Renaissance Society of America: A virtual conference, the first I’ve attended in many years … (1)

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) — self portrait of herself as a painter

Dear friends and readers,

Although I have only a few sessions to describe out of the many that the RSA presented online for a few days, that is, from November 30th, to December 1st, I want to record what I heard and participated in. The primary reason is in two of the sessions I heard ideas and information which will help me the next time I want to write and deliver at a conference a paper on Anne Finch. But I also want to record some sense of how wonderful in tone and content the conference seemed to me — and perhaps therefore will be of interest to others outside the early modern scholars who attended it.

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I can no longer take stenography the way I once did, and spare my reader my attempts in other sessions than those on women studies which is the aspect of the Renaissance I’ve been most interested in. Here I do provide longer synopses because both of the panels taken together will provide me with a new perspective for a new paper on Anne Finch. These two panels are on Women Leaders and Their Political Behavior, and Reworking Literary Representations of Women’s Bodies and Voice. for the second blog I’ll be reviewing: the depiction of women in the era; dance, gender and sexuality; women on the stage, women during plague time, and creative approaches to telling the lives of women. For the second I will keep the synopses short, giving the gist of the talk and omitting details. I have enough material for two not overlong blog reports.

There were three presentations in the session on Women Leaders and their Political Behavior.

Elizabeth I when a princess (attributed to William Scrots, 1564)

Yafit Shachar talked about Elizabeth I, and how since she was a woman and ceaselessly regarded from the point of view of her literal woman’s body, during the early years of her reign she was under severe pressure to marry. Parliament made every attempt to exclude her from knowing about their talk on other issues! They regarded her refusal to marry as an attempt to ungender herself. Her female body was seen as a conduit for continuing the Tudor regime (and all the people in place staying in their places). At the same time a foreign man could potentially lead the country into wars. She responded in words by insisting they should see her body metaphysically (the queen’s two bodies) and that paradoxically her not marrying was their safety. She would protect the kingdom by bodily staying outside the world of matter. As time went on and she was not able to conceive, and her astute political behavior, especially during the threatened invasion by Spain, the pressure gave way.

An imagined statue for Anne Murray, Lady Halkett at Abbot House, Dunfermline — she was a spy!

Caroline Fish discussed the transterritorial power of Costanza Dora del Carretto, a widow. When her son died, and her grandson was still a young child, she was given the legal authority (power of attorney) to administer the family’s estates. Women were apparently usually disenfranchised, but she was very effective also in provisioning and maintained squadrons of ships (that included enslaved people working in the galleys). She also appointed governors wisely. Andrea Bergaz discussed Anna Colonna, a marquise (first in Madrid?). During her seven years in Vienna she initiated and ran public mostly musical events at court, became an active patron of the arts. The idea was to show how a woman could use the spaces of allowed sociability to contribute to the arts. There was much interesting general talk from inferences the speakers made from their material; among the most interesting to me was the assertion that women did act as spies far more than we realize (lacking documents).

There were three presentations on Reworking Literary Representations of Women’s Bodies and Voices, and one respondent (Anne Larsen).

Giulia Andreoni spoke of how women’s association with elements of nature, specifically trees, enabled women to assert their identities. Her main stories were derived from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and Ovid’s Metamorphosis. We see heroines dress up as shepherds, mark up trees which become a kind of containing vessel for the female characters’ bodies (women turn into trees to escape rape). Trees protect the women, are pleasant places to dwell in, and become the woman’s tomb after she dies. She showed illustrations of pregnant trees, trees with female imagery. Some of the women are sorceresses whom the impassive hero refuses to pity. Julia Varesewski told of the mother daughter team Madeleine (1520-87) and Catherine des Roches (1542-87). They wrote within Renaissance poetic genres, e.g., the blazon. The poetry they produce is lyrical, ecstatic, erotic (women are touching, touchable) and their virtue is never questioned. In one story the women behave reciprocally and restore one another’s health and beauty. They adapted a literary tradition from men and made it serve a community of women. The style fits the kind of writing Helene Cixous describes as l’ecriture-femme and very aggressively through women’s collaboration. The mother and daughter invented a textual space within which women were seen to converse and live.

A modern Echo and Narcissus (David Revoy) — the early modern & beautiful Victorian ones might be taken for or responded to as soft-core porn and Revoy has imagined the relationship between these two: the man loving his image, the woman compelled to hang on his every gesture or sound …

Nancy Frelick discussed male and female writers of the French Renaissance (Louise Labe, Marguerite de Navarre), their motives for writing and the reception of their work. She dwelt especially on the figure of the disembodied echo. Echo stands for the sorry state of a desiring subject or poetic persona where women repeat male forms: Echo was cursed and could repeat only the last sounds she hears; she haunts places and then dissolves away. Her predicament can be read as women’s powerlessness, but also make visible or felt a poignant poetic inner struggle, a divided self. She quoted playful poetry; and a critic talking about male poets as capable of inspiring stones (Orpheus?). She went through poems by men, e.g., Donne, and then went on to the Des Roches women, showing the daughter using this figure to echo her mother’s voice with a sense of deference and respect. They were creating a poetry of mutual support which gained prestige. There were contests as to who was a muse, seeking immortality, but they turned back to Sappho. The daughter stayed single, so she does not become someone’s property and does not support the patriarchy. And they get away with their subversion. In a poem called “Echo” (1586) in response forms the characters show how to find comfort; in a poem of a Sybil reads, writes and is simply herself. Frelick argues the figure of Echo is multifaceted and used to evoke different aspects of subjectivity; Echo is not unidimensional.

In the talk afterwards the women talked of landscape poetry of the era where we see gender and concerns over environment mingle. One woman was much interested in Gaspara Stampa; another what women do with epic genres. I brought up how Anne Finch read Tasso (and Ovid too), translated Tasso, wrote poems on trees, and one on Echo, aligned herself for immortality with Sappho. It seemed to me their way of talking could give new perspectives to Anne’s so-called romantic lyrics by moving backwards to the early modern women poets. They spoke of a Tasso poem where trees were cut down, reminding me again of Finch. The tree is creative, alive, beauty in itself. They seemed to appreciate what I had to say.

So I bring forward from a blog I wrote in 2020, 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 one of the minor manuscripts:

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”, is by Joseph Farrington, 1747-1821.

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My header includes the phrase “the first I’ve attended in many years.” In the later 1980s my husband wanting me to return to my Renaissance world, partly because I had embarked on a many year project to learn Italian and translate the poetry of Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, and continued during that decade to keep up reading about the early modern period, its poetry, drama, and doing research at the Folger Shakespeare Library an Library of Congress on my own. I was what’s called an Independent Scholar. He meant very well. He took care of our two children while I went. I had been writing reviews that were published in the Renaissance Quarterly by that time; I had gone to Renaissance sessions at the MLA and published a paper on Katherine Philips in Philological Quarterly. Well for me to go to that conference by myself was a disaster for me. I knew no one any more, and when I talked to a few people, I was greeted with silent stares. I will not tell the social faux pas I made; suffice to say I refused to go to another early modern conference for many years. The trauma of what had happened remained with me.

Then one year after I had returned to scholarship and conferences through my work on the 18th century and Austen after 1999 (2000 I published my first book, Trollope on the ‘Net), gone to and delivered a talk on Trollope in London at the Reform Club. Also gone to a Virginia Woolf session and then party at one MLA. Jim said we should go to Florence one April (during spring break). There was another early modern conference there. He thought we could have good time in that city during the times I was not at the conference. I now feel very bad that I refused to go to an early modern conference in Florence in 1998 or so. He never went to Florence and is now dead and will never go. I now realize what I should have done is ask him to come with me to the conference proper (we could have paid) and I would have recovered. Rien à faire. Irretrievable.

Antonio Canaletto (1867-1786), Northumberland House

I just got off a zoom where I told friends how getting on the Internet in 1995 had transformed my life beyond what I’ve written above: it had enabled me to make friends without having to cross official thresholds: I began by writing on listservs, and that eventually brought me friends, respect, an invitation to write my book, and to write reviews regularly, to attend small regional conferences. The pandemic caused events to occur online which I could never have gone to even with Jim. Online you are welcomed as the image of someone in a tile and if you behave conventionally, no one questions you.  For example, I’ve now attended two virtual Virginia Woolf conferences in isolated obscure places in the mid- and Northwest USA — and joined in during the talks after the papers — I read and study Woolf a lot, have written a number of blogs on her here.

Come to our topic at hand: it was the second year of the pandemic and the RSA had its first virtual conference. I was brave enough to register, and tried to join in. I don’t know now why I didn’t manage but I found the site user-unfriendly, and managed at most to attend two sessions and gave up. Not this time. They have learned how to present the sessions and it’s now easy to get in and find things. I heard in the sessions that this year’s virtual conference had been set for Dublin, Ireland but now had added a virtual conference in November. People were lamenting they had decided to go virtual. I regret for them, they could not have the more fulfilling time they imagined (plus travel), but for me it was the first time since 1998 I was at an early modern conference, and for the first time successfully joined in.

So there we are. I broke the barrier at last. I finally also spoke during the talk afterwards in two of the sessions.

Ellen

A poem as a gift Christmas, 1716 into 1717: Anne Finch to Lady Selena Finch Shirley,”How is it in this chilling time …”

A double stock flower (tagetes patula?)

Dear friends and readers,

After all I have something for Christmas this year: it’s a beautiful poem that Anne Finch wrote and sent to Lady Selena Finch Shirley (1681-1762), a graceful compliment also meant for Lady Selena’s daughter, also called Selena.

Finch says looking upon the flower in its ripe prime (paradoxically during winter) reminds her of the time when she “That beauteous maid wou’d view/The green house where I liv’d retired;” that is, between 1700 and 1703 when Anne lived at Wye Shirley Finch would come to visit her in a green house or garden near Wye. This was when Finch was enduring the aftermath or getting over one of her intermittent depressive breakdowns, this one partly brought on by the anxiety over the flight of the Stuart court, Heneage’s attempted flight with them, and his arrest, bail, and threatened trial for Jacobitism, and a conviction of treason. In the event he was freed and left to live quietly (no office for him of course).

Here is Wye, now a college in Kent, where Anne wrote some of her most beautiful poetry, much of it melancholy and personal

This time included the first years of Lady Selena’s life with her husband, Robert Shirley, Lord Ferrers (1650-1717); married to him in 1699, she went on to have ten children. She was a daughter of George (and Jane?) Finch; thus a relative of the Finches (whom Cameron located living at Wye College in the early 1700’s). One woman recovering from mental distress and trouble, and the other incessantly pregnant, they made a pair together. Now fate or destiny has made Selena a widow and placed her in the country, and made Anne a Countess too, most unexpectedly also placing her in town (both the result of the inheritance by Heneage of the earldom when his nephew, Charles, died so young), in town where she is in need of the rejuvenating presence of her friend.

This is apparently an image of Lady Selena Finch Shirley when young

Writing the poem and imagining the flower brings together in Anne’s mind the two women’s minds together, makes them alive to one another through the medium of these words in a verse epistle. These are sentiments Anne expressed in her In Praise of the Invention of writing Letters).

Gentle reader, you must read it aloud slowly, savoring the tones of this renewal of friendship at a distance between the two friends

How is it in this chilling time,
When frost and snows the season claim,
This flow’ring plant is in its prime,
Which of July assumes the name?

But since we poets speech bestow,
And form what dialogues we please,
With animals or plants that grow,
And make them answer us with ease.

Tell me (said I) prolifick stock,
Which do’st these fragrant treasures bring,
What is it can such stores unlock,
At Christmas as outvie the spring?

Thus ask’d, the flower of tinctur’d bloome,
Soon blush’t into a deeper dye,
Cast stronger odours round the room,
And sweetly breath’d out this reply.

Tis true, all plants of my nice sort
Have not such license to appear,
But wait till Phoebus keeps his court,
In the hot circle of the year.

Whilst I a brighter influence own,
Than is imparted from the skies;
Nor take my blossoms thus full blown,
From summer, but Selena’s eyes.

