800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  E. EDEN, UP THE COUNTRY; LETTERS FROM INDIA (1983)

  GEORGE ELIOT ON CUPID THE ENEMY

  George Eliot enjoyed learning, and read theology with real interest. At twenty she studied seriously, at home, but was sometimes attracted to young men. She wrote to a former teacher:

  Spring 1840

  To Miss Lewis

  I feel that a sight of one being whom I have not beheld except passingly since the interview I last described to you would probably upset all; but as it is, the image now seldom arises in consequence of entire occupation and, I trust in some degree, desire and prayer to be free from rebelling against Him whose I am by right, whose I would be by adoption. I endeavoured to pray for the beloved object to whom I have alluded, I must still a little while say beloved, last night and felt soothingly melted in thinking that if mine be really prayers my acquaintance with him has probably caused the first to be offered up specially in his behalf. But all this I ought not to have permitted to slip from my pen.

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

  At school she had already written to a friend, Patty Jackson:

  Cupid listens to no entreaties; we must deal with him as an enemy, either boldly parry his shafts or flee. I find our language teacher, Joseph Brezzi anything but uninteresting, all external grace and mental power, but ‘Cease ye from man’ is engraven on my amulet. And to tell you the truth I begin to feel involuntarily isolated, and without being humble, to have such a consciousness that I am a negation of all that finds love and esteem as makes me anticipate for myself – no matter what; I shall have countless undeserved enemies if my life be prolonged, wherever my lot may be cast, and I need rigid discipline, which I have never yet had.

  ED. G. HAIGHT (1954)

  It was a prophetic remark. As time passed the prospect of a lover seemed more remote. In a letter to Patty, 20 October 1840, she said:

  Every day’s experience seems to deepen the voice of foreboding that has long been telling me, ‘The bliss of reciprocated affection is not allotted to you under any form. Your heart must be widowed in this manner from the world, or you will never seek a better portion; a consciousness of possessing the fervent love of any human being would soon become your heaven, therefore it would be your curse.’

  ED. G. HAIGHT (1954)

  A KANSAS TEACHER ON HER CHILDREN

  Mary Abell was a teacher, married to a farmer-preacher. Here she writes to her mother, 14 August 1872. This letter and the others that follow are all from Kansas. Nettie is six and going to school.

  Nettie has commenced piecing a quilt. She sews very nicely – has finished six blocks – wants Grandma to send her a lot of pieces and the girls. Rob bought Robbie and Eddie each a little hatchet while at Manhattan – axe one side and hammer on the other – and Nettie a set of dolls’ furniture, the smartest lot of little things I ever saw. There are four chairs, a bureau, table, sofa and bedstead, writing desk, stand, center table, footstool, and cradle, they are as perfectly made as any thing you ever saw – that is her present for taking care of baby. Robt. got her a drawing book for the slate a while ago – pages painted black and pictures white. She is learning to read also.

  Mary Abell to her sister Kate, 7 March 1874; Nettie is now seven-and-a-half.

  Robert and Nettie are digging a well – They have got eleven feet now. Shall I tell you how they manage. Robert has a box holding a bushel and a half with a string handle to it, to which is attached a long heavy well rope, which runs over pullys. When he gets the box full of dirt he sings out to Nettie who leads off the horse, who draws up the dirt in fine style. Rob pulls out the pin that holds the box end of the rope – hitches another horse which is close by to a staple in the side of the box – and hauls off the dirt, comes back, changes riggings again and gets into the bucket and horse No. 1 lets him down into the well again. If you want an idea of how they get along – I kept tally today, and they hauled up 22 boxes this a.m. and 36 this p.m. Rob dug over three feet today. He has come to rock now but how solid he don’t know. He had engaged men to help him, but when he went to see them they could not come. He gets along just as fast – as if he had a man and with only Nettie’s help. One would hardly believe it. He says he can do 35 feet in that way. He has a long house ladder which he puts into the well to climb out with and will splice it and make it go that far. If we could only get water at that depth how little it would cost us. Nettie is quite tired out tonight she says it has kept her running all day. Eddie tends the baby for me in her place. Yesterday was a miserable day. Snow – rain – hail – mud – and a hard wind, but Nettie led the horse for Rob to work all day. I bundled her up good and warm, so she would not catch cold.

  By the way John Abell’s little girl Mary is dead. . . .

  I have written a letter for Nettie to Nellie, that I shall mail at the same time I do this, but when that will be I do not know. This is a beautiful day. Eddie has led the horse today, so he relieves Nettie, and for both of them it will not be hard work – besides it makes it some easier for me, as Nettie can hold the baby some of the time – and Eddie can only rock him – cannot hold him.

  ED. H. JORDAN, LOVE LIES BLEEDING (1979)

  ON A SON GROWING UP

  The Spanish novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán was born in 1851, in Galicia. She wrote many acclaimed novels, at a time when few women were able to publish in Spain. The best known are Los Pazos de Ulloa and La Madre Naturaleza. Her aristocratic husband was less intellectual than she was, and she fell in love with a university professor, Linares. When he lost his job because he objected to the dominance of the Catholic Church, he had to move away. She wrote touching letters, ostensibly about her young son, in discourse suggesting a multiplicity of identities.

