800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  But, if women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they want reason – else this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever shew that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality.

  I have repeatedly asserted, and produced what appeared to me irrefragable arguments drawn from matters of fact, to prove my assertion, that women cannot, by force, be confined to domestic concerns; for they will, however ignorant, intermeddle with more weighty affairs, neglecting private duties only to disturb, by cunning tricks, the orderly plans of reason which rise above their comprehension.

  Noted for her path-breaking Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft had many intellectual men friends, including Dissenters. In 1787 she was befriended by her publisher, Johnson. He was a middle-aged bachelor and suggested she marry a young acquaintance to prevent gossip. She replied angrily in completely distinct discourses:

  1787

  I will not be insulted by a superficial puppy – His intimacy with Miss –– gave him a privilege, which he should not have assumed with me – a proposal might be made to his cousin, a milliner’s girl, which should not have been mentioned to me. Pray tell him that I am offended – and do not wish to see him again! – When I meet him at your house, I shall leave the room, since I cannot pull him by the nose. I can force my spirit to leave my body – but it shall never bend to support that body – God of heaven, save thy child from this living death!

  I scarcely know what I write. My hand trembles – I am very sick – sick at heart.

  Through Johnson she met the poet-painter Blake and the painter Fuseli, with whom she had an obsessive, unpromising relationship. She travelled alone to revolutionary France in 1792, and met Gilbert Imlay, an American writer and businessman. They fell in love, and later had a daughter in Le Havre. To her grief, he soon lost interest, and she attempted suicide. She despised Imlay’s affairs with ‘beings whom I feel to be my inferiors’, yet to hate his behaviour would be to lose her dignity as a rational human being. However she could not prevent herself from expressing her hurt to him, while emphasizing her ‘feminine’ needs.

  1794

  Gracious God! It is impossible to stifle something like resentment, when I receive fresh proofs of your indifference. What I have suffered this last year, is not to be forgiven.

  Love is a want of my heart. I have examined myself lately with more care than formerly, and find, that to deaden is not to calm the mind – Aiming at tranquillity, I have almost destroyed all the energy of my soul . . . Despair, since the birth of my child, has rendered me stupid . . . the desire of regaining peace (do you understand me?) has made me forget the respect due to my own emotions – sacred emotions that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy – and shall enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark.

  CLAIRE TOMALIN, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1974)

  ‘AN EXCESS OF MOROSENESS’

  Middle-class girls in the nineteenth century wanted some fulfilment in marriage. They also wanted to please their families, to help if possible. The Parisian Stéphanie Jullien was twenty-two when she wrote this to her father. Her worries about whether to marry make her anxious about her whole life and exacerbate her self-doubt.

  Feb. 20, 1836

  You want an answer to your letter and I believe, in reality, that this is the best way to express a thousand things that one can lose sight of during a conversation in which one speaks only with difficulty and embarrassment. . . . I don’t want to enumerate my anxieties about the future, the discord in my family that I felt more than anyone else, the vexations my mother endured and to which I was the only witness and consolation, the six months passed in anguish and despair over her deathbed. . . . I only want you to understand that I know grief. You men have a thousand occupations to distract you: society, business, politics, and work absorb you, exhaust you, upset you. But all these things also help you forcibly. As for us women who, as you have said to me from time to time, have only the roses in life, we feel more profoundly in our solitude and in our idleness the sufferings that you can slough off. I don’t want to make a comparison here between the destiny of man and the destiny of women: each sex has its own lot, its own troubles, its own pleasures. I only want to explain to you that excess of moroseness of which you complain and of which I am the first to suffer. My life has been sad, and my character shows it. But even now, when I do appear to be calm and happy, what anxieties, what worries about the future don’t I have? I am not able to do anything for myself and for those around me. I am depriving my brothers in order to have a dowry. I am not even able to live alone, being obliged to take from others, not only in order to live but also in order to be protected, since social convention does not allow me to have independence. And yet the world finds me guilty of being the only person that I am at liberty to be; not having useful or productive work to do, not having any calling except marriage, and not being able to look by myself for someone who will suit me, I am full of cares and anxieties.

  Is it astonishing that since any work that I could do would be null and useless for others as well as for myself, since it would not lead to anything, that I let myself be lazy, that I try to prolong my sleep in order to escape life? This laziness that you seem to reproach me for is really a means of discharging an excess of energy that has no outlet. If you believe that this laziness prevents me from doing anything, you are mistaken. I would quickly find courage and ardour again if I had some mission to fulfill or if some goal were proposed to me. But that is not the case. I don’t have any calling, nor could I have one. That has been the most ardent of my wishes and no one will let me do it. I don’t understand the reasons, and I’m not accusing anyone if I don’t have a calling. I hope that one gives me the same benefit of a doubt, because it is not my fault. As for the sadness that I am accused of, one should not be astonished by it. This awkward position in which I find myself, my memories, my fears, my anxieties, often the delicacy of my health, are enough cause for it. . . . Would one be just if one reproached you for the annoyed and said air that you often have?