Her cheering smile, her modest air,
Did me to this perfection charm;
For nothing droops when near the fair,
But all is lively, all is warm.

That beauteous maid wou’d often view
The green house where I liv’d retired,* *Wye
Who did such early graces shew,
That I to suit them was inspired.

Sometimes a sprig from me, I thought,
Might happily adorn her hair,
Or pardon me if ’twas a fault,
Might rest upon her bosom bare.

My soft perfumes for her design’d,
I ev’n from Zephyrus withdrew;
Unless when that obliging wind
Wou’d shed them round her as he flew.

Delighted when by me she stood,
I wish’d for some transforming art.
For had I then been flesh and blood,
I should have told her all my heart.

Yet I to Flora softly pray’d,
To hasten my disclosing day;
Who doating on the fairer maid,
For her does now my buds display.

But from a strange reverse of fate,
She to the country, I the town, *Anne in town
Have sadly been remov’d of late,
And neither to advantage shown.

Then let none blame you, if my flower
Beneath your roof is faded seen,
But know that such enlivening power
Is only granted to fifteen.

I for Selena shall repine,
And when some noble youths you see,
Bow their dejected heads like mine,
Think in our passions we agree.

What farther answer cou’d be made,
Or father question could I try?
Then let her come, and cheer our shade,
Or men and plants in town must die.

On this fourth of January 2022, two days before twelfth night.

Melissa Scott Miller, A Dusting of Snow at Islington Gardens, 21st century (don’t miss the cat)

Ellen

Anne Finch’s friendship poetry: those sent to friends & family where the recipient was not a poet herself

Laura Knight, Two Girls on a Cliff (Cornwall), a foremother artist, again quiet female friendship is not a topic readily found in all eras

Eph — What freindship is, Ardelia shew?
Ard — Tis to love, as I love you.
Eph — This account so short, (tho’ kind)
Suites not my enquiring mind.
Therefore farther now repeat.
What is freindship, when compleat?
Ard — ‘Tis to share all joy, and greif,
‘Tis to lend all due releif,
From the tongue, the heart, the hand,
‘Tis to morgage [sic] house, and land,
For a freind, be sold a slave,
‘Tis to dye upon a Grave,
If a freind therein do lye.
Eph — This, indeed, tho’ carry’d high,
This, tho’ more then ‘ere was done,
Underneath the roling [sic] Sun,
This, has all been said before,
Can Ardelia, say no more?
Ard — Words indeed, no more can shew,
But ’tis to love, as I love you.
— Anne Finch to her beloved sister-in-law, Francis Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth

Dear friends and readers,

I should probably have framed my previous blog with one of the insights in Paula Backscheider’s study of 18th century poetry by women in the context of poetry “through the ages:” she suggests and (I think) demonstrates that friendship poems are used different by women from men. Men often use these politically, to situate themselves publicly. For women they create counter-universes with the friend in which they can explore possibilities, pleasures, identities together.

This is a companion blog to the previous on Anne Finch’s friendship poems to good friends who were also poets, and to her predecessors. Now we come to friendships where the women were not poets, but were willing to enter Anne’s poetic world with her, so, to start, e.g, Catherine Cavendish Tufton (Arminda) and Francis Finch Thynne (Ephelia), two of her closest dearest women friends. The number of poems doesn’t tell us much as there is but one to, e.g., her cousin, Elizabeth Haslewood (d. 1733) who becomes Lady Hatton, daughter of her mother’s brother, Sir William, whom Anne grew up with and with whom she remained close. Elizabeth married Christopher Viscount Hatton.  The list here contains one women who was a reluctant participant. To begin,

“Ephelia” was not the powerful caustic still anonymous female poet, “Ephelia” and glamorous aristocrat that Maureen Mulvihill wants her to be. The last time I looked Ephelia’s identity was still officially not known.  Finch’s Ephelia was Heneage’s sister, Finch’s sister-in-law, Frances Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth, wife to Heneage’s close friend, companion and support, Thomas Thynne, Lord Weymouth.  Utresia (see below) is Anne’s niece , Lady Weymouth’s daughter, called in the poems also Lady Worseley. Lad Worseley was dragged (so to speak) into a close relationship she apparently was made uncomfortable by. The three poems to Lady Worseley’s mother are deeply felt and include one of Anne’s very best poems, the outstanding:

1) MS Folger, 6-11, “Me, dear Ephelia, me, in vain you court,” Ardelia’s answer to Ephelia, who had invited Her to come to her in Town–reflecting on the Coquetterie & detracting humour of the Age,” as brilliant as that of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, both of which find an ultimate source in Boileau’s Satire III (itself an imitation of Horace’s Satire I, ix). I believe Frances Thynne is also depicted in

2) MS Folger 22, “What freindship is, Ardelia shew?” “Freindship Between Ephelia and Ardelia”. Frances Finch was the muse of the poems addressed to Ephelia because all her life, she played the role of consoler, strengthener: she knew intimately the sources of her “sister’s” psychological problems and we see yet more of their relationship in

3) MS Wellesley 100, “Absence in love effects the same,” “Untitled: These verses were inserted in a letter to the Right Hon: ble the Lady Vicountess Weymouth written from Lewston the next day after my parting with her at Long Leat,” copied out with an apparently frank letter, which, alas, was destroyed. We can say though that unlike Francis’s daughter (see directly below), Francis stayed a satisfyingly long time (over night). It’s a melancholy song written upon awakening after parting from a friend.  Cf earlier brief or one stanza version, presented as translation from a French libertine epigram, found in Ms Folger

Ephelia was not Dorothy Ogle either (as surmised by Myra Reynolds), Finch’s beloved step-sister who died young, whom Finch addresses as “Teresa,”

1) MS’s: F-H 283, 18-25; Folger 206-8, “Hither, Ardelia I your Stepps Pursue,” “Some Reflections in a Dialogue between Teresa and Ardelia on the 2d and 3d Verses of the 73d Psalm,” a Biblical paraphrase, in tone and content bearing a strong resemblance to an important as yet unattributed autographical poem,

2) No MS (!), 1701 Gilden Miscellany, pp 288-93, “All flie th’unhappy, and I all wou’d flie,” “The Retirement” are addressed. Dorothy had lived with Anne their sometimes lonely orphaned childhoods in Northamptonshire among the Haslewoods (an affectionate but large household), and with the litigious formidable grandmother Kingsmill in Sidmouth.

Joseph Farrington, The Oak Tree (18th century engraving): See Anne’s “Fair Tree” (scroll down for podcast)

A third close associate and one from her younger years, Elizabeth Haslewood, Lady Hatton (see above). Mock heroic in a delicate way and like “The White Mouses Petition” in the vein of Madame Deshouliers. The poem mentions at least three of Elizabeth’s four sons, and evinces comfortable intimacy

1) MS Wellesley, pp 93995. “Where is the trust in human things,” To the Hon ble Mrs H—n [in Heneage’s hand, pasted over ample space, original heading censured]. Anne identifies with the mouse in both poems, but as that was a custom (in Madame Deshouliers and aristocratic circles), one should not over-read.

Eventually, much to her distress, embarrassment, and irritation, Lady Worseley, another Frances Thynne (it is hard to distinguish these people as individuals since they themselves chose names which placed them as a member of a kinship system of aristocrats), married to Robert Worseley by 1690, found herself chosen by Anne Finch in the way Anne chose Frances Thynne Seymour, the daughter of a beloved friend, Grace Strode into whom Anne wanted to pour her innermost feelings. The poetry to Utresia contains much beauty but also the most painful lines left by Ardelia. There are three poems, which suggest that at first Utresia decided that to accept letters would be the best way to handle the relationship, but eventually found Anne’s intensity too much and then Anne seems to have been unable to accept Lady Worseley’s rejection of her intensity.

1) MS Folger unnumbered page -275, “If from some lonely and obscure recesse,” “To the Honourable The Lady Worsley at Long-leate who had most obligingly desired my Corresponding with her by Letters.” It ends on extravagant praise of Lord Weymouth, Lady Worseley’s father (Heneage’s brother-in-law); Finch imagines them walking together. Longleat itself the focus of what he created. This is a deeply moving poem with much beautiful landscape, but (as is not uncommon), Anne may not have not seen clearly enough the person she wanted to make her companion soul; it may be that Lady Worseley was forced to accept this because not to do would be to reject the praise of her father.

2) Ms Wellesley, pp 77-78. “From the sweet pleasure of a rural seat,” A Letter to the Hon: ble Lady Worseley at Long-Leat, Lewston August the 10th 1704. This is one of those poems in MS Wellesley whose date makes it much earlier than the rest of the poems in the Ms Wellesley; at the same time, it is accompanied by a letter from “Ann Finch” to her niece saying that her mother, Lady Weymouth so easily excused the verses Anne wrote upon waking (see above), she will excuse these. She stopped writing because a messenger who was to carry the poem was about to leave. It seems the visit of mother and daughter over-excited Anne and she showed an intensity or kind of emotionsthat disquieted the daughter.  In her letter she is not aware of this. The last or next poem shows Utresia determined to keep a distance between herself and her poetic aunt.

3) MS Portland 19, pp 304-7, “The long long expected hour is come,” , “On a Short Visit inscrib’d to My Lady Worsley,” copied out in Anne’s own hand, for she needed to write this, wanted it saved but could not apply to anyone else to write it down. Utresia (here also called Celia) had found it hard to put Anne off, Anne would not take a hint, and when Utresia finally showed up, Anne’s behavior was so overwhelming, she had to get away from her. McGovern quotes someone who visiting Anne in London in later years and finding her “ill,” or “melancholic, wrote that she found Lady Winchilsea very amusing. Not everyone can dismiss or frame a melancholy woman as someone who makes jokes.

Several other women across Anne’s life meant a great deal to her personally so that she could feel free to write candid poetry:  Catherine Cavendish, who married Thomas Tufton, Earl of Thanet; both spouses were friends of Heneage and Anne, and married only a few months after they did; the Tuftons (or Earl and Lady Thanet) took in the Finches (Colonel and Mrs Finch) at their estate of Hothfield in Kent when the Finches fled London. Catherine Cavendish is Arminda, and they were life-long confiding friends; to Arminda, Anne wrote but one poem, but an important beautiful one, deeply grateful, openly vulnerable:

1) MS Folger, pp 220-27, “Give me, oh! indulgent Fate,” “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat, Inscribed To the Right Honorable Catharine Countess of THANET, mention’d in the Poem, under the name of ARMINDA.”

Of the next generation, another close friend to Anne Finch was Cleone, or Mrs Grace Strode Thynne, wife of Henry Thynne (Theanor, died 1708), son of Francis and Thomas Thynne, Lord and Lady Weymouth. Henry was then Heneage’s nephew so Cleone was daughter-in-law to Anne’s best friend, and, eventually, mother to Anne’s beloved Lady Hertford. Henry died fairly young, and Mrs Grace did not continue to live with her in-laws but returned to the Strode family home in Leweston; nevertheless, she and Anne remained close, to which relationship three poems by Anne testify.

1) “Sooner I’d praise a Cloud which Light beguiles,” To the Painter of an ill-drawn Picture of CLEONE,” no MS (!), the only source text the 1713 Miscellany, pp 176-78. Very lovely in parts, with strong praise in words which suggest these contemporaries were “sympathizing” friends, written possibly around the time of the couple’s marriage (1695),

2) “THINK not a partial fondness sway’d my mind,” An Epistle to the honourable Mrs. THYNNE, persuading her to have a Statue made of her youngest Daughter, now Lady BROOKE. No MS; found in a 1714 Steele Miscellany; and in 1717 Pope’s Own Miscellany, from which the copy on my website is taken. Finch defends herself for having appeared to favor Mary (“Maria”) over Francis Thynne (“Aspasia”) I suggest 1704-5.

