800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  ED. G. HAIGHT, THE GEORGE ELIOT LETTERS (1954)

  MILLICENT FAWCETT TO A MEMBER OF THE HOUSE

  Millicent Fawcett devoted her life to women’s rights, for which she was often slandered publicly by men. Here she describes the tactful way she dealt with a Member of Parliament who vilified her.

  Jan. 1872

  A few days later a then well-known Member of Parliament, Mr C.R., referred publicly in the House of Commons to the appearance of Mrs Taylor and myself upon a platform to advocate votes for women, as ‘two ladies, wives of members of this House, who had disgraced themselves,’ and added that he would not further disgrace them by mentioning their names.

  It so happened that a very short time after this, my husband and I were spending the weekend in Cambridge, and that most hospitable of men, Mr James Porter, of Peterhouse, (the victim of Mr Perkins’s bulldog!) asked us to dine with him. What was my amusement to see Mr C.R. among the guests: this amusement was intensified into positive glee when he was asked to take me in to dinner. I could not resist expressing condolences with him on his unfortunate position. Should I ask Mr Porter to let him exchange me for some other lady who had not disgraced herself? But after we had let off steam a little in this way, I found him quite an agreeable neighbour at the table, and so far as I know, he never again publicly held up any woman to contempt for advocating the enfranchisement of her own sex. After all, what he had said was very mild compared to Horace Walpole’s abuse of Mary Wollstonecraft as ‘a hyena in petticoats’.

  RAY STRACHEY, MILLICENT FAWCETT (1931)

  A MUSLIM WIFE’S STOICISM

  Female stoicism was harrowingly expressed in the epistolary novel So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, first published in French in 1980. Mariama Bâ was Senegalese. She married the Minister of Education, who divorced her after she had given him nine children.

  When I stopped yesterday, I probably left you astonished by my disclosures.

  Was it madness, weakness, irresistible love? What inner confusion led Modou Fall [her husband] to marry Binetou?

  To overcome my bitterness, I think of human destiny. Each life has its share of heroism, an obscure heroism, born of abdication, of renunciation and acceptance under the merciless whip of fate.

  I think of all the blind people the world over, moving in darkness. I think of all the paralysed the world over, dragging themselves about. I think of all the lepers the world over, wasted by their disease.

  Victims of a sad fate which you did not choose, compared with your lamentations, what is my quarrel, cruelly motivated, with a dead man who no longer has any hold over my destiny? Combining your despair, you could have been avengers and made them tremble, all those who are drunk on their wealth; tremble, those upon whom fate has bestowed favours. A horde powerful in its repugnance and revolt, you could have snatched the bread that your hunger craves.

  Your stoicism has made you not violent or subversive but true heroes, unknown in the mainstream of history, never upsetting established order, despite your miserable condition.

  TRANS. M. BODÉ-THOMAS, MARIAMA B, SO LONG A LETTER (1982)

  A LETTER OF LITERARY ADVICE

  Fay Weldon is one of our most controversial novelists, partly because she criticizes patriarchal attitudes vehemently, also because she attempts to make women face their weaknesses, in prose which is often as didactic as it is inventive. In 1983 she published Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. Although she terms it an epistolary novel, it is rather a series of open letters on the practice of reading and writing fiction. Furthermore, it is in the tradition of women writing after reading an older, influential woman’s writing. This letter offers caustic late twentieth-century comments on the role of women in the late eighteenth century.

  October 1983

  My dear Alice,

  Jane Austen is reputed to have fainted when her father said ‘We’re moving to Bath.’ She was twenty-five; she had lived all her life in the Vicarage of Steventon: her father, without notifying anyone, had decided to retire, and thought that Bath was as pleasant a place as any to go. None of us fainted the day my father came home and told my mother, my sister and myself that he was leaving us that day to live for ever with his sweetheart, whose existence he’d never hinted at before. What are we to make of that? That swooning has gone out of fashion? Or that a later female generation has become inured, by reason of a literature increasingly related to the realities of life, to male surprises? Jane Austen’s books are studded with fathers indifferent to their families’ (in particular their daughters’) welfare, male whims taking priority, then as now, over female happiness. She observes it: she does not condemn. She chides women for their raging vanity, their infinite capacity for self-deception, their idleness, their rapaciousness and folly; men, on the whole, she simply accepts. This may be another of the reasons her books are so socially acceptable in those sections of society least open to change. Women are accustomed to criticism; to being berated, in fiction, for their faults. Men are, quite simply, not. They like to be heroes.

  That is quite enough of this letter. If I write too much at any one time the personal keeps intruding, and I am writing a letter of literary advice to a young lady, albeit a niece, on first reading Jane Austen, not a diatribe on the world’s insensitivity to her aunt’s various misfortunes, or the hard time women have at the hands of men: a fact liberally attested to up and down the streets of the City of Invention.

  Alice, I see in your postscript, to my alarm, that you plan to write a novel as soon as you have the time. I sincerely hope you do not find the time, for some years.