  Coruna, 24 December 1876

  My friend,

  I have left far too long a time since my last letter. I feel disappointed with myself whenever I recall the trivial circumstances which have prevented me. If I thought my silence upset you, it would be presumptuous of me, but that would decrease my low spirits somewhat. What can I write to you about? the distance and different directions of our lives mean that I don’t know what your present preoccupations are, and mine can’t interest you. I believe that you are with your sister . . . What a life! The extent of our affections depends on a few miles, more or less.

  My son is growing, in body and mind. At two, his innocence is a delight. At this moment I’m completely alone in the house, as the rest of the family is out and he’s on my lap. I’ve only got one free hand, so I can’t structure my ideas, or even write properly, because he keeps putting his little hands on the pen, and distracting me.

  When I close my eyes I can imagine him at 20. My friend, don’t be surprised at my lyrical feeling for this child: it is so sweet to bring a person into the world, and so necessary to love passionately when you lack something you can never, never possess; and there are wounds which bleed till your death and continue to hurt as much as the very day they were inflicted. . . .

  PRIVATE COLLECTION AND TRANS. OLGA KENYON

  EDITH SITWELL’S CHILDHOOD

  Edith Sitwell’s aunt, Aunt Florence, wrote of her, just before her brother Osbert was born:

  November 1892

  She is now five years old, a most interesting and dear little person . . . I have been giving her tiny lessons after tea. Last Sunday, I began the life of Our Lord with her. When the visit was ending, little Edith helped arrange the flowers. I think she did four vases with her dear little hands, taking great pains to make them pretty, and making quaint remarks, such as ‘We must make the best of things’, ‘We mustn’t carol [quarrel] with what we’ve got’.

  She then complained about her nurserymaid, Martha, who she said does ‘nothing to amuse, and everything to displease me’. She is an unusually articulate small child, of the sort sometimes called ‘oldfashioned’, and unusually retentive and intelligent.

  It is wonderful the way in which the child is getting on with her reading – really teaching
herself – asking the meaning of unknown words, and remembering them. Fairy tales have been her especial delight. She is very reflective and at the same time full of fun and mischief, delighting in a joke. . . .

  Once she got one of her frightened fits, and clung to me. These unexplained attacks of terror are the only sign that anything is wrong at all for this dear little person. Dear little E has grown round one’s heart, and it was sad parting with her.

  V. GLENDINNING, EDITH SITWELL: LION AMONG UNICORNS (1981)

  ON THE BIRTH OF BABY DAUGHTERS

  Millicent Fawcett worked unceasingly with her husband to further women’s rights and education. They had a clever daughter, Philippa, of whom they were extremely fond and proud. Mrs Fawcett found no difficulty in combining her maternal feelings with her unremitting social work. In 1892 the Chicago Exhibition asked her to produce something to show the value of university education for women, and among other exhibits Millicent Fawcett decided to send ‘a frame full of photographs of prize babies whose mothers are graduates’. The letters to students when a daughter was born reveal her delight. She wrote to Clotilda Marson, a Newnham graduate, when her baby Mary arrived that year:

  1892

  We were made very happy by the joyful telegram ‘Strong daughter both well’. Strong daughter sounds so nice, it is what we all hope for her all through her life; it made us think of the beautiful bit in the Baptism service, ‘Manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world and the devil, and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto her life’s end’. She will need to be a strong daughter for that, so well as for many other good and beautiful things.

  RAY STRACHEY, MILLICENT FAWCETT (1931)

  In July she wrote to her friend Mrs Merrifield, when her granddaughter Helen was born to May, whose Tripos Mrs Fawcett had secured for her. She uses public metaphor to celebrate this intimate event, to show that she saw daughters’ roles to be as important in the public as in the private arena.

  The 4th of July is a beautiful day for a birthday. I hope the baby’s declaration of independence will date from it, and that she will be a worthy descendant of those who have gone before her.

  RAY STRACHEY (1931)

  A DAUGHTER ANALYSES THE PROBLEMS CAUSED BY HER PARENTS’ ILL-MATCHED CHARACTERS

  The Tibetan expert and explorer, Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) here writes to her distant cousin Philippe, whom she married in 1905, to explain why she thinks they ought not to have children.

  August 1905

  I came into existence as a misconceived instrument of reconciliation between my parents. I blame my mother who felt things, rather than consciously analysing them. My greatest fear is that I may resemble her. When I look in the mirror I see those features and wrinkles which I hate.

  I am the daughter of the man she did not love. I am his daughter alone in spite of the blood from which she made me and the milk with which she nourished me . . . See, my friend, that which sometimes awaits those imprudent women who look to maternity for consolation from an ill-matched union. I see myself as a wife being pulled inexorably into the self-annihilating role of my mother. If I had a child I would be as destructive toward it as my mother was to me.