3) One of Anne’s comic (happy) masterpieces, “How plain dear Madam was the Want of Sight,” After drawing a twelf cake at the Hon ble Mrs Thynne’s (dated in MS Additional 4457: “To the Hon ble Mrs Thynne after twelfth Day 1715 By Lady Winchilsea”, Ms Wellesley 91-92 (copy text althought one of the lines is softened in comparison with Ms Additional text)

For full details about the occasion, the cards, the people there, click on The Birthday at Winter Solstice

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Mary of Modena (Urania) was one of Anne’s real and dream figures: Mary of Modena seems to have functioned in Finch’s life as a luminous icon of beauty, divinity, poetry of language. Perhaps she was also in Anne’s mind a mentor-substitute for the mother whom Anne never had. Perhaps one of the sources of Anne’s passionate Jacobitism was this imagined relationship. Two poems. One very early, after James II fell from power, one of Anne’s brief masterpieces. The second includes the presence of Anne Tufton (Salisbury or Lamira; see below) who tries to mitigate Anne’s over-reaction and on whose advice the elegy to the queen is brought to an end:

1) MS’s: F-H 283, 7*; Folger 17, “She Sigh’d, but soon it mixt with common air“. Never printed.

2) Ms Wellesley, pp 68-71, “Dark was the shade where only cou’d be seen,” “On the Death of the Queen”

Mary of Modena, depicted with a James III

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Returning to Anne’s circles in later life, one is tempted to say these are less important women to Anne because they came later or were of a younger age. Not so apparently in the case of Anne Tufton (see above, Lamira and below “Salisbury”): Catherine Cavendish Tufton, Lady Thanet had two daughters. These relationships may have been substitutes for the biological daughters Anne never had: To Anne Tufton, Lamira, the first of which seems to me uncomfortably coy; the second perhaps Anne’s greatest poem. She is also mentioned in Anne’s poem on the death of Mary of Modena:

1) Ms Wellesley, 92-93, “With all respect and humble duty,”, The white mouses petition to Lamira the Right Hon: ble the Lady Ann Tufton now Countess of Salisbury. This relationship matured into

2) No MS, 1713 Miscellany, pp 292-94, “In such a Night, when every louder Wind”, “A Nocturnal Reverie”

A tawny owl — part of a beautiful tribute and analysis of Anne’s poem by Carol Rumens in the Guardian for this year!

Mrs Arabella Marrow was an unmarried daughter of Samuel and Lady Marrow, of Berkwell, Warwickshire; she was one of Mrs Grace Strode Thynne’s closest companions. Date: Lady Marrow died October 19, 1714. A “letter” shows how much Anne knew and was up-to-date on Jacobite and Hanoverian politics.

1) Ms Wellesley, p 55v.“For can our correspondence please,”, “A Letter to Mrs Arrabella Marow: [A prose opening: The favour of such an agreeable & most obliging letter as I recieved . . .] In MS Additional 4457 it is subscribed “London, October 18 1715.” A strongly Jacobite poem. Lady Marrow already dead.

2) MS Additional 4457, p 56v “Their piety th’Egyptians show’d by Art,” “To Mrs Arabella Marrow upon the Death of Lady Marrow”. A witty epigram whose modest idea is intended to console her friend for her loss of her mother.

A double stock flower (tagetes patula?)

Anne did not forget people. Lady Selena Finch Shirley (1681-1762), married to Robert Shirley, Lord Ferrers (1650-1717) in 1699.  Lady Selena lived at Wye College in the early 1700s (Cameron found this out): she was a daughter of George (and Jane?) Finch whom Cameron found living at Wye College in the early 1700’s; she had ten children by Robert Shirley before he died in 1717. She died 1762. In the second poem Finch says looking upon the flower in its ripe prime reminds her of the time when she “That beauteous maid wou’d view/The green house where I liv’d retired;” that is, between 1700 and 1703 when Anne lived at Wye Shirley Finch would come to visit her in a green house or garden near Wye; now destiny has led her young friend to the country and Anne placed in town where Anne can no longer feel rejuvenated by her friend’s presence as once she was. It is a compliment to Lady Selena’s daughter, also called Selena (See Complete Poems, Vol 2, pp 484-85).

The first may be explained this way: Statira was best known to 17th century women readers as presented in La Calprenede’s Cassandra. Finch had used this romance before in poetry found in MS Folger: see the homoerotic, “An Epistle from Alexander to Ephestion in his Sicknesse” Statira is a formidable heroine in LaCalprenede’s book, a sort of Amazon; it’s an ambiguous compliment (for she is not chaste), but perhaps Finch was thinking of her friend having had ten children.  During the time the women were close Lady Selena must’ve been almost continually pregnant.  And now she is or is near widowhood.

1) Ms Wellesley, “Such was Statira, when young Ammon woo’d,” Upon Lady Selena Shirly’s picture drawn by Mr Dagar.

2) 1717 Pope’s Own Miscellany “How is it in this chilling time,” “On a double Stock July-flower, full blown in January, presented to me by the Countess of FERRERS” By the right honourable the Lady WINCHELSEA, pp. 126ff

Lady Catherine Jones (Clorinda, d 1740), third daughter to Richard Jones, Viscount, first Earl of Ranelagh. Her name occurs very late in Anne’s poetry and only once but there is suggestive evidence they knew each other for a long time. Anne uses the name Clorinda in other poems but these are about secular beauty, and one may refer to Anne herself. What’s significant here is she served Mary Beatrice as Chamber-keeper, and was a patron of Mary Astell who dedicated two religious treatises to her. Lady Catherine corresponded with Swift twice but to her contemporaries it was probably more important that her family moved in high circles (she once dined with George I, 1717); she seems never to have married. The poem below is devotional, poetry as praying:  perhaps Lady Catherine was especially religious. The poem occurs in series of such poems, and I think it was meant to be set to music; it’s not meant to be read, but sung as a series of visions:

1) Ms Wellesley, 134-35 “Alleluja Sollemn Strain,” An Ode Written upon Christmas Eve in the year 1714 Upon these Words[:] And again they Said Alleluia Inscribed To the Rt: Hon ble the Lady Catherine Jones

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Last the daughters and granddaughters of friends and relatives:

To the younger Catherine Tufton, Serena, born 1692, Anne Tufton’s sister:

1) MS Folger, 298-9, “To write in verse has been my pleasing choice,” “To the Rt. Honble the Lady Tufton Upon Adressing to me the first Letter that Ever she Writt at the Age of–”

2) MS Folger, pp 242-44, “‘Tis fitt Serena shou’d be sung,”, “A Poem For the Birth Day of the Right Honorable the Lady Catherine Tufton. Occasion’d by the sight of some Verses upon that Subject For the preceding Year compos’d by no Eminent Hand” — also for a child.

The first poem in the MS Wellesley, to or on Lady Carteret, yet another daughter of the family, Francis Worseley, Lady Carteret, Utresia’s daughter, so granddaughter to Frances Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth:

1) Ms Wellesley, p 49  “Quoth the Swains who got in at the late Masquerade”, “On Lady Cartret drest like a shepherdess at Count Volira’s ball”

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So I’ve identified as friends or people Anne Finch both cared about and wrote deeply felt poems for: Frances Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth; Dorothy Ogle; Elisabeth Haslewood, Lady Hatton; Frances Thynne, Lady Worsley; Mrs Grace Strode Thynne; Mary of Modena; Anne Tufton, Lady Salisbury; Arabella Marrow; Lady Selena Finch Shirley, Countess of Ferrers; Lady Catherine Jones; Catherine Tufton; Francis Worseley, Lady Carteret.

Anne writes to and about male friends too, some poets, some not, but often with irony and never with the open earnestness and fullness of heart she does to her women friends. Several of these poems to women are more deeply felt than those by her to Heneage. Eventually I may try to write a blog about the poems to male friends and poets.

Ellen

Anne Finch’s friendship poetry: to women friends who were themselves poets, or wrote some poetry

Sisters, 1891, Elin Danielson-Gambogi (Finnish), 1861-1919. Quiet female friendship is such a rare topic (except the woman painter be painting discipleship) for fine painting, one must go to novel illustrations and I can’t think of any of sufficient beauty for my purpose

From the Circuit of Appollo, a poem by Anne where she names (unfortunately using pseudonyms) other women poets she knew in Kent:

Appollo, as lately a Circuit he made,
Throo’ the lands of the Muses, when Kent he survey’d,
And saw there that Poets were not very common,
But most that pretended to Verse, were the Women
Resolv’d, to encourage, the few that he found,
And she that writ best, with a wreath should be crown’d …

But now to proceed, and their merritts to know,
Before he on any, the Bay’s wou’d bestow,
He order’d them each, in their several way,
To show him their papers, to sing, or to say …

When Alinda began, with a Song upon Love.
So easy the Verse, yett compos’d with such art,
That not on expression, fell short of the heart …

If Laura, not quickly a paper had read,
Wherein she Orinda, had praised so high,
He own’d it had reach’dhim, while yett in the sky …

‘Till Valeria, withdrew him a little from thence,
And told him, as soon as she’d got him aside,
Her works, by no other, but him shou’d be try’d;
Which so often he read and with still new delight,
That Judgment ’twas thought wou’d not passe ’til ’twas night …

Dear friends and readers,

This is not the first blog I’ve written in the spirit of trying to understand something which I’m having trouble making clear to myself because various sources for the topic are confusing. It is also not the first blog I’ve written about women’s friendships, especially women poets for one another, as seen in letters or novels — or just life, using other documents left from the relationship. Anne Finch’s crucial relationships as a woman and poet or woman poet may be divided into 1) real living women she knew we know were themselves poets, and to whom Finch wrote poems, and whom the poems interchanged show a deep relationship’; 2) poetry by women Finch read whom she interacted deeply with as her predecessors, and I take these to be Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips; 3) real living women, to whom Finch was very close, often related to, to whom she wrote poetry or whom she put as figures in her poems, but who themselves did not write poetry and who may not have been intellectual at all. This blog presents the first two groups.

I gather together first what we know of her and Catherine Fleming (Flavia) then move on to women Anne got to know as or through relatives, who loved who understood and wrote poetry too, e.g, Frances Thynne Seymour, Lady Hertford (Hartford).

There are altogether five poems from Anne Finch to or for her apparently close and much valued friend, Catherine Fleming. We can date the friendship from the 1701 Gilden’s Miscellany when Nicholas Rowe’s epistolary poem to Flavia in priase of Ardelia is printed; he was probably not the first and certainly not the last to urg Finch to overcome her reluctance to publish. Anne’s friendship with Catherine Fleming lasted to the end of Finch’s life, as their last poems are exchanges in 1718.  One of these poems is another of these dreadful paraphrases of the Bible; it is clear that Finch is reluctant; her reluctance to do this kind of thing any more (it’s seen in the Northampton and Folger ms’s), shows she knows how bad they are. In the Wellesley MS generally speaking her religious poetry has become brief concise lyrics using some of the techniques she practiced in her nature poetry and may be seen in her free adaptations of fables and translations (found in her published poetry after 1709).

There is also one poem by Nicholas Rowe to Catherine Fleming where he addresses her as Finch’s friend who understands the value of Finch’s poetry.

Finally, there is one poem by Fleming to Finch thanking her for attempting the paraphrase of the last chapter of Ecclesiastes.

So altogether seven poems.

No letters. I adhere to Sarah Sard Hughes’ explanation: after her exhausting bouts with melancholia, Finch was left with a trembling hand; to which I add no one wanted to leave clear evidence of her struggle against depression while she was under its power, only what she wrote of her experiences afterwards.

I place them in the order I surmise they were more or less written.

Not a single one by Finch was published (nor was Fleming’s one poem) — yet Finch’s epistolary poems (or ballads as they are called in some ms’s) are so appealing, indeed fun and wonderful in so many ways: Nos. 4, and 5 represent her at her best, esp. “From me who whileom sung the town.”

1) Ms Wellesley, pp 57-58.  “Oh! friendship, how prevailing is thy force?“, from “To Flavia. By whose perswasion I undertook the following Paraphrase” (“The last chapter of Eclesiastes . . . In the full strength, of thy created frame” Described in my first blog upon beginning this review project; but the poem also appears in Ms Harleian described here. So I think this series of three earlier than Ms Wellesley.