  EDS. E.O. HELLERSTEIN, L.P. HUME AND K.M. OFFEN, VICTORIAN WOMEN (1981)

  ‘HOW A WOMAN CARES FOR A MAN’

  Geraldine Jewsbury (1812–80) published six novels and contributed to Westminster Review and Household Words. She spent many years housekeeping for her father and brother. Fortunately she met Jane Carlyle, who found a publisher for her first novel Zoë (1845). These two women had a great deal in common and when not in London both wrote lively, thoughtful, long letters. They express warmth, intelligent reflection on life and skill with words that deserve a wider audience. Here Jewsbury comments on the different attitudes men and women bring to relationships.

  15 June 1841

  Dearest Jane,

  There is a great deal I want to say to you, but when I begin it seems difficult, almost impossible, to put it down as it really is . . . How much I wish you would give me some of your own philosophy! One day, whilst at Seaforth, a youth I have known a long time took it into his head to be very confidential, and preached his own gospel for the space of a whole afternoon! He had been thrown on the world very young to shift for himself, and a real little youth of the world he had become. He looked so young – though he is twenty-five – that one could not call him a man! The mere facts that he told me were not disguised and beautified, yet the morale that stood out clear was to the effect that men cannot afford to be very long or very much in earnest in their intercourse with women: that when a woman got thoroughly earnest and engrossed, a man who had any regard for himself or her would break off at once! That une grande passion was an embarrassing affair, and was very dangerous to people who had to get a living, and that he had always broken off as soon as he came to his senses: that women seemed to think it was the o
nly object of interest in life, and it was a desperate thing to let them go too far. One thing specially struck me – though this was not said to me, only repeated to me – viz., that all men who have received an English education hate a woman in proportion as she commits herself for them, though a woman cares for a man exactly in the proportion in which she has made sacrifices for him, evidently thinking and showing, he thought, that all that was in the world – business and riches and success and so forth – were the only realities, and the only things worth making objects! He is neither better nor worse, but an average specimen of the generality of men. He once did me a material piece of kindness, and he was not in love with me: he had taken a fit of kindness to a friend of mine, and he raised himself in my opinion, and showed more real feeling than I had supposed in him. To be sure, the fact that my friend did not care about him would account for his good behaviour; it was not in his power to behave ill! This will seem stupid to you, not knowing the people and the circumstances: but it had a great interest for me, and it set me moralising to think how much more miserable we should be than we are if we had our eyes opened to discern always true from make-believe. I have great sympathy with that prayer of the Ancient Mariner, ‘O let me be awake, my God, or let me sleep away!’ There is something else I long very much to tell you, but I dare not in a letter.

  I wish there were some photographic process by which one’s mind could be struck off and transferred to that of the friend we wish to know it, without the medium of this confounded letter-writing!

  A poor lady of my acquaintance is in great trouble; she has just lost a daughter, of whom I was very fond, under most painful circumstances, and I must go and see her. It makes my heart sick to see her. Her husband is a great scoundrel; he left his family, after tormenting them to death, and now he increases their trouble by all sorts of vexations, and it makes me mad to hear people coolly say, ‘I understand Mrs —— has a violent temper,’ as if a woman was to be steel and marble under the most unprovoked outrages! I wish I might say my say about matrimony. This is a tremendously long letter.

  God bless you, dear love. Take care of yourself, and write as soon as you can.

  Ever yours G.E.J.

  ED. A. IRELAND, SELECTION FROM THE LETTERS OF GERALDINE E. JEWSBURY TO JANE WELSH CARLYLE (1892)

  A MARRIED WOMAN HAS NO LEGAL EXISTENCE

  In 1855, Caroline Norton, granddaughter of Sheridan and a fairly successful writer, wrote a letter to Queen Victoria on the Marriage and Divorce Bill. She had married the Honourable George Norton in 1827. He proved violent and mean, to the extent of refusing her access to their three children. She played a leading role in the agitation to reform the law, which made wives suffer so greatly when their husbands were unfaithful, cruel or unbalanced. This extract is taken from a lengthy, well-argued letter to the Queen, analysing skilfully the humiliations that many wives had to undergo. At last, in 1857, Parliament passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, which set up civil divorce courts.

  1855

  A married women in England has no legal existence.

