800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  At the end of yesterday’s proceedings, I asked Bobrov’s permission to make an official journey – to Akhmatova. Laughter all round.

  ELAINE FEINSTEIN (1989)

  LITERARY RIVALS

  The literary friendship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf was disturbed by rivalry and disease. After Mansfield’s early death from tuberculosis, Woolf tried to analyse what she had felt for this woman friend. She wrote to Vita Sackville-West:

  1922

  Katherine has been dead a week, & how far am I obeying her ‘do not quite forget Katherine’ which I read in one of her old letters? Am I already forgetting her? It is strange to trace the progress of one’s feelings. Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday ‘Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’ At that one feels – what? A shock of relief – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer. More generously I felt: But though I can do this better than she could, where is she, who could do what I can’t! Then, as usual with me, visual impressions kept coming & coming before me – always of Katherine putting on a white wreath, & leaving us, called away; made dignified, chosen. And then one pitied her. And one felt her reluctant to wear that wreath, which was an ice cold one. And she was only 33. And I could see her before me so exactly, & the room at Portland Villas. I go up. She gets up, very slowly, from her writing table. A glass of milk & a medicine bottle stood there. There were also piles of novels. Everything was very tidy, bright, & somehow like a doll’s house. At once, or almost, we got out of shyness. She (it was summer) half lay on the sofa by the window. She had her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead. Sometimes we looked very steadfastly at each other, as though we had reached some durable relationship, independent of the changes of the body, through the eyes. Hers were beautiful eyes – rather doglike, brown, very wide apart, with a steady slow rather faithful & sad expression. Her nose was sharp, & a little vulgar. Her lips thin & hard. She wore short skirts and liked ‘to have a line round her’ she said. She looked very ill – very drawn, & moved languidly, drawing herself across the room, like some suffering animal. I suppose I have written down some of the things we said. Most days I think we reached that kind of certainty, in talk about books, or rather about our writings, which I thought had something durable about it. And then she was inscrutable. Did she care for me? Sometimes she would say so – would kiss me – would look at me as if (is this sentiment?) her eyes would like always to be faithful. She would promise never never to forget. That was what we said at the end of our talk. She said she would send me her diary to read, & would write always. For our friendship was a real thing we said, looking at each other quite straight. It would always go on whatever happened. What happened was, I suppose, faultfinding & perhaps gossip. She never answered my letter. Yet I still feel, somehow that friendship persists. Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine. If I had been in Paris & gone to her, she would have got up & in three minutes, we should have been talking again. Only I could not take the step. The surroundings – Murry & so on – and the small lies and treacheries, the perpetual playing & teasing, or whatever it was, cut away so much of the substance of friendship. One was too uncertain. And so one let it all go. Yet I certainly expected that we should meet again next summer, & start afresh. And I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of. This made it harder to write to her; & I saw in it, perhaps from jealousy, all the qualities I disliked in her . . . I have the feeling that I shall think of her at intervals all through life. Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else . . .

  CLAIRE TOMALIN, KATHERINE MANSFIELD: A SECRET LIFE (1987)

  COMFORT FOR A FRIEND ABANDONED

  A Senegalese divorced woman comforts her great friend Aissatou, who has been abandoned by her husband. This modern epistolary novel So Long A Letter, written in 1982 by Mariama Bâ displays the same caring and wisdom that Geraldine Jewsbury showed to Jane Carlyle.

  Leave! Draw a clean line through the past. Turn over a page on which not everything was bright, certainly, but at least all was clear. What would now be recorded there would hold no love, confidence, grandeur or hope. I had never known the sordid side of marriage. Don’t get to know it! Run from it! When one begins to forgive, there is an avalanche of faults that comes crashing down, and the only thing that remains is to forgive again, so keep on forgiving. Leave, escape from betrayal! Sleep without asking myself any questions, without straining my ear at the slightest noise, waiting for a husband I share.

  I counted the abandoned or divorced women of my generation whom I knew.

  I knew a few whose remaining beauty had been able to capture a worthy man, a man who added fine bearing to a good situation and who was considered ‘better, a hundred times better than his predecessor’. The misery that was the lot of these women was rolled back with the invasion of the new happiness that changed their lives, filled out their cheeks, brightened their eyes. I knew others who had lost all hope of renewal and whom loneliness had very quickly laid underground.

  The play of destiny remains impenetrable. The cowries that a female neighbour throws on a fan in front of me do not fill me with optimism, neither when they remain face upwards, showing the black hollow that signifies laughter, nor when the grouping of their white backs seems to say that ‘the man in the double trousers’ is coming towards me, the promise of wealth. ‘The only thing that separates you from the man and wealth, is the alms of two white and red cola nuts,’ adds Farmata, my neighbour.

  She insists: ‘There is a saying that discord here may be luck elsewhere. Why are you afraid to make the break? A woman is like a ball; once a ball is thrown, no one can predict where it will bounce. You have no control over where it rolls, and even less over who gets it. Often it is grabbed by an unexpected hand . . .’ I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes took in the mirror’s eloquence. I had lost my slim figure, as well as ease and quickness of movement. My stomach protruded from beneath the wrapper that hid the calves developed by the impressive number of kilometers walked since the beginning of my existence. Suckling had robbed my breasts of their round firmness. I could not delude myself: youth was deserting my body.