  With best wishes

  Aunt Fay

  FAY WELDON, LETTERS TO ALICE, ON FIRST READING JANE AUSTEN (1983)

  THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY ROLE

  In this extract, again from a novel composed entirely of letters, Gillian Hanscombe describes a lesbian falling in love. Between Friends (1983) analyses the roles of women in the late twentieth century, the need to work, look after the home and children, while experimenting with meaningful relationships in women’s groups.

  What I really want to write about is seeing Jane. You know I was going to pop in for a chat after leaving you. Well, I did. And ended up staying the night. Have just rushed back down the motorway, collected Simon, paid some bills and sat down here, before even sorting out the washing. I’m behaving like some giddy young girl who is nothing but a web of impulse and irresponsibility. I’m supposed to be a sober mother and reliable friend, sorting out details about the house and Jan and Simon, but what’s really happening is a set of fantasies about joining Jane’s household! There – I’ve said it.

  It is all mostly just fantasy, and due in part to my lapping up the human company after feeling so alone since Jan left, rattling round in this house. There’s Simon, of course, but it’s not the same as having adult company to share things with. Jane’s household positively hums by comparison – they’re all so busy getting a protest organized about the lack of proper sex education in schools. As well as all that, there’s the normal money-earning and housework, but it seems so much easier when there are more to share it. I began to think we should all be living like they do – if women really are to become liberated from the full-time work of caring for house and children (usually in that order), the only way to do it seems to be to share it out. Anyway, I know I can’t be serious about it because they would never agree to having Simon, and I don’t want to give him up, even though I know Jan would take him like a shot. We discussed it, but both felt he should stay with me – at least for the moment.

  Jane is such a strange mixture – a creature of moods and impulses on the one hand, and a determined hard-liner on the other. I told her that her indulgence in extreme mood changes was exactly the kind of characteristic people describe as ‘feminine’. Doctors and the so-called helping professions are always describing women as hysterical and neurotic, and I told Jane (though she didn’t want to hear it) that carrying on as she does simply adds fuel to the prejudi
ce. She was pretty quiet for a while after that conversation and I think some of it may have sunk in.

  Nevertheless, I find her so attractive and even think I may be half in love with her. It’s fairly obvious that something similar has happened to her, though how she would describe it I can’t imagine, since she vehemently denies that there is any such thing as ‘falling in love’ – says it’s a load of bourgeois crap and invented by the patriarchy to keep women enslaved to ideals and dreams instead of encouraging them to live more actively. I suppose it’s some variation on the Marxist argument about religion, and she may be right.

  But I think no one can totally escape the process of cultural conditioning, so whether being in love is mere conditioning or whether it is some truthful human experience is a merely academic question, since there is no one enough outside the culture to answer it. What I think privately is that she may never have been in love at all, not seriously – and if that is the case, I feel sorry for her, because it will hit her hard.

  I’m just speculating about all this. What is not speculation is the degree to which she fascinates me. I suppose you won’t approve, but I can’t help it. It’s such an age since I felt passionate about Jan that I’m ready – I must be – for that sort of experience to happen again.

  It was super to see you and chat. Look after yourself and don’t work too hard. Whether you have six hours’ sleep or eight is not likely to change anything.

  Love,

  Meg

  GILLIAN HANSCOMBE, BETWEEN FRIENDS (1983)

  Two

  Friendship

  The importance of friendship in women’s lives, and their ability to sustain lifelong relationships has only recently been recognized. There is little extant correspondence between friends until the time of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when she, her sister Lady Mar, and fellow writers shared their ideas and feelings on a range of personal and public issues. A group of wealthy eighteenth-century intellectuals, named bluestockings by Dr Johnson, displayed both political commitment and the ability to work together on many philosophical, social and governmental issues. Women in the nineteenth century continued this tradition of collaboration.

  Friendship provided a rampart against solitude and incomprehsnsion and against the social indignities which many spinsters were forced to undergo. Friendships between sisters proved vitally supportive, as did correspondence between writers, often isolated or underappreciated. Fanny Burney was delighted to meet Madame de Staël in 1792, as Virginia Woolf was to meet Vita Sackville-West in 1926. (However, with her novelist’s honesty, Woolf realized that envy slightly undermined her response to Katherine Mansfield.)

  The second part of this section deals with ‘romantic friendship’ a more evocative term than lesbian to describe close, loving, possibly sexual relationships between women. I concentrate on the emotional and intellectual sharing and caring of the Ladies of Llangollen at the end of the eighteenth century, and also letters between Sackville-West and Woolf in the twentieth century. Compare these with the extracts from the significantly named Between Friends by Gillian Hanscombe in the previous chapter.

  The third part concentrates on women’s friendships with men. First George Sand, as she was skilful in maintaining emotional and intellectual relationships with a wide circle of men, often helping them, as with her advice to Flaubert in his old age (see Chapter Ten). Her powers of analysis are used to indicate where the strenths of friendship lie. In this century Anaïs Nin was supportive emotionally, and often financially. Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak both needed their correspondence in order to share poetic ideas. This section represents the multifaceted aspects of female friendship.