2) Ms Harleian, 71-81, “The Preacher thus, to Man, his speech adrest,” “The last chapter of Eclesiastes Paraphras’d Inscribed to Mrs Catherine Fleming.” This also occurs in Ms Wellesley, pp 59-65, which since it was created by Heneage and Anne should be the chosen copytext over Ms Harleian because I believe Ms Harleian to have been collected before MS Wellesley, though not much before.

3) Ms Harleian, 44-46, “To Coleshill, Seat of Noble Pen,” “For Mrs Catherine Flemming at ye Lord Digby’s at Coleshill in Warwickshire,” also called “A Ballad” in other manuscripts. Poem also occurs in MS Portland, XX, 10-11 (highly unclear, squeezed in, looks like Heneage’s hand in old age), which is described here; and MS Additional 28101, 163v-164r (clear attribution: “By the Countess of Winchelsea”). So I suggest this poem is also somewhat earlier than those copied into the Ms Wellesley.

4) Ms Wellesley, “‘Tis now my dearest friend become your turn,”, “An Epistle to Mrs Catherine Fleming at Coleshill in Warwickshire but hastily perform’d & not corrected. London October ye 8th: 1718.” Not printed until 1988 Ellis d’Alessandro prints Wellesley text, 109-11; McGovern & Hinnant, 42-44.

5) Ms Harleian, 47r-48v, “From me who whileom sung the Town”, “A Ballad to Mrs Catherine Fleming in London from Malshanger farm in Hampshire.” Also occurs in MS Wellesley, 89-91, which then takes precedent as a copy text; however it is notable that this poem and “To Coleshill, Seat of Noble Pen,” occur in tandem in the MS Harleian, which seems to me the right way they should be published, and unless someone does another selection where taste and consideration of who Anne Finch was as an individual and what her best, finest, genius poetry is about, this will be the only place the reader can find them together.

Catherine Fleming’s one poem to Finch:

1) Ms Harleian, pp 77r-77v. “My heart ov’rlow’s with Gratitude and Joy,” “By Flavia: To the Rt Hon ble Ann Countess of Winchelsea on her Obliging Compliance with my request to Paraphrase the last Chapter in Ecclesiastes.” Also occurs in MS Wellesey, p 59. Fleming’s inner life of “baffled cares” revealed.

What appeared in print:

1) 1701, “An Epistle to Flavia,” on the Sight of two Pindarick Odes on Spleen and Vanity. Written by a Lady to her Friend. by Nicholas Rowe. Flavia, to you with safety I commend. p. 53, introduces long section of poems by Finch. 1701 New Miscellany, described here. This one with 5 poems by Finch, one of which remains explicitly denied her in the Collected Poems. Note too the only published poem is by a man.

Here are three of Finch’s typical light social poems, the last of which is arguably a masterpiece, and none of them saw the light of day or came under readers’ eyes until 250 years later and all are now presented in forms where the reader is prevented from being able to respond properly to them because they are out of context.

What do we know about Catherine Fleming?

So Keith in her 2nd volume of the Cambridge Works, at the back, as part of the notes to “Oh! friendship, how prevailing is thy force?” tells us Catherine Fleming died in 1736 (so 16 years after Finch), was daughter of Robert Jefferson and wife of Archdeacon Sir George Fleming (1667-1747), who eventually became Bishop of Carlisle (c 1708?).  Then as part of the notes to the paraphrase, that Catherine had three daughters who lived to adulthood and one son, a William Gibson (why the change of last name is not explained). To give them their due, the chronology of Anne’s life in both volumes in front does single out these women as events in Anne’s life. Catherine Fleming is also mentioned in “Advertisement for the Gazette …” “whereas ’tis spread about the town,” as well as her sister (?), Ann Fleming. McGovern and Hinnant tell us that Fleming was also a friend of Lady Scudamore, cousin to Robert Digby, friend to Alexander Pope; it’s she that Catherine Fleming went to visit; the Flemings are part of the Digby clan. Fleming was Pope’s friend too. In her life of Finch, McGovern cites her name as a friend, and tells us nothing at all beyond citing these poems.

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A still from a film, Dyke Pussy (2008) where Allyson Mitchell’s sculptures are seen: or, more plainly, two cats as friends who mirror one another

After Catherine Fleming, the second most in number and seriousness of feeling are to Francis Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford (1699-1754), about whom I’ve written a blog. The three include a masterpiece (“Hartford ’tis wrong …”), and one very touching, oh so poignant (“Of sleeplesse nights, and days with care o’ercast”) showing Anne assumed real understanding and sympathy from her great-niece (the line: first her grandmother, Francis Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth (Ephelia), and then Lady Weymouth’s daughter-in-law, Lady Hertford’s mother, Grace Strode Thynne (Cleone), see my next blog on poems to women who were not themselves poets). Lady Hertford is once referred  to as Aspasia.

1) No MS; 1741 Birch, X, 179, “Of sleepless nights, and days with care o’ercast,” “To the Right Honorable the Countess of Hartford, with her volume of poems”

2) MS Additional 4457, p59r, “Joy from a zealous pen Ardelia [therefore ascribed] sends,” “To the Countess of Hartford on her Lord’s Birthday.

3) MS Wellesley, 72-6, “Hartford ’tis wrong if Poets may complain,” “To the Right Honourable Frances Countess of Hartford who engaged Mr Eusden to write upon a wood enjoining him to mention no tree but the Aspen & no flower but the King-cup.”

There is one to a Mrs [Grace] Randolph who is Laura in “The Circuit of Apollo,”. These two poems sound like women who know each other distantly, let’s say through their work, but are not yet friends. We may hope they had become closer friends by “The Circuit of Apollo.”  Grace Blome (1674-1750), came from an established Kent family; married to Herbert Randolph on June 27, 1700; married, Randolph had 12 children (!), but is known to have written three creditable poems besides the one to Finch (Keith, Vol 1, pp 534-35). There is real warmth in both poems; they felt an affinity and mutual respect and understanding. The first by Anne is one of her fine poems.

1) MS Folger, 48-49, “Madam, ’till pow’rfully convinc’d by you,” “An Epistle, from Ardelia, to Mrs Randolph, in answer to her poem upon her verses,”

and one from her:

2) MS Folger, np (2nd poem in tribute in the opening section), “Madam, As when the Macedonian Conqu’rour dy’d,” “An Epistle, from Mrs Randolph to Mrs Finch; upon her presenting her with some of her poems”

A second poet from “The Circuit of Apollo” identified by Anne Finch as Valeria, could very well be Sarah Dixon, about whom both Ann Messenger (Pastoral Tradition and the Female Talent) and Deborah Kennedy (see below) have written. Kennedy identifies Dixon with Finch’s Valeria in the poem where the poet’s lack of physical beauty is compensated for by her inner beauty. The selection chosen by Roger Lonsdale in his Eighteenth-Century Women Poets does far more credit to Dixon than those discussed so anodynely by Kennedy.

Sarah Dixon’s years were 1761-1765; her published poetry is all in the 18th century mode (Poems on Several Occasions, 1740, with a large list of impressive subscribers). It’s not certain she never married; there is evidence to suggest she was a widow. She came from an important Royalist family in Rochester in Kent; her grandfather, Sir Robert Dixon (1614-88), was a published writer himself who served Charles I during the civil; he was rewarded by Charles II with the Prebendary of Rochester Cathedral.  “The agreeable” suggests a genuine understanding between two women (for otherwise would Finch have dared to go on about Dixon’s lack of attractiveness?). While “Clarinda’s Indifference at Parting with Her Beauty” suggests a dialogue with the self (that is, Finch is Clorinda), nonetheless, the theme so insisted upon is found repeatedly in Dixon’s poetry and I suggest is understood better when seen in the context of women’s bitter discussions on the importance of fleeting physical beauty, and while probably not by Finch, the existence of “Cosmelia’s Charms” in a later ms with a row of Finch’s poems brings alive how these women related to one another empathetically.

1) Ms Wellesley, p 95. “She is not fair you criticks of the Town,” The Agreeable [second poem so titled in Wellesley MS].

2) MSs F-H 283, Folger 13, “Now age came on and all the dismall traine,” Clarinda’s Indifference at Parting with Her Beauty [Folger, a later copying over of a another censured title]. A deeply felt and angry poem (even if it’s embarrassing)

A third poet from “The Circuit of Apollo” had been identified: Alinda or Olinda is Elizabeth Wythens (nee Taylor), later Colepepper. She is also alluded to in “Ardelia’s Answer to Ephelia,” in a deliberately obscured but sympathetic way.

Alinda/Olinda was daughter to Sir Thomas Taylor, a baronet at Park House, Maidstone, Kent (and thus a Kentish poetess), forcibly married to a man very much older than she (Sir Francis Wythens) in 1685 to stop a love affair with Sir Thomas Colepepper. After the marriage, she seems to have quickly left Wythens to live with Colepepper, eventually living with him in his villa (and bringing with her children by Wythens whom Colepepper eventually successfully sued for support); Wythens died in 1704 (note the many years Elizabeth endured a marriage, for the husband would visit her), upon which Elizabeth and Colepepper married. She died in 1708. The story is told by Germaine Greer, in her notes to Elizabeth Taylor’s poetry, all well chosen, with an understandable animus against male behavior that reveals the milieu of Anne Finch’s early songs (Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Century Women’s Verse, pp 294-98). Taylor is alluded to by Keith, but only insofar as is absolutely necessary to identify her as Alinda (Vol 1, pp 461-62, and 529).

1) MS Folger, 6-11, “Me, dear Ephelia, me, in vain you court,” Ardelia’s answer to Ephelia, who had invited Her to come to her in Town–reflecting on the Coquetterie & detracting humour of the Age,” as brilliant as that of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, both of which find an ultimate source in Boileau’s Satire III (itself an imitation of Horace’s Satire I, ix). The poem is to Francis Finch Thynne, Lady Weymouth, but these lines are a sort of defense of Elizabeth Taylor Wythens Colepepper:

Can I dislike I cry, what all admire,
Discreet, and witty, civill and refin’d,
Nor, in her person fairer, then her mind,
Is yong, Alinda, if report be just,
For half the Caracter, my eyes I trust.
What chang’d Almeria, on a suddain cold,
As if I of your freind, some tale had told?

No, she replyes, but when I hear her praise,
A secret failing, does my pitty raise,
Damon she loves, and ’tis my dayly care,
To keep the passion from the publick ear.

I ask, amaz’d, if this she has reveal’d,
No, but ’tis true she crys, though much conceal’d,
I have observ’d itt long, but wou’d betray
But to your self, what now with greif I say,
Who this, to no’ne, but Confidents must break,
Nor they to others, but in whispers speak;
I am her friend, and must consult her fame ….

More was she saying, when fresh objects came,
Now what’s that thing, she crys, Ardelia guesse?

Finch is identifying strongly with Alinda as someone who has behaved in ways their societies use to ostracize them (Finch’s transgression would be her depression — this reality despite her “Spleen” proclaiming it is still avoided, and especially in this new edition).

It’s arguable that Elizabeth Rowe, Philomena, meant a great deal to Finch: she was so much better known, and respected than most women poets; perhaps they saw one another more often, having connections with people each of them were close to. Finch singles Rowe out twice in her poetry as part of a “celebrity” so-to-speak poetic world; there is evidence they moved in the same circles in Kent and southern England.

Still, I can find no real closeness, no intimacy recorded between Anne Finch and Elizabeth Rowe. There is but one letter by Rowe and that to Grace Strode, telling Strode to thank Finch for sending a copy of a poem, apparently in response to some sign of recognition by Finch to Grace Strode (Sarah Sard Hughes, and McGovern, AF and her poetry, pp 118-19). The lack of direct communication, and tone of the letter does not signal a close relationship; only if the following is by Finch, can we posit a certain amount of intimate camaraderie and friendship.

