by Olga Kenyon
800 YEARS
OF
WOMEN’S
LETTERS
800 YEARS
OF
WOMEN’S
LETTERS
OLGA KENYON
FOREWORD BY P.D. JAMES
Cover illustration: The Letter by Gwen John (courtesy of Manchester City Galleries)
First published in 1992
This edition published 2009
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Olga Kenyon, 1992, 2003, 2009, 2011
The right of Olga Kenyon, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7200 3
MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7199 0
Original typesetting by The History Press
Contents
Foreword by P.D. James
Introduction
Women’s Letters: The Feminist Approach
1. How Women View Their Roles
2. Friendship
3. Childhood and Education
4. Love and Sexual Passion
5. Marriage and Childbirth
6. Housekeeping and Daily Life
7. Work
8. War and Alleviating Suffering
9. Travellers and Travelling
10. Illness and Ageing
11. Political Skills
Appendix 1: The Epistolary Novel
Appendix 2: Select Biographies
Sources
Acknowledgements
‘Women find under their pens turns of phrase and expressions which in us men are the result only of long labour and painful searching. It is women who can make an entire emotion be read in a single word.’
La Bruyère
Foreword
by P.D. James
No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter. Long before women were writing novels they were expressing their emotions, aspirations, hopes and fears in epistolary form, and those letters from past centuries which have survived can give us a more vivid and realistic portrait of the age in which they were written than many more portentous literary forms.
This fascinating anthology reveals a richness of experience which will be of interest not only to social historians but to all those fascinated by the way in which, throughout the centuries, women have responded to the opportunities as well as to the frustrations of daily living, and the way, too, in which the changing style of letter-writing has reflected the spirit and concerns of the age. It is through letters that women, parted from family and friends by catastrophes such as war, civil strife or rebellion, or by marriage and travel, kept each other informed of those details of everyday life, those small and large satisfactions, those trials and calamities on which the interest and happiness of daily living so much depends, as well as of the great rites of passage: death, birth and marriage.
As Jane Austen writes in Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, ‘Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female’. In gathering together some of the most agreeable as well as the most notable of women’s letters covering a period of eight hundred years, Olga Kenyon has performed a service to all who are interested not only in the written word, but in the changing lives of women and the way in which they themselves have perceived these changes. Some of the women who appear in her book were close to the heart of great national events, were the wives or associates of great men, or themselves have names which are part of history: Empress Maria Theresa, Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria. Others are virtually unknown but come alive in lines which reveal the infinite variety and interest of their daily lives. Some were women of considerable erudition and intelligence, famed for their wit and political acumen; others lived apparently ordinary lives and wrote about more personal family concerns in letters which, in their directness, intimacy and sympathy, are even more fascinating than the epistles of famous and well-known women. Most were written with no thought of publication. Here is the intimacy of heart and mind speaking to heart and mind across distance and across time. In the words of Dorothy Wordsworth to her brother William, we ‘see the beating of the inmost heart upon paper’.
Olga Kenyon has provided a scholarly and perceptive introduction to her anthology which adds to our interest in the letters themselves. In the words of Héloïse:
If a picture, which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls, can speak, have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart.
Introduction
My aim is to show that women’s letters are a valid form of literature. This book revalues a wealth of previously ignored female writing from the Middle Ages to today. In recent years, novels and poetry written by women have been reprinted (mainly by women’s presses) and acclaimed. Women as letter-writers have been comparatively neglected, though often the letter was their main literary outlet. Such writing was merely esteemed for its information on the famous, or the world of men. No previous anthology has presented the richness to be found in women’s letters, of interest both for historians and the general reader.
These letters are valuable for many reasons, including the range of topics discussed, and variety of styles. They show women using one of the few forms of writing open to them with wit and skill. Already in the earlier centuries women’s correspondence matches the expressiveness if not the erudition of mens’. By the sixteenth century their scope has increased and they use the more complex, gravely formal discourse of the Tudor age, to draw attention to female needs. Lively conversational modes developed in the eighteenth century, when women were famed for their wit and political acumen. They prefigure the direct, sometimes colloquial registers of today.
This wealth demonstrates that a tradition of female letter-writing has existed for at least eight centuries. It had many functions: to inform; to instruct (children, even monarchs at times); to entertain family and friends with descriptions of society or daily life (by writers as amusing as Madame de Sévigné and Fanny Burney); to keep up relationships (a female quality); to convey news, before newspapers were widespread; to recount travels, before the time of the ‘foreign correspondent’; to give advice on many issues, from personal to public; to explore psychological problems, often with wisdom and insight, before counselling was thought of; to keep in touch, before the days of the telephone or cheap travel; to offer love and express caring.