  Whereas a woman draws from the passing years the force of her devotion, despite the ageing of her companion, a man, on the other hand, restricts his field of tenderness. His egoistic eye looks over his partner’s shoulder. He compares what he had with what he no longer has, what he has with what he could have.

  I had heard of too many misfortunes not to understand my own. There was your own case, Aissatou, the cases of many other women, despised, relegated or exchanged, who were abandoned, worn-out.

  To overcome distress when it sits upon you demands strong will. When one thinks that with each passing second one’s life is shortened, one must profit intensely from this second; it is the sum of all the lost or harvested seconds that makes for a wasted or a successful life. Brace oneself to check despair and get it into proportion! A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness. Little by little, it takes over your whole being.

  Oh, nervous breakdown! Doctors speak of it in a detached, ironical way, emphasizing that the vital organs are in no way disturbed. You are lucky if they don’t tell you that you are wasting their time with the evergrowing list of your illnesses – your head, throat, chest, heart, liver – that no X-ray can confirm. And yet what atrocious suffering is caused by nervous breakdowns!

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

  A ‘ROMANTIC’ FRIENDSHIP

  Women in patriarchal cultures have seldom expressed public understanding of the intense love of Sappho for other women.
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  In 1790 Mrs Piozzi (formerly Mrs Thrale, whom Dr Johnson loved) wrote that the ‘Queen of France is at the Head of a Set of Monsters called by each other Sapphists, who boast her example; and deserve to be thrown with the He Demons that haunt each other likewise, into Mount Vesuvius’. (Thraliana 1776–1809, ed. K. Balderston, 1951, p. 740). In 1795 she returned to this topic, still upholding views preached by the church and the majority of men: ‘’Tis now grown common to suspect impossibilities (for such I think ’em) whenever two Ladies live too much together’ (op. cit. p. 949). English social history had scarcely mentioned this topic. It was alluded to as ‘romantic friendship’, a far wider, less scornful term. Fanny Hill, forty years before, had mentioned ‘secret bias’, but there are few allusions to lesbianism. Havelock Ellis wrote in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 2, p. 261) that a Miss Hobart was mentioned in the court of Charles II, which shows us ‘how rare was the exception’. A century later, however, homosexuality among English women seems to have been regarded by the French as common, and Bacchaumont, on 1 January 1773, recording that Mlle Heinel of the Opera was settling in England, added, ‘Her taste for women will there find attractive satisfaction, for it is said that London is herein superior to Paris’.

  In the eighteenth century, middle-class daughters, sisters, aunts and some wives were gaining a little leisure to read and study. The notable correspondents reveal that terms often associated today with sexual relationships were mostly confined to literary friendships between women: tenderness, sensibility, shared tastes, even coquetry. For example, a clergyman’s daughter, Miss Carter, who corresponded with Mrs Montagu and Dr Johnson, wrote of a clever girl at Oxford: ‘Miss Talbot is absolutely my passion; I think of her all day, dream of her all night and one way or other introduce her into every subject I talk of’ (Mrs Carter’s Letters Vol. 1 p. 2). Like the Ladies of Llangollen, these women agreed to strict planning of their time, and shunning of town life. They all rose early, to pursue a rigourous course of reading and study of foreign languages, alleviated by long walks or rides, gardening and preserving or embroidery.

  ‘Romantic friendship’ is a term now lost, yet less marginalizing than ‘lesbian’ to describe a relationship which includes tenderness, lifelong devotion, shared tastes, probably passion and shared beds. One of the best known, at the end of the eighteenth century is that of the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who ran away to set up house together in 1778. They first had to fight their families, then public opinion, but succeeded in leading the intellectual life they sought together. Their friends and admirers included Wellington and Wordsworth. Wedgwood, Darwin and Sheridan, among many others, visited their ‘gothick’ cottage in Llangollen.

  They were both from aristocratic families, Butler thirty-nine, and Ponsonby twenty-three when they eloped together. Butler was considered eccentric as she was tall, clever and disinclined to marry. Ponsonby was considered pretty. When orphaned, she was taken in by her uncle who soon turned his unwelcome eyes on her.

  Sarah Ponsonby wrote many lively letters of complaint, to women relations and secretly to her friend Eleanor Butler:

  neither my pride, resentment, nor any other passion shall ever be sufficiently powerful to make me give Lady Betty any uneasiness in my power to spare her, and I sometimes laugh to think of the earnestness with which she presses me to be obliging to him, for I have adopted the most reserved mode of behaviour . . . taking no pains when she does not perceive it, to show my disgust and detestation of him. I would rather die than wound Lady Betty’s heart.