1) Ms Additional 28101, “Prithee Friend that Hedge behold,” “To a fellow Scribbler. By Lady Winchilsea,” may be to Elizabeth Rowe, as Cameron surmised, so the felt personal connection makes sense — it’s through shared anger at the way women poets are treated. The evidence that this poem is to Rowe includes that it occurs in an manuscript with two poems to Lady Hertford, one by Finch to Grace Strode, and one by Rowe, grieving intensely a year after her husband died, and two to Lady Arabella Marrow — all part of a narrow circle of friends.

Prithee Friend that Hedge behold
When all we rhiming Fools grow old
Who in vain Florish Life have spent
Amidst it stands a rivall’d Tree,
Now representing sixty three
And like it you and I shall be.
The bare vine round about it clings
With mischievous, intangling Strings
The night Shade with a dismal Flow’r
Culrs o’er it, like a Lady’s Tower
Or Honesty with feather’d Down
Like grizled Hair deforms its Crown
Luxuriant plants that o’er it spread
Not medicinal for Heart or Head
Whch serve but to amuse the Sight
Are like the nothings that we write
Yet still ’tis thought that Tree’s well plac’d
With beauteous Eglantine imbrac’d
But see how false Appearance proves
If he that Honeysuckle Loves
Which climbs by him to reach the Thorns
The rival Thorn his Age derides
And gnaws like jealousy his Sides.
Then let us cease, my Friend, to sing
When ever youth is on the Wing
Unless we solidly indite
Some good Infusing while we write
Lest with our Follies hung around
We like that Tree & Hedge be found
Grotesque & trivial, shun’d by all
And soon forgotten when we fall.

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The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain by Richard Samuel, 1779. The sitters are (standing, left to right): Elizabeth Carter, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Sheridan, Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox; (seated, left to right): Angelica Kauffmann, Catherine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith …

Moving into women poets before her time, poets Finch didn’t know well or not at all but were famous in her time:

With the best will in the world towards their books, which I have loved parts of and honor: Deborah Kennedy has written an admirable book, Poetic Sisters: Early 18th Century Women Poets, where she has chapters on Anne Finch, Elizabeth Rowe, Francis Thynne Seymour, Sarah Dixon and Mary Jones (see my foremother poet blog, 1707-78, Chantress), but while she unearths information and poems, she does not use poems by these women that discuss or are about these women’s relationships, or vocations, or real life problems, and when she discusses the women or their lives, it’s done in such a vein of optimistic naivete I just cannot take what she asserts about people’s relationships seriously.

Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community and Linguistic Authority, wants us to believe that the poetry of Anne Killigrew, of Mary Chudleigh, and Sarah Edgerton, and prose of Mary Astell influenced and were important to Finch, but there is no evidence for this in their different bodies of poetry. I look for some allusion, some reference, and find none. Germaine Greer’s anthology of 17th century women’s poetry (I would very much like to link Anne Wharton’s poetry to Finch but find nothing) and her Slipshod Muses if read astutely can yield much but it would be all speculation. Finch’s predecessors in English who meant a lot to her for sure, were Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips, both their highly sexualized poems (by which I mean the erotic and lesbian poetry too, their translations) and their witty ones.  We have many lines of poetry by Anne which attest to this: praise of them, imitations, using them as models.

Anne Finch was much moved by the plays and actresses of her era, and left a poem for Anne Oldfield to speaks as an epilogue which expressed her response to the tragic-queen plays of the era: see my “I hate such parts as we have plaid today. I see little influence on her by the female playwrights of her era, I am sorry to say, and we cannot know what she read in manuscript of earlier and contemporary women’s plays (except those she might have mentioned and we have no mentions). And her translation studies led her to Sappho as presented by Anne Dacier. There are a least three blogs here, but I have outlined what I would have said. The poem that I want here to allude to that is important (when we think about the possibility she wrote the libretto for John Blow’s Venus and Adonis and the intense sexuality of her Italian via the French translations) is Behn’s “The Golden Age,” and her adaptation of “A Voyage to the Isle of Love.”

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So I’ve here identified Catherine Fleming, Francis Thynne Seymour, Grace Randolph, Sarah Dixon, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elizabeth Rowe as her contemporary peers and friends; Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips as her predecessors in English. We’ve seen she was part of circles where there were other women poets. Elizabeth Tollet (1694-1754) wrote one of the earliest tributes to Anne Finch; Tollet was following Finch she felt, but the poem does not suggest any friendship. Here is poem by her from my foremother poet blog about her. You will find there a ballad by Tollet very much in the vein of Finch to Fleming, where Tollet also pays tribute to the importance of friendship for her

Adieu my Friend

Adieu my Friend! and may thy Woes
Be all in long Oblivion lost:
If Innocence can give Repose;
Or gentle Verse can please thy Ghost.
No pious Rite, no solemn Knell
Attended thy belov’d Remains:
Nor shall the letter’d Marble tell
What silent Earth the Charge contains.

Obscure, beneath the nameless Stone,
With thee shall Truth and Virtue sleep:
While, with her Lamp, the Muse alone,
Shall watch thy sacred Dust and weep.

Blue Violets, and Snow-Drops pale,
In pearly Dew for thee shall mourn:
And humble Lillies of the Vale
Shall cover thy neglected Urn.

Angela Kauffman (1741-1807), A girl reading a letter

Ellen

Anne Finch: what lengths of time & a newly discovered poem

Thus even in sleep conscience’s anxiety/pounds the heart awake — Christa Wolf, translating Aeschylus, Cassandra (p 216)

Dear friends and readers,

Today I returned for a third time to my project to read carefully, review and evaluate and then write a comprehensive accurate review of the new Cambridge edition of Anne Finch’s poetry. What strikes me most is “what lengths of time” I have been about this project: beginning sometime in April and then writing on June 30, 2020 on a first phase — that’s a year and six months ago — ; having had to put it down because of press of other work, and starting again, probably in August, and writing up my findings on September 20, 2020 — that’s three months later –; and now here I find, astonishingly, another whole year and six months have passed again, as I once again begin.

You will say this must be procrastination, and yes it is partly that. I am intimidated; I am referred to in the volumes in a sublimely impersonal condescending way, and I’ve been snubbed by this editor, perhaps unconsciously.  I cannot say she recognized me, though it was in a zoom where I spoke and I cannot believe she does not remember my name as she mentioned my work quite a number of times throughout the first volume, at one point taking out paragraphs to argue with my view, and I’m cited as a key source in both volumes. So I am working to be utterly accurate and when I disagree (which I will) want to make my case in a way that she will not be able to dismiss me (or others who agree with me), especially on some of the unattributed poetry.

But it also has been that it was not until this June (2021) that I actually got my hands on Volume 2. That is when I began work again, and produced two lists of Finch’s poem, each representing work done individually and comparatively. I went over manuscript cultural studies, caught up on all the new studies of Finch that had been written about since I reviewed the Hinnant-McGovern edition of the Wellesley ms, and wrote a couple of papers for 18th century conferences.

Gentle reader, I began with Anne Finch so long ago: really it was 1980, shortly after I finished my dissertation. I took up two women when I moved to Virginia: Charlotte Smith and Anne Finch, two 18th century English poets whose poetry I loved. Then after I spent some years translating Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, I studied Finch as a translator in 1993-94, then I tried writing a Life but put it on the Net unfinished in 2004 as I On Myself Can Live because I learned of McGovern’s biography, and understood I didn’t have the connections, money, social wherewithal to do it right. Then I got involved with a musical quartet, Apollo’s Muse, 2001 I wrote again a shorter Later Life. What lengths of time.

Well now I will not give over. I have promised myself not to volunteer for any more papers, or any more reviews until I’ve finished writing this and sending it to the editor of the 18th century Intelligencer. I will not take too many courses; I’ve done a lot of the basic work towards the courses I will be teaching for the coming winter, spring and summer — I can read more of course and will. But I will weave Anne Finch in. I’ll work on Austen slowly and continuously but as for a blog (I’m reading Sheila Johnson Kindred’s Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: the Life and Letter of Fanny Palmer Austen as a central text to review here)

What I want to do tonight beyond marking this date for myself is add another poem by Anne Finch and sum up my findings thus far concisely.

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A photograph of a singing nightingale

Yes a new poem definitely by Anne Finch has been found, which is not on my website; I’m sorry I cannot add it there, but I can describe it here and tell where it may be found — beyond the New Complete Poems. Vol 2, pp 215-16, with annotations pp 458-64. It is another bird poem, a fable, and about song: titled “The Nightingale & the Cuckoo,” it was found by Gillian Wright in another of the Northamptonshire Record Office’s manuscripts, MS 258, deposited there as part of the Finch archive in 1930, by the Earl of Nottinghamshire and Winchilea. Like the other unattributed poems I found in other ms’s, it is part of a row or list of poems, all known to be by Anne Finch. The 8 page manuscript is described, its history told, the other four poems in the ms, all by Anne Finch for sure, cited; the text of “The Nightingale and the Cuckoo quoted as it appears in the manuscript and then interpreted by Wright, all in her “The Bird and the Poet: Self-Representation and the Early Editing of Anne Finch’s poetry,” in The Review of English Studies, New Series, 64:264 (2013):246-66

“The Nightingale & the Cuckoo” is not a neglected masterpiece.  It’s a wry tale or fable, a little awkward towards the end, and Finch uses imagery and ideas found in her poetry elsewhere.  “The Musicians of the Wood” had long provided music for young men to “mollify their loves” without payment. It was “nois’d in every tree” that “Men resolv’d at last” to “pension” “the sweetest Voice.” Now this winner, the Nightingale (so she or he thinks) would no longer be hungry, “When Barns lock’d up the Grain.” The Nightingale, though, was assuming “merit Awards can raise,” but “not a Cuckoo left untry’d/Her Title to the Bays,” and in the end the “few” who understood the beauty of the Nightingale’s song “their Thoughts conceal’d,/Nor wou’d oppose the Crow’d.” The moral is “real Wits” who “contend with an ill-judging Age/Thus do You all your Labours spend” uselessly:

In vain, You wou’d sublimely write
An Epigram, a Punn;
A foul Burlesque gives more Delight,
King Charles’s days are done.

I agree with Keith that Wright’s idea in her essay that this unprinted poem was meant as a gift to Heneage, to thank him for being her amanuensis, is not convincing, and find Wright’s elaborate reading of the poem in the context of print publication over-reading though she does show how reluctant Anne Finch was to print anything that could be construed into mockery. But equally Keith’s invented narrative, concluding, based on speculation (as she often does) about the relationship between Anne and her nephew, the heir, and between “The Nightingale & Cuckoo,” and the four other poems, that it was meant for Charles Finch, as a way of complimenting him as “real wit,” seems to me slightly off.

Keith has decided that Charles Finch wrote “The First Edilium of Bion English’d by the Right Honourable the Earl of Winchilsea,” partly on the basis of her idea he was a fine serious learned poet, and seriously encouraged Anne Finch to write poetry, to publish her work, for which she was earnestly grateful. We had three poems by her where she directly and indirectly addresses Charles. It seems we now have a fourth. On the translation of Bion James Woolley and John Irwin Fischer have decided (as have I) it is by Anne Finch.

The first poem we know of that was written to Charles Finch, who became fourth Earl of Winchilsea, was in response to his return to the UK from Holland in spring 1703 to take up his position as apparent heir to the Winchilsea estates. It seems to me she doesn’t know him very well as yet but is of course taking a hopeful view, and lavishing praise on him. It is an intendedly beautiful ode, and reads like a poem intended for circulation, impersonal (unlike the third, below), “NOW blow, ye Southern winds, with full release,” 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. There is no ms, and it first appears many years after in Pope’s Own Miscellany, 1717, long after Charles himself had died.

The second is an apology for “trying his patience” with reading aloud some of her tragedy, Aristomenes, here called “a tedious Play.” She pleads her loneliness at “Godmersham … Not sure to be endur’d, without the Muses.” She begs his pardon rather abjectly, and promises this play or poem read aloud will be the last time she does this. On Charles’s behalf it is apparent that she also tried to read aloud one of her plays to Pope over a dinner and it went down very badly (see below).

The third poem about Charles Finch is an exquisitely beautiful landscape poem which includes a reference to a curious story (not fully printed until 1903 by Myra Reynolds) where Finch refers to a superstitious story that attributed the death of Heneage’s father’s second wife and his eldest son to the Earl’s decision to take down a grove of oak. It was the death of this eldest son (Heneage’s older brother) which led to Charles Finch inheriting the property. Finch might have thought he would take this reference as a comical reference as the rest of her poem is an ambiguous compliment to him for replacing the old mullioned windows at Eastwell with clear glass and planting a new garden that mends all the faults (in taste) that “in the Old was found” (presumably one of the reasons the old Earl pulled it down). In her notes to this poem Myra Reynolds registers discomfort over the tactlessness of retelling the family history. At the time in the house was the old Earl’s young widow, with her four children, and the old earl’s oldest son’s widow, with her son, Charles Finch, destined to be heir. In one note I came across it seems the two women sometimes fought over who owned what furniture. (Shades of Spoils of Poynton, only much worse because more than one widow of very different ages, and a new wife to the new heir, Charles Finch.)

I do not disagree it is possible this fable was intended for Charles Finch; if so, and if we pay attention to what Anne’s epilogue to Aristomenes suggests, and the queasy feel of her ambiguous compliments to Finch (which Myra Reynolds were responsible for leaving lines out in the printed version), and the tradition of fables to which “The Nightingale & the Cuckoo” belong, we have our explanation for why it was never printed or re-copied out. There is a description of Charles Finch which suggests he was a rather ordinary but generous young man who enjoyed crude jokes. This is quoted in John Irwin Fisher’s essay “In pitying to the emptying town:”  “He loves jests and puns, and that low sort of wit” (p 294). Charles Finch wrote no serious verse that we know of.  Fischer says except for Anne Finch (so beholden to this young man), no one ever “accused Charles Finch of versifying” and no manuscript of verse in his handwriting or anyone else’s attributing a poem to him survives (p 295). Keith prints none of his letters nor does she quote from any and I have not myself been able to read any.

But I have read several of the fables in the tradition of the Nightingale in competition with birds who sing poorly, or plainly, or not at all (the hawk, the owl, the cuckoo) and those who present a contest where the moral is either against the prideful assumption you will be admired (often the nightingale in this role) or more than half mocks the judge.  The version that is the closest source for this new poem is, as Keith suggests in her notes, L’Estrange’s 414, “An Ass Made a Judge of Music,” 1692 text, reprinted 1704, pp 386-387. I agree the bird fable might have been written with Charles in mind, but not as a way of making him into a serious wit. Rather he was the kind of person who likes epigrams, puns, and burlesques. The solution to why it was never printed is that again someone decided Finch had been tactless and worried lest the poem be misinterpreted as implying Swift’s Charles Finch would have liked burlesque and therefore seen as an insult. I suggest she never forgot that he was bored at her play (as apparently was Pope whose comment about being given a headache by being asked to listen to a play read aloud, where he includes Lady Winchilsea at the table is probably to her Aristomenes). But I doubt she meant an outright insult; it was more in the vein of uncomfortable teasing.

I find that Keith idealizes a number of the people connected to Anne Finch or simplifies them psychologically — she never so much as brings out the considerable tensions between Anne and her husband we find here and there in Anne’s more personal poems. So I suggest that Anne Finch had been made uncomfortable by the nephew’s lack of real appreciation of her poetry — by the time of her reading her play aloud (or parts of it), each of them knew the other was far from sincere in the veneer of politeness and mutual admiration kept up. Yes he urged her to print, but apparently this was a trope among several of her friends and associates. The poem to Charles urging his return home was not published until way after his death.  We should remember she brought no dowry, had had no children. I assume the marriage was tolerated because of her aristocratic heritage and because at the time it would have been thought highly unlikely Heneage would inherit (he was the fourth son). When it became apparent that Charles would have no children, that is when Heneage and Anne moved back into Eastwell because it was seen that Heneage might, now not so unexpectedly by that time, become the heir.

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Visit to the Composing Room (or typesetting) of the printing house/establishment of Clément Pomteux

I sum up my findings thus far this way: This new edition is an edition of the manuscripts and first printed book, so an addition to book history and those interested in the world of manuscript circulation before print took full hold in the 18th century. The team are apparently attempting to give the scholarly reader as close an experience of the four primary sources as is humanly possible in a book format. They also reprint or print for the first time those few poems where the attribution to Anne Finch is undeniable in a format which also imitates the way the text appears in the source as closely as one can do in a book meant to be read.

From the same series as above: attributed to Léonard Defrance (1784)

There is also a conscious attempt to avoid giving a poem a personal or autobiographical motive if this will bring out clearly Finch’s lifelong battle with depression, social anxiety, and troubled existence with Heneage as a non-juror. If you know her poetry from elsewhere and have read some of the considerable secondary material (criticism) that has come out on this poetry, you will recognize the attempt to erase a major complex emotional terrain across her oeuvre that, together with any observation of the traumas she endured with difficulty (as an orphaned child, an intellectual learned woman without a considerable dowry, and, as it turned out, childless woman), would go a long way towards explaining persuasively how all the poems relate to one another. See, for just one example, Vol 1, pp l-li (50-51) where these aspects of her personality are omitted all together, and the silence over the distressing personal content in the two poems Finch partly obliterated but could not get herself to destroy (Vol 1, pp 3-6, 408-13). (Another memo to self: I must find in Keith’s own book and/or essays where she explicitly vows not to present Finch as a weak woman or victim because, as a feminist, she dislikes such treatments of women. Such women are not good role models.)

A Song [for my Br. Les Finch: added]. Upon a Punch Bowl.

From the Park, and the Play,
And Whitehall come away,
To the Punch-bowl, by far more inviting;
To the Fopps, and the Beauxs [sic],
Leave those dull empty shows,
And see here, what is truly delighting.

The half Globe ’tis in figure,
And wou’d itt were bigger;
Yett here’s the whole Universe floating,
Here’s Titles, and Places,
Rich lands, and fair faces,
And all that is worthy our doating.

‘Twas a World, like to this,
The hott Gracian did misse.
Of whom History’s keep such a pother,
To the bottom he sunk,
And when one he had drunk
Grew maudlin, and wept for another.

— Anne Finch, it is telling how she does not forget the importance of money & rank in her poetry; she & Heneage had some lean years; she also did not like the heavy drinking the male Finches indulged in at night, which, of course, she was helpless to stop …
Ellen

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 are often printed texts by other people or individuals. For this blog I describe the other manuscripts and printed books which contain further poems by Anne Finch which are not found in the major four sources or are 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 or no longer in use for copying, 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.  In a way I do what Keith does in her new standard: I am content to put the ms’s and books in the order they themselves came and forget trying to date individual poems (except in commentary)

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; everything about this piece you might want to know, especially if you are interested in its probable 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.  It is very sexy but then so are her two plays.

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

Now here I bring 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.  I regret strongly I do not dare to even link this blog into my website.  I just don’t know how to cope with it any more.  I haven’t gone near the website except of course to read it — not to correct or put new things in it — since 2015.

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 did list them on my website. But there is an essay by Rachel Bowman in Volume 2 which will be sure to supersede mine even if it cites less anthologies.  Update 7/4/2022: Bowman does not supersede mine; an agenda determines her choices of anthologies; I am neutral because unaware of what this year’s or decades’ fights are about.

I could make a blog about Finch’s sources, for the sake of bringing out what she read and how large the number of her works are derived from translations. She lived in worlds of words — among books and written landscapes, imagined and real. Her memories of texts were important to her; 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 this will not make her admired and the above list on the website will have to do.

I am gathering the few important mistakes I made, which can no longer be corrected because I am now (as I say) afraid to touch my website lest I goof.  These with the two new attributions, Venus and Adonis and a poem called “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale” announced in an essay by Gillian Wright, “The Birds and the Poet” (The Review of English Studies, 64:264 (2013): 246-66 will form a third blog for sure.

I will say this refusal of Keith’s to include anything without firm attribution suggests a turning away from the real Finch by her — she does not want to see the depression, for in her list of characteristic passages by Anne, Keith omits Anne’s despair.  Again, her refusal can have the effect of making my website’s original purpose still alive.  I applaud Reynolds for embracing a perception of Finch that includes Finch’s vulnerable depressive wounded personality. I shall write in my review about this de-personalization as an insistent erasure that disables us from making a consistent and vivid sense of Finch’s life and work.  It is only by facing the full woman (however painful a successful academic woman scholar finds this) that we can take in the full resonances and final gallant courage of such a poem as the following free translation, adaptation.

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 conspicuous 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

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720): the major sources for her poetry (1)

A page from the Folger Manuscript book of Finch’s poems (written up or in 1704-1709)

On my selfe

Good Heav’en I thank thee, Since it was design’d
I shou’d be fram’d but of the weaker kind,
That yet my Soul, is rescu’d from the Love
Of all those trifles, which their passions move
Pleasures, and Praises, and Company with me
Have their Just Vallue, if allow’d they be;
Freely, and thankfully, as much I taste
As will not reason, nor Religion waste,
If they’re deny’d, I on my Selfe can live
Without the aids a cheating World can give
When in the Sun, my wings can be display’d
And in retirement I can have the shade.
— Finch-Hatton 283, pp 34-35 (printed first in 1903 Reynolds, pp 14-15), but taken from MS Portland, Vol 19, p 212 (located in Longleate)

Dear friends and readers,

Though now and again I’ve posted a poem by Anne Finch, or included her in a discussion here of women’s poetry, especially in the long 18th century, I’ve never attempted a foremother poet blog. I feel I know too much, and cannot see how I can contain what I know into a small enough compass that a blog-essay demands. I understand this suggests I am too much involved even now, some nearly 30 years after I first started to read and seek out and study her oeuvre seriously. See my website region for her. I am nonetheless going to write about her here because I’ve been asked to review the new standard edition of her poetry for Cambridge University Press by Jennifer Keith with the help of Claudia Thomas Kairoff and several other women scholars for an eighteeth-century newsletter.

On my desk is Volume I of II (the second volume to come out this coming January), hereinafter called Keith. I’ve found over the last month (I am going slowly partly because I am doing other things) that to do this in a genuinely evaluative critical manner I must go back to all my work and re-familiarize myself: this includes returning to all the manuscripts and early printed books her poetry appears in, and at least going over the history of the criticism and anthology tradition. And I’ve discovered that in this returning to the whole of this material for the first time in 16 years, I have reached a new phase in my responsiveness to this woman, her life, her work; if not detached, I am looking at it afresh.

A photograph of the ancient battered copy of Myra Reynolds’s 1903 edition of Finch’s poems, which I have worked with since I first bought it in the 1980s

Alas, I am become so alive to Finch’s many faults: among them, the unfinished crude nature of work she was not sure would ever reach public eyes, the unevenness of this material and other work she did prepare for publication. The reality that her lack of any confidence in her ability not to write good poems but to be judged fairly, to be read in an unbiased manner, without hostility to her as a woman, her fear of any exposure of her private life (which included bad depressions, anxiety-attacks, her husband and her Jacobitism, her uncertain status as unexpectedly she became a titled aristocrat) made her revise her work in ways that made it worse. She broke apart beautifully personal poems, rewrote some of her best strong lines (as possibly transgressive). I was long aware that in writing she obeyed the way poetry was written at the time: she may have feminized but she held to popular social verse genres. I think these stifled her poetic gifts. Finch needed not only to feminize them (which like other women in this era, she did), but to more daringly than she did, make them autobiographical and develop the simpler lyric forms. She could be effective in pindaric odes, but often she is not: she is not self-critical enough.  Some of the devotional work (especially paraphrases and some narratives) are dreadful.

Far from concentrating on her masks, we must go beneath and against the grain of these to drive down to where her soul is at. I agree with Keith she is a separate presence not equivalent to her “muse” and all the allegorical apparatus of psychology and landscape she divided her mind into, but find it is that presence insofar as it emerges and sometimes dominates that makes for her living poetry today.