More implicitly, and perhaps even more interestingly, these letters explore female experiences, viewpoints and emotions. The writer and the recipient gain a clearer sense of identity in cultures which underestimate their abilities by stereotyping their needs.
This study cannot be fully comprehensive, yet shows many women reaching eminently sensible or provocative conclusions on a vast array of topics, including both national issues and domestic concerns. They offer thoughtful solutions to deeply personal issues, from how to deal with family and health problems, to how to
make life bearable even when isolated or poverty-stricken. There is heartfelt sympathy in response to fear of sickness and dying, the burden of mental depression, the boredom of monotonous routine. The many ideas for coping with children and work, difficult husbands, money, are well worth reading still. In a world which seldom listened, letters provided a sharing of dilemmas, an early process of therapy attempts at a constructing of a positive female identity.
Letters have one considerable advantage over conversation in that they are written with time for reflection, allowing choice of apt wording. They prove more subtle than talk in strategies for subverting patriarchal limitations. Because letters were the one form of writing which men did not find threatening (according to Virginia Woolf) they could both explore the sexist devaluation of female values and aid consciousness-raising.
Of course, there are many parallels with men’s letters, in attitudes to topics and manner of expression. Nevertheless, women did not learn Latin and Greek. The training of men in the rhetoric of dead languages could have brilliant effects, as is well known, but it could be stultifying. Leonard Woolf testifies to the dreariness of translating for seven hours each day at a school as good as Westminster, even in this century, and Shakespeare’s schoolboy crawled unwillingly to school. Women, not allowed this education, had to listen more carefully to adults to gain learning (even listening outside doors while their brothers were tutored, as in The Mill on the Floss, quite possibly George Eliot’s own experience). This ear for real conversation, the power of oracy, enriches these remarkable missives.
My geographical range is wider than most anthologies, from America to Europe. I have lived and worked in France and Spain, which made me keen to include writers considered great there, still underappreciated here, such as Madame de Sévigné and George Sand, St Teresa and La Pasionaria. I enjoy their special tone and have made my own translations from the original.
Some of the writers have been continuously read since their own time, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in my view the most interesting letter-writer in the English language. Not one volume of her letters is at present available in print. This sad fact is yet more evidence of the relative neglect of some outstanding female writers, which at last I can redress a little with long extracts from three of her many books. Other writers in this volume, whose names are better known, yet still not fully appreciated include Héloïse (to Abelard); Margaret Paston, Dorothy Osborne, Emily Eden, Isabella Bird, Empress Maria Theresa, Mrs Gaskell, Florence Nightingale, Edith Wharton, Anaïs Nin and Jean Rhys. Of course, most of us have looked at some letters by Queen Victoria, who wrote an average of six a day. At such a production rate some are unpolished, but many offer both her speaking voice and good advice. Recently, the actress Maria Perry collected all the letters and speeches of Elizabeth I in a delightfully illustrated volume, which displays her tremendous skill with words and arguments. On a par is Queen Isabella of Castile. She married Ferdinand of Aragon, probably a model for Machiavelli’s The Prince, in 1469. Together they united Spain, Isabella accounted the more skilful politician of the two. It was she, and no other leader in Europe at the time, who had the sense to grant Colombus the small fund he requested to discover the spice routes to the Indies.
My aim is also to bring to a wider public women only recently ‘rediscovered’ by feminist historians and critics. These include Hildegard of Bingen (1154–1201), the Mystic Abbess, respected by emperors; Christinede Pisan, the first woman professional writer, in fourteenth-century Paris; Aphra Behn (1640–89), now established as one of our great women writers, who virtually invented the novel with Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) and the scandalous Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–7), from which I include passionate extracts.
Fanny Burney was celebrated in her own time, even by the demanding Dr Johnson. Yet she was neglected until reread by feminists, specifically Dale Spender in Mothers of the Novel: 100 Great Women Novelists Before Jane Austen. Her epistolary novels reveal detailed study of society, and lively characterization through the speaking voice, qualities noticeable in epistolary novels today, of which the outstanding is Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Burney’s witty letters about Dr Johnson, about life at court when she was lady-in-waiting, her meeting with Madame de Staël and her reactions to her weakness are all worth attention.
This book opens with the twelfth century, because in Paris and Germany women there began to write with assurance, and their letters have been preserved. It is only too possible that the majority of women’s letters were thrown away, as even happened to some of Bach’s manuscripts. The earliest letter-writer in English (as opposed to Latin) was Margaret Paston. She was the efficient, affectionate manager of her husband’s estate while he practised law in London during the Wars of the Roses. Her description of facing attacks from neighbouring barons is so dramatic that it is now quoted in schoolbooks.
