the first chapter and the 34th (where Darcy proposes, and Elizabeth refuses him) of Pride and Prejudice, to make a speaking video of myself. I thought of it as a playful, fun things to do & for me a new experience to hear my voice aloud on the Net.

But alas, I am so old & ugly (all wrinkled skin) but when I tried to reverse the camera, & hold a copy of the book behind the screen at the same time as reading in front of it, I found I had not enough hands. No place in the house, including a piano where I could prop up what I needed to. And then, though I’ve been much praised when I’ve done reading from Austen (recently in a dramatic reading class), the thought occurred that in all cases there were real people in the room, who were themselves reading, who knew me, and might be inclined to be kinder. I might be taken as wanting more praise than I do — I know I’m no professional. My idea was to amuse in a new more distinctly felt human way — what more appealing than human voices (as Penelope Fitzgerald ironically says in her book of that title). And then I felt the question (the prejudice against as not sufficiently middle class) of my ineradicable New York City accent …

March — Prudie (Emily Blunt) wisely reading silently to herself Mansfield Park (2007 Robin Swicord, The Jane Austen Book Club)

So what to do? I turned to see what Austen had to say about illness. Worse yet. Not much solace here. It’s not just that in Persuasion we learn sickrooms are not places for heroism, places where people are seen far from their best, and in Sanditon, the way to cope with illness and death (as in a number of Austen’s letters) is to be wildly antipathetic, as in Jane to Cassandra: “I believe I never told you that Mrs Coulthard and Ann, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in childbed. We have not regaled Mary [James’s wife, nine months pregnant] with the news” (Letter 11). This is a mild joke. She most often refuses to believe people are ill; confronted with mental suffering, she spits out caustic or wry references. Mockery of hypocrisy (as with Mrs Norris) or forgiving people is her stance. Mrs Smith, near destitute, utterly crippled, is so egregious an example of unwellness, she cannot dismiss her — and what seems to make Austen tolerant is Mrs Smith (most unusually implies Austen) has a buoyant spirit, much fortitude and patience. (See my “Depiction of Widows and Widowers.”)

Perhaps as this is supposed a blog about women in art, followers in some sense of Austen perhaps, if I turned to other writers. Susan Sontag’s Illness as a Metaphor sprung to mind. Won’t do, because quite rightly much of the energy of the piece is devoted to ripping the metaphors away and making us recognize the real miseries of sickness and death, and shearing away hypocrisies to lay bare before us how people withdraw from the ill person, stigmatize the condition, give it a moral meaning (including fantasies about who gets sick and who doesn’t as if your attitude of mind makes you blameable). Sound, I admit, and with its rock bottom disillusion, reminiscent of Austen.

On a listserv I’m on for Virginia Woolf, someone suggested her “One Being Ill” is peculiarly a propos. I can link the text in, and agree with her that illness can alter consciousness, give us new insights into ourselves and other people, enable us to read texts in new ways. Here I felt her moving onto these insights was taking us dangerously into the territory of turning illness into a metaphor. When you are truly sick, it is hard to read, but again I found myself back with Austen from a different direction. Woolf finds the idea that people are linked together from illness an illusion; each person she suggests is in a “virgin forest” of isolation (perhaps she is thinking of a first severe illness). And Nature indifferent.

There is a good reading aloud of a translation of an unabridged text (and used Audio CDS may be found)

Eighteenth century texts will neither counter illness or offer much cheer — it was an age of satire. Of course the one everyone thinks of is Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year (1666 is the year imagined), and it is just such a calamitous situation that our present social distancing is desperately trying to avoid. This is a not atypical moment:

“He was going along the Street, raving mad to be sure, and singing, the People only said, he was drunk; but he himself said, he had the Plague upon him, which, it seems, was true; and meeting this Gentlewoman, he would kiss her; she was terribly frighted as he was only a rude Fellow, and she run from him, but the Street being very thin of People, there was no body near enough to help her: When she see he would overtake her, she turn’d, and gave him a Thrust so forcibly, he being but weak, and push’d him down backward: But very unhappily, she being so near, he caught hold of her, and pull’d her down also; and getting up first, master’d her, and kiss’d her; and which was worst of all, when he had done, told her he had the Plague, and why should not she have it as well as he. She was frighted enough before, being also young with Child; but when she heard him say, he had the Plague, she scream’d out and fell down in a Swoon, or in a Fit, which tho’ she recover’d a little, yet kill’d her in a very few Days, and I never heard whether she had the Plague or no.” Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (1722), p. 184.

I came across a qualification from a member of another listserv: “Defoe does all he can to “challenge … the inhuman behavior in all the sources. Scandals told of the buriers, doctors, watchmen, nurses, he is unable to accept.The refusal to condemn, the tempering of any adverse judgment of the population and the authorities, is the most characteristic quality of the “Journal.” In almost every case the participants are exonerated from any charge of cruel behavior or offensive conduct. Reminding us of the charity and benevolence of London’s citizenry in the past, and given our moment in time, Defoe’s Plague Year might be a saner and more supportive and even reassuring read than Camus” (whose La Peste likens those rats to fascists, a worrying topic for us today)

I thought of Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, written in the 19th century, imitative in some ways of Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, is a novel set in the 17th, in Milan (Lombardy is today not a lucky place), plague appeared in 1630 and (it’s said) half the population died, and a crazy paranoia arose whereby it was thought evil people were spreading the Black Plague by smearing oily substances about; suspects were hanged. I recommend this book, but for the purposes of this blog I was just not getting anywhere.

And then I thought of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1660-1720), whose work I spent so many years on: she had probably more than one nervous breakdown, suffered badly from depression, and none of this helped her physical well-being. Like Woolf I suppose, but Finch wrote much more about distressed and distraught states of mind, analyzing depression itself (the first attempt to do so without blaming anyone, without attributing the state to God’s intervention). Her verses which have been seen as proto-romantic, where she immerses herself in the natural world, are deeply-felt moments of healing in retirement, and then of taking back control and finding comfort and fortitude.

And so now I do have something, not too heavy, lovely  to share, offering good humor, beauty and strength out of disaster, Finch’s poem to a “Fair Tree,” in an early form not in print (so it’s a text you will not read in the new standard edition), from a manuscript:

Fair Tree! for thy delightfull shade
‘Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return, is due from me
To thy cool shadows, and to thee.
When thou to birds doest shelter give,
Thou musick doest from them receive;
If Travellers beneath thee stay
‘Till storms have worn themselves away,
That time in praising thee, they spend
And thy protecting pow’r, commend.
The Shepheard here, from scorching freed,
Tunes to thy daancing leaves, his reed;
Whilst his lov’d nymph, in thanks bestows
Here flow’ry Chaplets on thy boughs.
Shall I then, only silent be,
And no return be made by me?
No, lett this wish upon thee waite,
And still to florish, be thy fate.
To future ages may’st thou stand
Untoutch’d by the rash workmans hand,
Till that large stock of sap is spent,
Which gives thy somers ornament;
Till the feirce winds, that vainly strive
To shock thy greatnesse, whilst alive,
Shall on thy lifelesse hour attend,
Prevent the axe, and grace thy end,
Their scatter’d strength together call,
And to the clouds proclaim thy fall,
Who then their evening dews, may spare
When thou no longer art their care,
But shalt, like Ancient Hero’s, burn,
And some bright hearth be made thy Urn.

Here it is, read aloud accompanied by “Epping Forest” from John Playford’s “The English Dancing Master 1670, 11th Edition,” the painting which emerges, “The Oak Tree”, isby Joseph Farrington, 1747-1821.

Ellen

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