I know this is not a popular or even accepted attitude among the women and the few men (mostly seeing themselves as feminists) studying Finch and her contemporaries today. They go at the poetry to prove Finch was admired then, built up an authority for herself (so wrote strategically) by the use of tropes and genres of the era — this fame or authority is what they value too.  They want to show how ambitious she was, how influential.  Obeying conventions made her poetry socially acceptable but not necessarily read or in reality understood or sincerely valued. Who can today respond to the delusions of cautious 1790s Jacobitism? or a mausoleum of Beaumont and Fletcher techniques combined with naive ideas about monarchs and some memories of  a Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night transvestite heroine to make a play? As with so many women of this and other eras, there is  so much religious poetry.

Among the first pages of the Northamptonshire book (renamed by Keith) and what I called MS Finch-Hatton 283 (it was so called & numbered by the Northampton office) or sometimes on my website Godmersham-Wye (because that’s where it was probably written out) you see the lovely scribal hand and somewhat older fashioned lettering of the first group of poems in this first ms. The earliest poem is from 1682, the latest 1704.

I also disagree with some things done by these new editors.   They are apparently attempting to give the scholarly reader a close an experience of the four primary sources as is humanly possible in a book format.

I chose the texts individually on my website, either the first or the text I believe (and I maintain there are no protocols that enable the editor to escape subjectivity) is the best. They prefer the Folger for their copy text to the 1713 edition of a poem because they want to show the ms and they don’t want to reprint a poem twice. I prefer texts in the Finch-Hatten manuscript (from the family names) or Godmersham-Wye (again from where Anne and Heneage were living during the time it was written) to the Folger because I believe many are better in the earlier form.  They have named Finch-Hatton 283 the Northamptonshire manuscript because the copy resides in the Northamptonshire documentary records office (I bought it as a microfilm, turned that into xeroxes). They refuse to rearrange the poems in any order other than the one found in the sources, though these orders are often happenstance, poems put in not chronologically (when they were written) but as they came to hand or by genre (if one could be found).

The result, let me say here, is a standard edition that makes Finch into a writer of poetry no ordinary reader will easily make sense of, or read for enjoyment or historically (unless strong attention is paid to transcribed alternative lines). Finch comes across as disordered, repetitious, in fragments. They have not quite overcome the problem of chronology — it is truly impossible objectively to date most of the poems — since they have to choose a single copy text.  So maybe one of the F-H 283 poems is written later than the Folger corpus, or some in the MS Wellesley written quite early.

It is true that the four major sources are put into chronological order as books, which ms or book came first is first and so on. I would call these two volumes an edition of the manuscripts except that each poem is printed only once, with preference given to the Folger Ms. It is not so much a book to read as a scholarly tool to consult. Now if this is what is wanted in a standard edition, this is a good standard edition — except they have omitted poems that are by Anne Finch, even if not to a religious certainty.  Ironically, this means my website still has a purpose.  You can find poems by her certainly (the imitative translation of Bion), poems probably by her (column kind of verses, often autobiographical), and poems that are possibly or probably not by her but are worth considering.

But I can’t make any start in thinking about this edition and how to represent it in an academic review until I put together and write out what I had in my mind when I made that website but never wrote up individually in one place: I never in one place described the sources of these poems –I admit I had real trouble with the unattributed ones put in miscellanies. And not just descriptions of these sources, but how many poems in them, which are authorized, or clearly hers, or probably hers, or worth perusing for possible (though not probable) attribution.

Why I did not write it out in one place at the time I put up the website (2002-4) I know not.  Maybe because it seemed so basic and fundamental in my mind.  Now I have had to rebuild a document from different places on the website because I forgot a good deal.  It will be a comparative document to work with or from. But I cannot put such a document onto the website since Jim died as I cannot cope with the technology without him. It is no longer publishable, if it ever were — by me, at any rate.  For several years now I no longer correct  or add to that website.  I know I should make a separate blog about errors I made that having read this Cambridge book I am aware of (like in dating and some recondite editions and manuscripts I was not able to see), but I doubt anyone will come to my site for such information any more; but I will write in general of whatever I have learned better about once I finish reading the two new volumes.

Whence this is first of probably more than two working blogs,  which are linked into re-considered poems put into newly ordered lists.

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Wye College Kent (today), where Anne wrote some of her earliest and most beautiful (and melancholy) poems

In this blog I describe the four major authorized books: 3 manuscripts and 1 printed book.

MS Finch-Hatton 283 (so titled by the Northamptonshire office), now N. Although earliest poem in N is 1682 (the nearly obliterated The Grove), I dated this elegant octavo book as copied out as of 1694, and no longer in use by 1704 (copied out much later than the previous and in a hasty hand, the poem upon the hurricane). The first poem copied out is “The Introduction.”. N has an index, is 143 pages and is described in Keith, pp cxxvii-cxxxii (who had the advantage of people in the office sending her descriptions). I counted 59 items, 2 obliterated, so 57 items, minus 1 for which I preferred MS Portland 19 (“On my selfe”) so 56 items for an edition. I salvaged what I could of 2 of the 4 almost destroyed copies, producing pieces for two more texts, so from MS F-H 283 I had 58 poems. All but 7 re-appear in some version in MS Folger; so 52 items shared by both MS Finch-Hatton (N) and MS Folger (F).  To sum up, Keith in new edition says 1690-96; I conjecture 1694 to 1704.

MS Folger now F (so titled as owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library). Now in sum, Keith in new edition limits this one to 1701-2 (as a single, one time compilation). I conjecture 1704-1709 as copied out over a number of years the way the  N (F-H 283) poems were. By no means were all of them written during that time. Anne and Heneage come to live at Eastwell & settle in permanently by 1704. I suggest  the second manuscript book (MS Folger) was begun then, and then it was Anne wrote the preface. F begins with dedicatory poems, and then a prose “The Preface” (a footnote at the bottom of the preface points to the later insertion of Anne’s three pieces from the Italian of the Aminta, which had been decided on since she wrote the preface) and then we again have “The Introduction”. It consists of a series of poems, then two plays and then another series of poems. The handwriting differs in the different sections. No index. It’s not as elegant a book. This one has 68 new items because a 69th is always misprinted as three separated poems (“The Bird and the Arras”), beginning with the 1713 Miscellany where two parts appear, followed by Reynolds in 1903 where all three appear (as separate poems). There are 121 individual works (not counting the introductory poems by other people to her and not counting the two pieces of poems never copied out), 52 of which appear in MS F-H 283; 69 only in MS Folger. Of the 69 one is pasted over and not recoverable. There is also a 12 page break in the numbers (p 261, then p 273); one could conjecture there was a poem here which was pulled out. I have not counted these in the items as there is nothing to indicate that there was a poem there for certain. F is described in Keith, pp cxxxii-cxl. 1706 could be a terminus ad quem for the time of the writing of these poems because the book does not include two Tunbridge satires (found elsewhere); the reference to Mons in “An Invitation to Dafnis is dated 1706.

Anne was slowly moving from the personally referential religious and analytical pastoral meditations (long and short) of her court years, and the striking songs (some so knowing and bitter about what it was like to be a woman in this misogynistic aggressive court) from the 1690s through early 1700s, the MS F-H 283 and the early MS Folger — to a much more apparently impersonal and ironic poetry. So she is moving from a later 17th century woman poet to hudibrastic fables (out of translation work), impersonal Pope-like pastorals, and anacreontics in Prior’s gay amoral vein. She had written within the genres of later 17th century poets; now she is working within the newer sub-genres of the early Augustan era. Why 1709? it is in 1709 we find Tonson publishing some of the later MS Folger poems, and 1709 is the last date in the MS Folger: “A Tale of the Miser and the Poet,” written in a kind of naturalistic doggerel which dominates some of her fables in the 1713 Miscellany and many of the comic poems in MS Wellesley.

Volume I of Keith’s edition is based on only the above two major source texts. And it seems they are determined to eliminate as many texts outside the major four sources as possible (as safest).

1713 Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions, Written by a Lady (in 1714, her name and title appear). Written and or copied out and prepared for publication 1710-1713. Anne plans a book which she goes through with: it is basically comprised of translations and imitations, impersonal poetry and a very few personal poems whose real meaning or full or autobiographical significance has been obscured or cut away. It contains many poems from “the French” (La Fontaine, Madame Deshouliers, Racine, La Calprenede, Regnier), from Tasso’s Aminta, from Milton in the manner of Philips’ The Splendid Shilling), from the Bible. Out of 83 poems, 39 of which are new and not to be found in any manuscript form, 35 are fables and another 9 either imitations, translations, or paraphrases of other works; her earlier songs, pastorals, and meditations are censured and/or otherwise presented impersonally, the epistles mostly attached to occasions. Now the first poem is “MERCURY and the ELEPHANT. A Prefatory FABLE,” first line: “As Merc’ry travell’d thro’ a Wood … “ (see my commentary in the form of a posting to C18-l: “An elephant fretting to no purpose“). Anne used the concept of genre and the technique of translation and imitation as a mask under or through which she attempts to express herself.   The impersonality of the poetry and Heneage’s elevation to the peerage gave her the courage to go through with it. This is a book which obscures her finest gifts and their source. It was the favored copy text of Reynolds; so many of the texts in Reynold’s well-meant, earnest, fine scholarly edition (for her era) represent the form a poem took in this 1713-14 volume.

MS Wellesley. 1714-1720. It was during this period that Anne and Heneage decided to gather together those poems by Anne which she did not wish to publish but which he and she wished to save. I think these were copied out mostly before Anne’s death as many of them may be dated before her very last illness (1718-19). This manuscript has been published and fully described as a manuscript annotated now twice: by Jean Ellis-d’Alessandro (introd., ed), The Wellesley Manuscript Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea. Florence, 1988 (Ellis-d’Alessandro Poems); and by Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant (as editors), The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1998 (McGovern/Hinnant). I was able to buy the MS from Wellesley as a paper xerox. There are 54 texts (counting the one which exists in two distinct versions as two). There is a significant return to religious poetry precisely of the type that she wrote in MS F-H and printed in 1696 Tate, with the addition of a new “kind,” the impersonal dramatic narrative, altogether 16 (or if you do not count her epistle to Catherine Fleming which prefaces her paraphrase of Eccles) or 15 out of 53, only they are superior because chastened polished lyrics instead of cumbersome paraphrases of psalms. She also returns to ideas in MS Finch-Hatton and Tate and 1701 Gilden (“The Retirement”), to autobiographical poems, where she utters ideas like it was strange and wholly unexpected that she should end up living a life of solitude, cut off from society. Her childhood in Northampton with her maternal Haslewood relatives,  also the Kingsmill grandmother is presumably referred to here.

In the Wellesley MS Jacobitism, is not censured — though it no longer comes across as strongly as it did in Anne Finch’s earlier post-Stuart court years. Numbers of the poems are private, familial and enigmatic. Others are uncorrected or performed in the plain doggerel careless way. These plain unadorned poems may please the modern reader (some of them are very good), but the decorum and practice of the time show that they were (like the poetry of Lady Hertford and other educated women) intended for ephemeral consumption by friends. There is no introduction or preface; there is no attempt to group kinds of poetry. Indeed, the manuscript begins with page 49 (thus ruling out as a certainty that Anne and Heneage began in 1716 with “On Lady Cartret”). What were supposed to be copied onto pp 1-49 is anyone’s guess (perhaps more of Anne’s poetry but I doubt this). There is finally a wholesale variety of types (by no means is this an overwhelming devotional volume) — all of which, I think, argues that Anne and Heneage were treating this last book as a private depository for Anne’s poetry, not intended to be or coming too late to be published by her (not ill), not as a working source for a book to be published.

Anne and Heneage also put in (perhaps as they got hold of them) earlier poems which had been left out of the MS F-H 283 (N) and Folger (F) or 1713 Miscellany: two from Wye College between 1702 and 1703, two written at Lewston to Long-leat, 1704, one from Tunbridge Wells, 1706, another to Ann Tufton, 1707-9, perhaps at Hothfield or Thanet House, four from 1712, two sent to the Hatton family, one to Pope, one on the death of Heneage’s old friend and companion at the court of James II. These appear interwoven with Anne’s latest poems which all appear to have written after the 1713 Miscellany and its 1714 reprint and up to the time of Anne’s death; they can be variously dated from 1714, 1715 (five poems are so dated), 1716, 1718, 1719, and 1720.