The main timespan of this study is, therefore, from the Wars of the Roses to the beginning of the Second World War. I also include two ancient Greek epistles, to prove that women were more vital then than is commonly supposed, and some present-day letters, mainly from women friends, to show the continuing power of female correspondence in analysing ideas, feelings and social issues.
In the Middle Ages letters were often dictated, especially by women, to scribes or secretaries. However by Tudor times public schools increased the literacy of the rising yeoman class. In 1660 an Act of Parliament set up a national Post Office. Twenty years later the service was enlarged and stamping introduced. This new penny post service set up 334 houses for receiving letters, which reached 200 towns outside London. Foreigners admired the efficiency of our service, an achievement which enhanced the social, and business, life of the middle classes. Writers such as Daniel Defoe praised the ‘utmost safety and Dispatch’ of letters within the capital, up to ‘Four, Five, Six to Eight times a Day, according to the Distance of the Place makes it practicable’.1 It cost one penny inside London, to the person receiving the letter. Outside London both sender and receiver paid one penny each. Even money could be sent safely by post. France developed a service for the rich, of great help to writers such as Madame de Sévigné.
By the eighteenth century educated people were expected to be able to write elegant letters. In fact, some schools trained pupils by making letter-writing into a standard composition exercise. Students were often made to study and copy Greek, and especially Latin, letters. Recently established newspapers such as The Tatler (1709) and The Spectator (1711) received many letters, which soon became – and remain – a feature. Their editors, Addison and Steele, wrote that they had ‘Complaints from Lovers, Schemes for Projectors, Scandal from Ladies, Congratulations, Compliments and Advice in Abundance’.2 Editor John Dunton initiated a popular item of the editor’s reply to these ‘anonymous’ widely read letters.
So much paper was being bought that the government hit on the cunning idea of taxing it, to obtain more revenue in order to finance the War of Spanish Succession in Europe, which ended in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht. The Stamp Act of 1711 imposed a tax on stamped vellum, parchment and paper and upon certain printed papers, pamphlets and advertisements. Clearly business was using far more paper, and many more people were corresponding with each other.
It was aristocratic women who gave social acceptability to the public letter-writing of women. The Duchess of Newcastle (1623– 94) was protected by a rich and powerful husband who had fought for Charles I and was rewarded by Charles II. She longed for fame, wrote a great deal in many genres and in 1664 brought out virtually the first volume of collected letters: Sociable Letters. Her aim was not modest: ‘I have endeavoured under the Cover of Letters to Express the Humour of Mankind.’ She describes the communion of two female friends who are happiest when reading and writing to each other. Her preface states that if she were empress of the world, she would advance people of learning and wit, not just men. One of the correspondents is said to be fit to be an empress because ‘Na
ture had Crown’d her Soul with a Celestial Crown, made of a Poetical Flame of Understanding, Judgement and Wit, also with clear Distinguishings, and sparkling Fancies’.3 She used the genre of letter writing to portray real life, to present actual problems and even propose solutions. The drawback of discursiveness was overcome by providing narrative; thus the epistolary novel started life.
Her admiration for knowledge and the imagination also distinguishes the writing of many women of her time and the following century. Thanks to the success of Restoration women, especially playwrights such as Aphra Behn, far more women felt able to take up the pen. Even if not encouraged by their menfolk, letter-writing was allowed, since it was done unobtrusively. Jane Austen sometimes pretended to be writing letters in the drawing room when in fact she was creating fiction.
The letter-writing of women was seldom taken seriously, as it posed no threat to the male-dominated literary establishment, which never counted it as ‘real’ writing, though male letters were considered ‘literature’. Indeed, letters became a significant part of our culture. They are autobiographical, based on intimate experience, yet not opposed to the Puritan tradition of noting the facts of an individual’s life. Many were encouraged by the notion that God’s Divine Purpose could be discerned in the recounting of events – and emotions. Letters deepen self-inspection, at a time when Puritan divines considered self-examination a healthy step towards salvation.
Many of these letter-writers were upper-middle-class women who felt able, by the middle of the eighteenth century, to display their prowess in literature. The group known as the bluestockings provided a network of wealthy women with salons (like those of seventeenth-century France), encouraging the intellectual activity of women without disturbing the hierarchies of gender and class. Their letters to each other were frequently witty and honest. In 1782 Elizabeth Montagu (named ‘Queen of the Blues’ by Dr Johnson) wrote about a friend:
