800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  The friendship between Mrs Chamberlayne and me which you predicted has already taken place, for we shake hands whenever we meet. Our grand walk to Weston was again fixed for yesterday, and was accomplished in a very striking manner. Every one of the party declined it under some pretence or other except our two selves, and we had therefore a tête à tête but that we should equally have had after the first two yards had half the inhabitants of Bath set off with us.

  It would have amused you to see our progress: we went up by Sion Hill, and returned across the fields: in climbing a hill Mrs Chamberlayne is very capital; I could with difficulty keep pace with her, yet would not flinch for the world. On plain ground I was quite her equal. And so we posted away under a fine hot sun, she without any parasol or any shade to her hat, stopping for nothing, and crossing the churchyard at Weston with as much expedition as if we were afraid of being buried alive. After seeing what she is equal to, I cannot help feeling a regard for her . . .

  We are to have a tiny party here tonight. I hate tiny parties, they force one into constant exertion. Miss Edwards and her father, Mrs Busby and her nephew, Mr Maitland, and Mrs Lillingstone are to be the whole; and I am prevented from setting my black cap at Mr Maitland by his having a wife and ten children . . .

  Affectionately yours,

  J.A.

  ED. R.W. CHAPMAN, JANE AUSTEN: LETTERS (1932)

  CHARLOTTE BRONTË SORROWFULLY ALONE

  Female friendships were supportive and enduring to many girls who needed to share their problems, their happiness or their loneliness. Here Charlotte Brontë, aged eighteen, is wretched as an assistant teacher. She writes to her lifelong, emotionally stable friend Ellen Nussey.

  Feb. 20, 1837. – I read your letter with dismay, Ellen – what shall I do without you? Why are we so to be denied each other’s society? It is an inscrutable fatality. I long to be with you because it seems as if two or three days or weeks spent in your company would beyond measure strengthen me in the enjoyment of those feelings which I have so lately begun to cherish. You first pointed out to me that way in which I am so feebly endeavouring to travel, and now I cannot keep you by my side. I must proceed sorrowfully alone.

  Why are we to be divided? Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well – of losing sight of the Creator in idolatry of the creature. At first I could not say, ‘Thy will be done.’ I felt rebellious; but I know it was wrong to feel so. Being left a moment alone this morning, I prayed fervently to be enabled to resign myself to every decree of God’s will – though it should be dealt forth with a far severer hand than the present disappointment. Since then, I have felt calmer and humbler – and consequently happier. . . .

  I have written this note at a venture. When it will reach you I know not, but I was determined not to let slip an opportunity for want of being prepared to embrace it. Farewell; may God bestow on you all His blessings. My darling – Farewell. Perhaps you may return before midsummer – do you think you possibly can? I wish your brother John knew how unhappy I am; he would almost pity me.

  EDS. T.J. WISE AND J.A. SYMINGTON, THE BRONTËS: THEIR LIVES, FRIENDSHIPS AND CORRESPONDENCE IN FOUR VOLUMES (1932)

  COMFORT FOR A FRIEND

  Geraldine Jewsbury wrote with sense and sensibility yet her name is scarcely known. Here she writes to a close friend, Jane Carlyle (the wife of writer Thomas) to comfort her after the death of her mother, for which she was grieving.

  Seaforth: Friday (Postmark, May 30, 1842)

  My Darling – Your note has made me very sad. There is nothing to be said to it, as you cannot be comforted, but time – time, that is the only hope and refuge for all of us! I know full well what it is to cease to see the necessity of struggling; it would puzzle the wisest of us to point it out at the best of times, but the inscrutableness does not always press upon us so heavily – it does not come till we see into some deep trouble, and then are like to go mad. To all of us life is a riddle put more or less unintelligibly, and death is the only end we can see – for we may die, and that is a strong consolation, of which nothing can defraud us. We cannot well be more dark or miserable than we are: we shall all die – no exception, no fear of exemption. Every morning I say this to myself. When I am in sorrow, it is the only comfort that has strength in it. Why, indeed, must we go on struggling, rising up early and late and taking rest? ‘Behold, He giveth His beloved sleep!’ And yet it is not well that you feel this so constantly that it swallows up all other feelings. Life is not strong in you when you are thus – it will not be so always. There is a strength in life to make us endure it. I am astonished sometimes to find that I am glad to be alive – that the instinct of feeling that it is a pleasant thing to behold the sun, and that light is good. And this is a feeling that will spring up in your heart after a while, crushed and dead as it seems now. When my father died I cannot tell you the horrible sense of desolateness and insecurity that struck through me. I had friends to love me, who would do anything for me, but I had no right to count on their endurance. I had lost the one on whose love I could depend as on the earth itself – the one whose relationship seemed to revoke the law of change pronounced against all other things in this world. Our parents and relations are given us by the same unknown Power which sent us into this world, given to us like our own bodies, without our knowing how or where, and when they are taken from us our ties to this life are loosened, and all seems tottering – nothing can supply their place. But yet even this gets blunted after a while; we can and do live, when we are put to it, on wonderfully little, without all we at first fancied indispensable, and then for ever after the love of such friends as are left or raised up to us becomes strangely precious in a way no one else can understand. We strain them to us with all our force, to try to supply the place of that natural necessity which united us without effort on our part to those who are gone! We have always a fear that the friends we have made for ourselves will leave us; we were only afraid for the others that they would be taken away. Dear love, this present strange, stunned state you will recover from. No fear of your sinking down into apathy – there is too much for you to do. You are necessary to the welfare of too many, your life will take shape again, though now it seems nothing but confused hoplessness. The thought of you brings tears to my eyes any moment it comes. Do not be so very wretched I can give you no comfort – there is none – but from time to time write when you can, but don’t plague yourself. I will also write without waiting. I am most thankful the dear little cousin still stays with you. Give my love to her. I am glad that your husband is well, and that he has his book to busy himself in. It is like a child to him. I am here since a week. I go home in a few days. Mrs —— sends her love to you. I wish you could be within reach of her; she would be a comfort to you, as she has been to me. Good bye, dear love: take care of yourself for the sake of others besides yourself!

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

  WOMEN ON WOMEN: TWO VIEWS ON MADAME GERMAINE DE STAËL

  Madame de Staël (1766–1817), daughter of the influential Necker, became the best-known woman writer in Revolutionary France. Today, she is possibly remembered for her novel Corinne (1807). She was also a leading critic on ‘everything concerned with the exercise of thought in writing’, as she said in De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les Institutiens sociales (1800). The book which most influenced contemporaries was De l’Allemagne (1810), which includes a philosophy of history, ethics and politics.

  Rosalie de Constant, the favourite among Benjamin Constant’s innumerable cousins and who later detested Germaine, was enchanted by her on first acquaintance (novelist Benjamin Constant was one of Germaine’s lovers):

  She is an astonishing woman. The feelings to which she gives rise are different from those that any other woman can inspire. Such words as sweetness, gracefulness, modesty, desire to please, deportment, manners, cannot be used when speaking of her; but one is
carried away, subjugated by the force of her genius. It follows a new path; it is a fire that lights you up, that sometimes blinds you, but that cannot leave you cold and indifferent. Her intelligence is too superior to allow others to make their worth felt, and nobody can look intelligent beside her. Wherever she goes, most people are changed into spectators. And yet, at the same time; it is astonishing to find in this singular woman a kind of childlike good humour which saves her from appearing in the least pedantic.

  J.C. HEROLD, LIFE OF MADAME DE STAËL (1959)

  In 1792, de Staël fled France with her then lover, Narbonne, and General d’Arblay, who was to marry Fanny Burney. The novelist felt admiration for Madame de Staël and the cultured émigrés with whom she came over after the French Revolution. However, her father wrote to warn her about rumours of adultery. Her answer shows warmth of affection to her new friends, but care about her reputation, since she needed her earnings as lady-in-waiting.

  Mickleham, February 22, ’93

  What a kind letter is my dearest father’s, and how kindly speedy! Yet it is too true it has given me very uncomfortable feelings. I am both hurt and astonished at the acrimony of malice; indeed, I believe all this party to merit nothing but honour, compassion, and praise. Madame de Staël, the daughter of M. Necker – the idolising daughter – of course, and even from the best principles, those of filial reverence, entered into the opening of the Revolution just as her father entered into it; but as to her house having become the centre of revolutionists before the 10th of August, it was so only for the constitutionalists, who, at that period were not only members of the then established government, but the decided friends of the king. The aristocrats were then already banished, or wanderers from fear, or concealed and silent from cowardice; and the jacobins – I need not, after what I have already related, mention how utterly abhorrent to her must be that fiend-like set.

  The aristocrats, however, as you well observe, and as she has herself told me, hold the constitutionalists in greater horror than the Convention itself. This, however, is a violence against justice which cannot, I hope, be lasting; and the malignant assertions which persecute her, all of which she has lamented to us, she imputes equally to the bad and virulent of both these parties.

  The intimation concerning M. de Narbonne was, however, wholly new to us, and I do finally believe it a gross calumny. M. de N. was of her society, which contained ten or twelve of the first people in Paris, and, occasionally, almost all Paris; she loves him even tenderly, but so openly, so simply, so unaffectedly, and with such utter freedom from all coquetry, that, if they were two men, or two women, the affection could not, I think, be more obviously undesigning. She is very plain, he is very handsome; her intellectual endowments must be with him her sole attraction.

  M. de Talleyrand was another of her society, and she seems equally attached to him. M. le Viscomte de Montmorenci she loves, she says, as her brother: he is another of this bright constellation, and esteemed of excellent capacity. She says, if she continues in England he will certainly come, for he loves her too well to stay away. In short, her whole côterie live together as brethren. Indeed, I think you could not spend a day with them and not see that their commerce is that of pure, but exalted and most elegant, friendship.

  I would, nevertheless, give the world to avoid being a guest under their roof, now I have heard even the shadow of such a rumour; and I will, if it be possible without hurting or offending them. I have waived and waived acceptance almost from the moment of Madame de Staël’s arrival. I prevailed with her to let my letter go alone to you, and I have told her, with regard to your answer, that you were sensible of the honour her kindness did me, and could not refuse to her request the week’s furlough; and then followed reasons for the compromise you pointed out, too diffuse for writing. As yet they have succeeded, though she is surprised and disappointed. She wants us to study French and English together, and nothing could to me be more desirable, but for this invidious report.

  J.C. HEROLD (1959)

  The openness of the relationship between Narbonne and de Staël seems to have shocked the more prudish English middle class, and unfortunately, Fanny Burney was terrified this friendship might jeopardize her pension from the Queen; she refused all further invitations. In vain Germaine tried to reassure her that far from being Jacobins, she and her friends had ‘barely escaped the Jacobins’ knives’. When Susan Phillips tried to explain her sister’s conduct, Germaine was dumbfounded: ‘Do you mean to say that in this country a woman is treated as a minor all life long? It seems to me that your sister behaves like a girl of fourteen.’