  My son and my daughter, in reliving what I was in earlier times, would be incomprehensible to you and you would not respect them. That would be the sad struggle amidst these children. Indifference would perhaps come on your part, but I am only too fully aware of the mother I would be to risk the terrible adventure. The child for me would be the god to whom would go all my adoration. He would be my unique hope and I would only live to see him live the life I did not live, to realize the ideal I did not attain. Without doubt he would not achieve this. But it could happen that I would become a person in whom lodged a spirit dissimilar to my present one . . . it would be the story of my mother, but intensified by all the superiority, sensitivity and intelligence that I have over that wretched woman in whom disappointments only changed into rancour and spitefulness against her unsuspecting child.

  Ah, my poor dear, believe me, there is much wisdom, much foresight in my will not to be a mother. How support the terrible thought of not being able to expose all of one’s life, sentiments and actions before the vigorous, implacable, severe judge which one’s child would prove?

  PRIVATE COLLECTION

  EDUCATION

  The second part of this chapter deals with education, defined both as a leading out of the child’s innate abilities, or a putting in of knowledge. The Church tended to ‘put in’ many hours of theology, Greek and Latin, from which girls were excluded. Up to Virginia Woolf women have written of their frustration at not being allowed to learn this privileged discourse of men.

  Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, and Dame Julian of Norwich, like many aristocratic women, dictated their letters. It still remains a mystery how Hildegard learned Latin and theology; perhaps from listening to sermons very attentively, as so many girls had to do if they were to pick up an education. Hildegard’s Latin is limited in its vocabulary, yet she deploys it with remarkable subtlety to describe her visions. She also wrote competently on science, herbal medicine and philosophy. Not to mention her brilliant composing of plain chant (which should no longer be called Gregorian!).

  Héloïse, educated by a scholastic uncle, used arguments equal to her ambitious churchman-lover. She learned the ability to manipulate their language, as did Christine de Pisan two centuries later. By the late Middle Ages in England we have evidence of women writing skilfully, in collections such as the Stonor papers, and by Tudor times daughters of the rich were often well educated in arts and languages, as demonstrated by daughters of humanists and princes. Lady Jane Grey suffered ‘nips and beatings’ from her ambitious parents (who so nearly gained the throne through her). Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, chose one of the best tutors of the time for her stepchildren, in Roger Ascham. One can but admire the control of Elizabeth over language in persuading her father to accept a gift which will ingratiate her both in his eyes and those of her intelligent stepmother.

  A DAUGHTER TO HER FATHER IN THE HOUSE OF HER STEP-GRANDMOTHER

  This letter was written in English, in about 1500, by Dorothy Plumpton to her father, Sir Robert Plumpton. On his remarriage he placed his daughter in the home of her stepmother’s family. This was partly to improve her chances of meeting marriageable young men. However, she found life tough.

  Let this be delivered in haste to my most honoured and wholly beloved, good, kind father, Sir Robert Plumpton, presently staying at Plumpton in Yorkshire.

  Most Honoured father, in the humblest manner I know I send you my respects, and to my lady mother, and to all my brothers and sisters, whom I beseech Almighty God to maintain and preserve in health, prosperity, and increasing honour, asking of you only your daily blessing; this is to let you know that I sent a message to you, by Wryghame of Knaresborough, about my feelings, how he should ask you, in my name, to send for me to return home to you, and as yet I have had no answers, and my lady has obtained knowledge of my desire.

  Because of this she has become a better lady towards me than she ever was before, and she has promised to be my good lady as long as she lives; and if you or she can find anything more suitable for me in this district or any other, she will help to further my interests to the limit of her power. So I humbly ask you, to be so good and kind a father to me as to let me know your pleasure, how you would like me to be settled, as soon as you are pleased to.

  And please write to my ladyship, thanking her good ladyship for the tender loving-kindness she has shown me, and asking her to continue it. Sir I beseech you to send a servant of yours to my lady and to me, and show by fatherly kindness that I am your child: for I have sent you various messages and letters, and have never had any answer. Because of this, it is believed in the district among those persons who would rather speak ill than good, that you have little feeling for me, an error which you can discredit, if it pleases you to be a good kind
father to me.

  And please send me a fine hat, and some good cloth to headscarfs.

  And I pray to Jesus that he will be pleased to have you in His blessed keeping, and bring you happiness and your heart’s desire.

  Written at the Hirst, the thirteenth day of May,

  By your loving daughter,

  Dorothy Plumpton.

  ED. C. MORIARTY, THE VOICE OF THE MIDDLE AGES (1989)

  THE FUTURE QUEEN ELIZABETH SENDS THE PRESENT OF A TRANSLATION TO HER FATHER

  To the most glorious and mighty King Henry VIII, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and Supreme Head under Christ of the Church of England and Ireland for whose every happiness His Majesty’s most humble daughter Elizabeth ever prays, and who she entreats to give her his blessing.