  E. MAVOR, LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN: A STUDY IN ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP (1971)

  Butler’s mother had attempted to persuade Eleanor to enter a convent, but the girl no longer felt the happiness in Catholicism which she had experienced when younger. The two girls left their homes on the last day of March 1778. The following day, Sir William’s men caught up with the girls and brought them home, but a few weeks later, they succeeded in escaping together and bought a small cottage in Llangollen. There they developed a ‘system’ to devote their minds to self-improvement. Sarah described it to her aunt Mrs Tighe:

  11 April 1783

  . . . my B[eloved] has a Book of (I think) very well chosen Extracts from all the Books she has read since we had a home. We record elegant extracts, recipes, nostrums, garden plants, anecdotes, and in a special book, our future projects. We wish to eschew the vanity of society, never to leave home, and to better, in so far as we can, the lot of the poor and unfortunate . . .

  TIGHE MS

  The daughter of Mrs Tighe, Caroline Hamilton, wrote of their friendship:

  I have no cause to think that Lady Eleanor Butler ever repented the steps she had taken, but from a letter I suspect that Miss Ponsonby sometimes expressed regret at having left Ireland. The two ladies continued to the last devoted to each other, and if they had a difference of opinion, they discussed it in a particular walk where they could not be overheard, for as they felt themselves bound to give to the world, an example of perfect friendship, the slightest appearance of discord would have tarnished their reputation.

  NLI. MS 4811

  FRIENDSHIPS WITH MEN

  George Sand, the French novelist, not only fell in love with many men, she maintained lifelong friendships with men even more than with women. To François Rollinat, one of her most intimate and valued friends, a young barrister, practising in Châteauroux, the town near Nohant, she wrote:

  Nohant, 1834

  I have never felt love for you of any kind, neither moral nor physical; but from the very first day we met I felt for you one of those rare sympathies, those deep unconquerable attractions which no force can alter, because the more deeply one explores then the more one identifies one’s own soul with the being who inspires this attraction, and shares in it.

  I never found you superior to myself either mentally or morally, if I had, perhaps I should have regarded you with that glowing enthusiasm which leads to love.

  In a way you were worth more than I, because you were younger, because you had lived less than I in torment, because God had sent you from the first upon a better more firmly marked road than mine. But you come from His creative hand with the same number of virtues and failings, of great qualities, and of miseries as I did.

  I know many men who are superior to you, but I shall never have the same depth of affection (it comes from the depths of my being) for them as I have for you. I should never be able to walk with any one of them under the stars all night, as I can with you, without feeling one moment of disagreement or antipathy. And yet we often prolonged these walks and talks until dawn and never without awakening an identical transport in the souls of both of us; and did the confession of some misery fall from my lips, it never failed to draw an echo of the same sorrow from yours.

  We had for each other the profound indulgence and the almost cowardly tenderness that one feels for oneself. We felt for each other that kind of besotted confidence which one feels for one’s own ideas, and we felt that confident pride, that one has in one’s personal force, for one another.

  We have never once quarrelled or disagreed on any subject bad or good. What one suggests is adopted by the other immediately, and not out of complaisance or devotion, but because of necessity and inevitable sympathy.

  ED. E. DREW, LETTERS OF GEORGE SAND (1930)

  A POET IN EXILE

  The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva found life in exile tough, mentally and physically. Though she was happier in Czechoslovakia, from where she wrote this letter, than in Paris, she desperately needed the friendship of other writers. Her correspondence with Pasternak was important to them both.

  Mokropsy, 19 November 1922

  My dear Pasternak,

  My favourite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see in a dream.

  My second favourite is correspondence. A letter is, as a form of otherworldly communication, less perfect than a dream, but the rules are the same.

&n
bsp; Neither can be ordered. We dream and write not as we want, but as they want. A letter has to be written: a dream has to be seen. (My letters always want to be written!)

  Now about Weimar [where Pasternak had suggested that they meet in two years’ time]. Pasternak, don’t joke. I shall live by this for two years running . . . Pasternak, I was just returning along the rough country road . . . I was feeling my way. Dirt, potholes, dark lamp posts. Pasternak, with what force did I then think of you; no, not of you; of myself without you, of these street lamps and roads without you. Oh Pasternak, my feet will walk milliards of verses before we meet! (Forgive me for such an explosion of truth; I am writing as if about to die.)

  Now the prospect of massive insomnia. Springs and summers – I know myself – every tree that my eyes single out will be you. How can one live with this? It is not that you are there, while I am here; the point is that you will be there, that I shall never know whether you exist or not. Yearning for you and fear for you, wild fear; I know myself . . .

  Do not be afraid. There will be only one letter like this . . .

  My Pasternak, perhaps I shall, one day, really and truly become a major poet – thanks to you! I do have to speak without bounds to you, to unfold my heart. In conversation this is done through silence. But I have only a pen! . . .

  Pasternak, how many questions I have to put to you! We have not talked about anything yet. In Weimar we shall have a long conversation.

  ELAINE FEINSTEIN, MARINA TSVETAYEVA (1989)

  Mokropsy, 9 March 1923

  Dear Pasternak,

  I have nothing, except my fervour for you, and that will not help. I kept waiting for your letter, not daring to ask for a visa to visit you without your permission. And I did not know whether you needed me or not. I simply lost heart. (I write in a cheerful fatal fever.) It’s too late.