  An English wife may not leave her husband’s house. Not only can he sue her for ‘restitution of conjugal rights,’ but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge, and who may ‘harbour her,’ – as it is termed, – and carry her away by force, with or without the aid of the police.

  If the wife sue for separation for cruelty, it must be ‘cruelty that endangers life or limb,’ and if she has once forgiven, or, in legal phrase, ‘condoned’ his offences, she cannot plead them; though her past forgiveness only proves that she endured as long as endurance was possible.

  If her husband takes proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself. She has no means of proving the falsehood of his allegations. She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for ‘damages’. . . .

  If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband, a vinculo, however profligate he may be. No law court can divorce in England. A special Act of Parliament annulling the marriage is passed for each case. The House of Lords grants this almost as a matter of course to the husband, but not to the wife. In only four instances (two of which were cases of incest) the wife obtained a divorce to marry again.

  She cannot prosecute for a libel. Her husband must prosecute; and in cases of enmity and separation, of course she is without a remedy. . . .

  She cannot claim support, as a matter of personal right, from her husband. The general belief and nominal rule is, that her husband is ‘bound to maintain her.’ That is not the law. He is not bound to her. He is bound to his country, bound to see that she does not cumber the parish in which she resides. If it be proved that means sufficient are at her disposal, from relatives or friends, her husband is quit of his obligation, and need not contribute a farthing: even if he have deserted her; or be in receipt of money which is hers by inheritance. . . .

  Separation from her husband by consent, or for his ill usage, does not alter their mutual relation. He retains the right to divorce her after separation, – as before, – though he himself be unfaithful.

  Her being, on the other hand, of spotless character, and without reproach, gives her no advantage in law. She may have withdrawn from his roof knowing that he lives with ‘his faithful housekeeper’: having suffered personal violence at his hands; having ‘condoned’ much, and being able to prove it by unimpeachable testimony: or he may have shut the doors of her house against her: all this is quite immaterial: the law takes no cognisance of which is to blame. As her husband, he has a right to all that is hers: as his wife, she has no right to anything that is his. As her husband, he may divorce her. For his wife, the utmost ‘divorce’ is permission to live alone – married to his name. [Her husband spent the money she earned from writing, even when he had left her destitute. It was not illegal for him to do so – nor to take their three children.]

  C. NORTON, ‘A LETTER TO THE QUEEN ON LORD CHANCELLOR CRANWORTH’S MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE BILL’ (1855)

  GEORGE ELIOT COMFORTS A FRIEND

  George Eliot wrote to a close friend, Mrs Robert Lytton, attempting to comfort her after the death of her uncle, Lord Clarendon, whom she had loved as a father. The writer offers thoughts of death as a means to help women live more independently.

  8 July 1870

  I did not like to write to you until Mr Lytton sent word that I might do so, because I had not the intimate knowledge that would have enabled me to measure your trouble; and one dreads of all things to speak or write a wrong or unseasonable word when words are the only signs of interest and sympathy that one has to give. I know now, from what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt by you, – that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and this makes me think of you very much. For learning to love any one is like an increase of property, – it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm. I find myself often thinking of you with that sort of proprietor’s anxiety, wanting you to have gentler weather all through your life, so that your face may never look worn and storm-beaten, and wanting your husband to be and do the very best, lest anything short of that should be disappointment to you. At present the thought of you is all the more with me, because you trouble has been brought by death; and for nearly a year death seems to me my most intimate daily companion. I mingle the thought of it with every other, not sadly, but as one mingles the thought of some one who is nearest in love and duty with all one’s motives. I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity – possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.

  I don’t know why I should say this to you, except that my p
en is chatting as my tongue would if you were here. We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life – some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed – because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defence against passionate affliction even more than men.

  Just under the pressure of grief, I do not believe there is any consolation. The word seems to me to be drapery for falsities. Sorrow must be sorrow, ill must be ill, till duty and love towards all who remain recover their rightful predominance. Your life is so full of those claims, that you will not have time for brooding over the unchangeable. Do not spend any of your valuable time now in writing to me, but be satisfied with sending me news of you through Mr Lytton when he has occasion to write to Mr Lewes.

  I have lately finished reading aloud Mendelssohn’s Letters, which we had often resolved and failed to read before. They have been quite cheering to us, from the sense they give of communion with an eminently pure, refined nature, with the most rigorous conscience in art. In the evening we have always a concert to listen to – a concert of modest pretensions, but well conducted enough to be agreeable.

  I hope this letter of chit-chat will not reach you at a wrong moment. In any case, forgive all mistakes on the part of one who is always yours sincerely and affectionately.