  LITERARY FRIENDSHIP

  Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf had an affair which lasted some months, until it changed into a literary, supportive friendship. Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) is partly based on the flamboyant Vita, born at Knole. Here, Vita analyses her first reactions:

  Long Barn

  Weald

  Sevenoaks

  11 October

  My darling

  I am in no fit state to write to you – and as for cold and considered opinions, (as you said on the telephone) such things do not exist in such a connection. At least, not yet. Perhaps they will come later. For the moment, I can’t say anything except that I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell. It seems to me the loveliest, wisest, richest book that I have ever read, – excelling even your own Lighthouse. Virginia, I really don’t know what to say, – am I right? am I wrong? am I prejudiced? am I in my senses or not? It seems to me that you have really shut up that ‘hard and rare thing’ in a book; that you have had a complete vision; and yet when you came down to the sober labour of working it out, have never lost sight of it nor faltered in the execution. Ideas come to me so fast that they trip over each other and I lose them before I can put salt on their tails; there is so much I want to say, yet I can only go back to my first cry that I am bewitched. You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I can only tell you that I am really shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation, – and then after all it does touch me so personally, and I don’t know what to say about that either, only that I feel like one of those wax figures in a shop window, on which you have hung a robe stitched with jewels. It is like being alone in a dark room with a treasure chest full of rubies and nuggets and brocades. Darling, I don’t know and scarcely even like to write, so overwhelmed am I, how you could have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg. Really, this isn’t false humility; really it isn’t. I can’t write about that part of it, though, much less ever tell you verbally.

  By now you must be thinking me too confused and illiterate for anything, so I’ll just slip in that the book (in texture) seems to me to have in it all the best of Sir Thomas Browne and Swift, – the richness of the one, and the directness of the other.

  There are a dozen details I should like to go into, – Queen Elizabeth’s visit, Green’e visit, phrases scattered about, (particularly one on p. 160 beginning ‘High battlements of thought, etc.’ which is just what you did for me,) Johnson on the blind, and so on and so on, – but it is too late today; I have been reading steadily all day, and it is now 5 o’clock, and I must catch the post, but I will try and write more sensibly tomorrow. It is your fault, for having moved me so and dazzled me completely, so that all my faculties have dropped from me and left me stark.

  EDS. L. DESAHO AND M. LEASKA, THE LETTERS OF VITA SACKVILLE-WEST TO VIRGINIA WOOLF (1984)

  FRIENDSHIP FOR ANOTHER POET

  Marina Tsvetayeva admired and liked the poet Anna Akhmatova. She met her when they were young, during the Russian Revolution. Anna’s early poems had excited her so much that Marina began a cycle of poems for her in 1916. Sadly, by 1921 most writers were having to learn to be less outspoken, even in Writers House and House of the Arts in Petrograd, as Marina described in this letter to her friend:

  Everywhere there was s
ilence, waiting and uncertainty. The 24 August arrived. Early in the morning, when I was still in bed, Ida Nappelbaum came over. She came to tell me that on the street corners were posted the announcements: all had been shot . . . sixty-two persons in all. . . .

  ELAINE FEINSTEIN, MARINA TSVETAYEVA (1989)

  The passion that went into Marina’s letter to Akhmatova of 31 August, offering her loyalty, was characteristically reckless:

  31 August 1921

  Dear Anna Andreyevna,

  Of late, gloomy rumours have been circulating about you, becoming more persistent and unequivocal with every hour that passes. I write to you about this because you will hear in any case. I want you to be correctly informed, at least. I can tell you that, to my knowledge, your only friend among poets (a friend indeed!) turned out to be Mayakovsky, as he wandered among the billboards of the ‘Poets’ Café’ looking like a slaughtered bull.

  I have, in the hope of finding out about you, spent these last few days in the Poets’ Café. What monsters! What squalid creatures! What curs they are! Everything is here: homunculi, automatons, braying stallions and lip-sticked sleeping-car attendants from Yalta . . .

  ELAINE FEINSTEIN (1989)

  A few days later, after a meeting at Writers Union, she wrote again.

  Dear Anna Andreyevna,

  To understand what yesterday evening was for me, to understand Aksyonov’s nod to me, one would have to know how I lived the previous three unspeakable days. A horrible dream. I want to wake up, but I cannot. I confronted everybody, beseeching your life. A little longer and I would have actually said ‘Gentlemen! See to it that Akhmatova be alive!’ . . . Alya comforted me: ‘Marina! She has a son!’