In their introduction to their edition of the Wellesley McGovern and Hinnant candidly state that there was no substantial edition of Finch’s poems between 1713 and 1903 and ask why?  They say the poems in this ms volume are Jacobite, even if mutedly so, that the Finches were seen as compromised Tories. I think it was also to hide Anne’s depression and anxiety syndrome, which might have been seen had more of her poems been printed. The family kept them hidden.

I assume the above two volumes:  1713 book and Wellesley ms, will be the basis for Volume II.

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Amazon has reprinted one of the more interesting volumes in which we find both attributed and unattributed poems by Finch: the 1701 volume put together by Charles Gilden or Nicholas Rowe

I shall stop here and (I hope) inside several days produce a second blog for the poems scattered in printed and manuscript miscellanies, where some texts are attributed to Anne Finch and are clearly by her, others not as clearly attributed (“by the same hand”) but which the circumstances of the text itself, its content, and other contexts indicate to me they are clearly by Finch. I am going to include in that blog poems where the attribution is probable but not beyond doubt, and where the attribution is perhaps unlikely but still not to be altogether dismissed.

In the case of my review, I have the disadvantage that I do not have Volume II of Keith’s standard edition, but since she and her co-editors have made clear what are their attitudes I will by contrast include all the ms’s & printed books, for before and after those texts that seem to come from the second part of her career (as defined by Keith, beginning just around the time of the 1713 Miscellany).  Later addition: I now have both volumes.

More generally, since I often choose a different copy text, and reprint many of these (when they differ from Myra Reynolds, whose copy text was the 1713 while Keith’s is first the Folger), I hope my work will still be useful to anyone who wants to know what there is extant to know about Anne Finch. Their site is also surprisingly small; they are not generous in what they share. I have included all I could arguably say added to Reynolds.

For a glimpse at this material see Finch’s unpublished (I should have said mostly unattributed) poetry, taken from manuscripts and printed books of her era, and just beyond, e.g., the 1724 Hive Collection of Songs, an astonishingly good volume: its quality reminds me of the sixteenth-century collection England’s Helicon; it represents the best and most beautiful songs of the preceding generation. It includes no less than 16 poems which are clearly by Finch.

I end on one of Finch’s unknown, and until now unprinted poem, presumably a fragment towards one more, from MS F-H 282, Heneage’s diary written into the page of an almanac for 1723, an unpaginated sheet which is the 122nd in the book.

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,
The tend’rest Ofspring of endearing Love,
Blest emanation from the’Eternal Seat
The Sinners claim, the Wretches safe retreat,
The Worlds inliv’ning, beneficial Ray,
The Providential Cure, the sweet allay
To all the weaknesse, to the Wants that wear
The human Frame, and urge it to Dispair,
The Tears that dew the penetential Cheek
Kind Pitty in their silent Courses seek

Ellen

The birthday during Winter Solstice

Nell Blaine, November in Snow (1987)

Friends and readers,

Each year I have commemorated “the birthday” (to echo PL Travers’s way of talking of Mary Poppins’s birthday in the MP books) — sometimes by poetry Austen wrote on her birthday, in 1808 her good friend, Mrs Lefroy lost her life; one by showing how Austen regarded Tudor queens in her History of England; once on how she loved to dance, complete with videos of characters and people dancing 18th century pattern dancing; another on a new opera adapted from Mansfield Park. Many such days since I opened this blog.

This year I am departing to contextualize her birthday: she was born the 16th of December 1775, a snowy day, and the baby was not to be taken out until March, to protect her from the cold (see Tomalin, JA: A life, pp 3-5).

The Winter Solstice with all its rituals and pleasures.

At the Folger consort last night: they refreshed the soul with a program of carols and winter songs from the 12th though 20th centuries. This is not the first time I’ve experienced the this and it’s not just the place as quietly decorated with an intelligent exhibition, but the experience on stage as a oasis, a halycon moment of good will, beauty, and cheer. Izzy had tears in her eyes towards the end when they did a couple of more familiar carols (from the 19th century) and a song where the main instrument was the recorder, a Ralph Vaughan Williams “fantasia on Christmas Carols.” So rare to escape the commercialism, faux ostentation, and fouling of all our minds that occurs so many places and across so much of our culture nowadays.

So I too will anticipate the 12 day ritual celebration by this year offering up a poem by Anne Finch which projects the nature of the Christmas celebrations at the opening of the 18th century: still a twelve night group celebration centered on a group of religious and pagan myths.

A contemporary Twelfth Night Cake

An eighteenth century one

On January 12, 1715/16 at Lewston, Dorsetshire (the home of Mrs Grace Stode Thynne, widow to Henry Thynne, Heneage’s nephew), Heneage and Anne Finch, Earl and Countess of Winchilsea; [Mrs] Thynne (mother to “the Gentle Hertford,” Francis Thynne Seymour), [Mrs] Higgons (Mrs Thynne’s elderly companion-servant); and Maria [Mary] Thynne (Mrs Thynne’s daughter, married later that year to William Greville, 7th Lord Brooke) drew charms from a twelfth night’s cake which would have been large and festive cake, and was usually frosted or heavily ornamented. This cake would have “charms” in it — silver ones. Then slices from the cake were handed about. If in your slice of cake, you found a silver bean, you were king; if you found a silver pea, you were queen; if you found a silver clove, you were the knave; a silver twig made you the fool and a silver rag, the slut. (Slut does not mean tramp; it means kitchen maid.) The person who got the King was then King for the rest of the festive evening, the person who got the Queen, became Queen.

This merry ritual was recorded in an apparently spontaneous not-so-merry or slightly saturnine poem by Anne Finch.

To the Hon ble Mrs Thynne after twelfth Day 1715 by Lady Winchilsea

“How plain dear Madam was the Want of Sight
On Fortune Charged seen at your House last Night
Where all our Lots were govern’d by Mistake
And nothing well proportioned but the Cake

First for the Crown on which the rest depend
On Higgins shou’d that glorious wreath descend
Were she to govern in a Kingly sort
‘Twould quite reverse the Nature of a Court

Her generous Heart the Treasury wou’d drain
And none by her shou’d live or die in pain
Good Humour, Wit and pleasure she’d promote
And leave the merry Land not worth a Groat

Were I a Queen as Fortune has design’d
‘Twould suite as ill with my retiring mind
Who after all aspiring Iffs & Ands
Shou’d leave the Cliffs and sink into the Sands

If Winchillsea’s a Knave where’s his Estate?
His larger House? his Equipage? his plate?
His Mastery in Law & over Delay
Which sweeps his patience & his pence away?

A Knave without all these is poorly made
And wou’d Disgrace the beneficial Trade
But farther She has err’d beyond all Rule
In Giving Thynne what I’ll not name the —

In all her List of patents and Decrees
Where some grow vain on Names and some on fees
She cou’d have found no Title so unfit
Or such a Foil to her establish’d wit

To fair Maria in her blunder’d scene
She gave the Slut tho’ Ermin’s not so clean
O’er all her Charms a youthfull Lustre spreads
Which on her Dress reflected Brightness Sheds

As phoebus gilds whatever’s in his sight
And makes (like her) all cheerful by his Light.
This Simile I hope you’ll think is fine
For verse where neither Sun or Stars do Shine

Is blind as Fortune that has wrong’d us all
Whose Gifts on real Fools and Knaves will fall.”

And at the close, in the 1790s when we find the solstice has retreated into the local experience of families, secularized into memories all shared, and a longing for home. Robert Southey was travelling in Spain (see Southey’s Letters from England) while his wife, Edith (sister to Coleridge’s wife) was in the Lake District (see Kathleen Jones’s A Passionate Sisterhood). How quickly this dream-hope morphs into nostalgia for a scene that is not occurring (“I’ll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams”)

Written on Christmas Day (1795)

How many hearts are happy at this hour
In England! Brightly o’er the cheerful hall
Flares the heaped hearth, and friends and kindred meet,
And the glad mother round her festive board
Beholds her children, separated long
Amid the wide world’s ways, assembled now,
A sight at which affection lightens up
With smiles the eye that age has long bedimm’d.
I do remember when I was a child
How my young heart, a stranger then to care,
With transport leap’d upon this holy-day,
As o’er the house, all gay with evergreens,
From friend to friend with joyful speed I ran,
Bidding a merry Christmas to them all.
Those years are past; their pleasures and their pains
Are now like yonder covent-crested hill
That bounds the distant prospect, indistinct,
Yet pictured upon memory’s mystic glass
In faint fair hues. A weary traveller now
I journey o’er the desert mountain tracks
Of Leon, wilds all drear and comfortless,
Where the grey lizards in the noontide sun
Sport on the rocks, and where the goatherd starts,
Roused from his sleep at midnight when he hears
The prowling wolf, and falters as he calls
On Saints to save. Here of the friends I think
Who now, I ween, remember me, and fill
The glass of votive friendship. At the name,
Will not thy cheek, Beloved, change its hue,
And in those gentle eyes uncall’d for heart
Tremble? I will not wish for thee to weep;
Such tears are free from bitterness, and they
Who know not what it is sometimes to wake
And weep at midnight, are but instruments
Of Nature’s common work. Yes think of me,
My Edith, think that, travelling far away,
Thus I beguile the solitary hours
With many a day-dream, picturing scenes as fair
Of peace, and comfort, and domestic bliss
As ever to the youthful poet’s eye
Creative Fancy fashion’d. Think of me,
Though absent, thine; and if a sigh will rise,
And tears, unbidden, at the thought steal down,
Sure hope will cheer thee, and the happy hour
Of meeting soon all sorrow overpay.

Robert Henry(1865-1929), Street Scene in Snow (mid-19th century)

Come Christmas I will re-post all the passages in Austen’s novels that characterize and swirl around Christmas and how they are treated in modern films, and then what we can find in her letters; for now this poem in her honor:

Re-reading Jane”

To women in contemporary voice and dislocation
she is closely invisible, almost an annoyance.
Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace?
Nothing she saw was free of snobbery or class.
Yet the needlework of those needle eyes . . .
We are pricked to tears by the justice of her violence:
Emma on Box Hill, rude to poor Miss Bates,
by Mr Knightley’s were she your equal in situation —
but consider how far this is from being the case
shamed into compassion, and in shame, a grace.

Or wicked Wickham and selfish pretty Willoughby,
their vice, pure avarice which, displacing love,
defiled the honour marriages should be made of.
She punished them with very silly wives.
Novels of manners! Hymeneal theology!
Six little circles of hell, with attendant humours.
For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours
And laugh at them in our turn? The philosophy
paused at the door of Mr Bennet’s century;
The Garden of Eden’s still there in the grounds of Pemberley.

The amazing epitaph’s ‘benevolence of heart’
precedes ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’
and would have pleased her, who was not unkind.
Dear votary of order, sense, clear art
and irresistible fun, please pitch our lives
outside self-pity we have wrapped them in,
and show us how absurd we’d look to you.
You knew the mischief poetry could do.
Yet when Anne Elliot spoke of its misfortune
to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who
enjoyed it completely, she spoke for you.

—– Anne Stevenson

I close with In the Bleak Mid-Winter, Gerald Hoist, sung by a boys choir, Cambridge, UK:

I am sure we all who come to this blog have derived much wisdom, strength, comfort, comedy, enjoyment from Austen’s novels and some of the movies made from these as well as many brilliant books of criticism re-creating, explicating, conveying the experience. This year my Christmas eve movie will be Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan

Aubrey Rouget (Fanny character, played by Carolyn Farina) fares better. She and her mother (apparently a long-time widow) go to St Patrick’s cathedral, a huge church in Manhattan where they join in the service and carols. They stand amid a huge crowd, people like them, some in pairs or groups, but many alone …

Ellen