  THE FIRST FEMALE LETTER IN ROMAN BRITAIN CELEBRATES WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIP

  The earliest letter written by a woman on British soil dates from 170, the first century AD. It was written in Latin, on a writing-tablet in the recently excavated area of Vindolanda. The ink is unusually well preserved, so that the writing is still clear.

  The tablet contains a letter to Sulpicia Lepidina (the name appears in full on the back) from a Claudia Severa. In her letter Severa sends Lepidina a warm invitation to visit her for her (Severa’s) birthday. We can confidently deduce that Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, prefect of one of the cohorts at the fort on Vindolanda. She then adds greetings from ‘Aelius Meus’, who must have been her husband. In one of the other letters found in 1985 Severa is again the writer and in this letter she refers to a certain Brocchus in such a way that there can be no doubt that she means her husband; his full name, therefore, was Aelius Brocchus. We cannot locate his station or specify his rank, but we can be sure that he was a commander of another unit, presumably in north Britain.

  The discovery of this tablet and of others with evidence concerning officers’ wives and families is of major importance, showing conditions in north Britain at this period, so soon after the conquest of the area. Equally important is the palaeographical evidence which the tablet presents. The body of the letter is written in an elegant script, the work of a professional writer. The second hand is noticeably less elegant, indeed it may fairly be described as somewhat clumsy in appearance. It is quite certain that the writer is Severa herself, adding a brief message and the closing greeting in her own hand. Almost certainly therefore, this is the earliest known example of writing in Latin by a woman.

  Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings.

  On the 3rd day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you come. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send you greetings. I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, my dearest soul, as I hope you prosper and hail.

  BRITANNIA, vol. XVIII (1987)

  THIS IS A VILE WORLD, DEAR SISTER

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s friendship with her sister sustained them both during travels and separations. Here she remembers their unhappy childhood and shares her misery. Her son Edward, fourteen, has just run away from Westminster School for the second time. He managed to reach Gibraltar and was not returned to his wretched mother until January 1728.

  September 1727

  This is a vile world, dear sister, and I can easily comprehend that whether one is at Paris or London one is stifled with a certain mixture of fool and knave that most people are composed of. I would have patience with a parcel of polite rascals or your downright honest fools. But father Adam shines through his whole progeny; he first ate the apple like a sot and then turned informer like a scoundrel. – So much for our inside. Then our outward is so liable to ugliness and distempers that we are perpetually plagued with feeling our own decays and seeing other people’s – yet six pennorth of common sense divided amongst a whole nation would make our lives roll away glib enough. But then we make laws and we follow customs; by the first we cut off our own pleasures, and by the second we are answerable for the faults and extravagancies of others. All these things and five hundred more convince me (as I have the most profound adoration for the Author of nature) that we are here in an actual state of punishment. I am satisfied I have been damned ever since I was born, and in submission to divine justice don’t at all doubt that I deserved it in some pre-existent state. I am very willing to soften the word damned and hope I am only in purgatory, and that after whining and grunting here a certain number of years I shall be translated to some more happy sphere where virtue will be natural and custom reasonable; that is, in short, where common sense will reign.

  I grow very devout, as you see, and place all my hopes in the next life, being totally persuaded of the nothingness of this. Don’t you remember how miserable we were in the little parlour at Thoresby? We thought marrying would put us at once into possession of all we wanted; then came being with child, etc., and you see what comes of being with child.

  Though after all I am still of opinion that ’tis extremely silly to submit
to ill fortune; one should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials when one can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavours, and I run about though I have 5,000 pins and needles running into my heart. I try to console with a small damsel who is at present everything that I like, but alas, she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen she may run away with the butler. There’s one of the blessed consequences of great disappointment; you are not only hurt by the thing present, but it cuts off all future hopes and makes your very expectations melancholy. Quelle vie!

  ED. R. HALSBAND, THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1965)

  JANE AUSTEN TO HER SISTER CASSANDRA

  Jane Austen’s friendship with her sister Cassandra was so warm and harmonious that she could share most of her reactions. She wrote twice a week, sharing small happenings with a wit that reveals the novelist. In these extracts we feel the close bond with her sister, and her mocking at superficial concepts of friendship.

  Steventon: Tuesday Janry 8 [1799]

  My dear Cassandra

  You must read your letters over five times in future before you send them, and then, perhaps, you may find them as entertaining as I do. I laughed at several parts of the one which I am now answering . . .

  You express so little anxiety about my being murdered under Ashe Park Copse by Mrs Hulbert’s servant, that I have a great mind not to tell you whether I was or not, and shall only say that I did not return home that night or the next, as Martha kindly made room for me in her bed, which was the shut-up one in the new nursery. Nurse and the child slept upon the floor, and there we all were in some confusion and great comfort. The bed did exceedingly well for us, both to lie awake in and talk till two o’clock, and to sleep in the rest of the night. I love Martha better than ever, and I mean to go and see her, if I can, when she gets home . . .