A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  It was partly to escape from this new emotional pressure and its attendant threat of ‘becoming an invalid wife’ as she put it, that Isabella had gone to Japan and Malaya; now she was back and patient John still waited. This time she definitely refused him, explaining gently that she was ‘scarcely a marrying woman’. He forbore to press her further and, she wrote, ‘He has acted nobly and sweetly to me, never saying one word about his own suffering.’ ‘Noble’ and ‘sweet’ are words that Isabella and Anna continually use about both John Bishop and Henrietta, who thus emerge as holier-than-life figures bathed in a saintly glow. Like Hennie apparently, Bishop was quite unselfish, kind-hearted, immensely loyal; like Hennie too, his nature was retiring, conscientious, quite unassuming and with that same quality which Anna calls ‘a rare simplicity and purity’, a certain spiritual grace. In appearance, as Isabella describes him to a friend, he was ‘a little under middle height, very plain, wearing spectacles and is very grey’, with a ‘high broad intellectual brow’ that confirmed his cultured and ‘very artistic tastes’. He must have had a quiet sense of the droll too: ‘Isabella has the appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich’ was how he diagnosed the amazing capacity of one so frail to travel so far. A man so similar in temperament to Hennie, sharing her talent for patient and undemanding devotion, could not but be a little de trop in 1879 when the two sisters were so happily and satisfyingly reunited. His role in Isabella’s life lay in the near future.

  In the meantime, that October, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, the somewhat reticent story of Isabella’s Colorado adventures, finally appeared in book form and was greeted with rave notices. Her ‘spontaneous and unadorned narrative’, applauded the Spectator, was ‘of more interest than most of the novels which it has been our lot to encounter, and in fact comprises character, situation and dramatic effect enough to make ninety-nine novels out of a hundred look pallid and flat in comparison’. Others concurred in their praise of her unforced, vivid style, her skilful combination of the dramatic and the natural, and not one, to Isabella’s relief, ‘scented out any imagined impropriety’ – at least, not as far as Jim Nugent was concerned. The reviewer of The Times while acclaiming it as a bright and lively book, commented in passing that Miss Bird ‘donned masculine habiliments for her greater convenience and backed such half-broken horses as she happened to hire’.

  Masculine habiliments indeed! This evoked in Isabella an unusual burst of really vindictive fury. She wrote to Murray straight away, making it quite, quite clear that ‘the Hawaiian riding dress’, as she described it, was ‘a dress worn by ladies at Mountain Resorts in America and by English and American ladies on Hawaii. The full-frilled trousers being invaluable in mountaineering or riding’. She continues, ‘My indignation and disgust have not cooled down yet. I can imagine a lady who “dons masculine habiliments” quite capable of thrashing an editor on less provocation’, and she apparently suggested that, as she was a properly-attired lady, Mr Murray might like to undertake the thrashing on her behalf? This he declined, and offered instead the soothing suggestion that a short prefatory note and a sketch to suggest the very feminine nature of the author’s riding costume would be more appropriate. These duly appeared in most subsequent editions (of which there were seven) and they somewhat mollified Isabella. The sketch, though, was ‘rather Amazonian and the horse unlike my little pet “Birdie”’, she complained, but at least, ‘the costume is not “masculine habiliments”’. At any rate, Dean Stanley told Mr Murray that everybody was asking, ‘Have you read The Rocky Mountains?’ – it was that successful.

  As for Isabella’s response to The Times review, it is surely justifiable to suppose that her quite immoderate rage was closely related to her emotional state at that period. She had, after all, just refused the hand of a man in order to continue living in devoted harmony with her sister for whom she cherished an abnormally intense love. It was a most inappropriate moment to so much as hint that Isabella was in any way ‘masculine’, wanting perhaps in the conventional responses to the opposite sex, and flaunting her difference by the wearing of trousers. In fact, there is really little question but that she was normally sexed, though most of her passion was diverted into channels other than sexual. She probably feared the physical intrusion of sex and, even more, the curtailment it would have imposed upon her freedom of action, especially while she was of child-bearing age. Clearly, she had no maternal instinct whatsoever, preferring, in the legendary British fashion, the company of horses. And so really Isabella’s reason for wearing trousers was simple, as the reviewer had in fact said: they facilitated the riding of horses astride. That travellers were ‘privileged to do the most improper things with perfect propriety’ was, after all, her lifelong principle, in time people accepted it from her, allowing her, by the rigid standards of the day, both to have her cake and eat it.

  The row simmered down and the sisters left Mull for the winter. Describing that summer they had spent together in the Tobermory cottage, Isabella wrote, ‘I think perhaps that I shall never again have such a serenely happy four months. I shall always in the future as in the past have to contest constitutional depression by earnest work, and by trying to lose myself in the interests of others; and full and interesting as my life is, I sometimes dread a battle of years.’ The most pressing ‘earnest work’ was the writing of her book about Japan, which, she feared, would be ‘dull and flat’ after the Rockies. And it would have been more so perhaps if John Murray had carried his point, for he urged her to ‘tone down’ somewhat her brutally frank descriptions of Japanese peasant life. This she refused to do, saying that she ‘wanted to speak the truth’ – to chip a little of the sugar off the cherry-blossom image that was already forming around Japan.

  When the manuscript was completed, Isabella went on one of her visiting treadmills among friends and relatives, while Hennie returned to Tobermory. Late in April, Isabella had a telegram to say that her sister was seriously ill, and, rushing to the cottage, found her prostrate with typhoid. Dr Bishop was at once sent for, and as, by almost providential chance, he had recently broken a leg, he gave up his normal practice and devoted himself entirely to Hennie. ‘There is such a strength in having so good a man and so skilful a doctor, who knows her constitution thoroughly, in the house’, Isabella wrote. The trial was a long one; hope ebbed and revived; the islanders brought masses of spring flowers, stood outside the gate to hear of her progress. In early June Hennie died.

  Isabella was broken. As some mothers for their children, some spouses for their mates, some children for their parents, so Isabella was cast into a pit of total desolation by the death of her sister. ‘The anguish is awful … She was my world, present or absent, seldom absent from my thoughts … She is not – and the light, life and inspiration of my life have died with her’, she wrote to Ella Blackie, who later recalled Isabella’s ‘white face, the rigidity of a grief that chilled and devitalised her, the awful loneliness that wrapped her round’. ‘I knew it would be terrible, but never knew half how terrible. I feel as if most of myself had gone,’ Isabella continued in despair. And indeed, whether consciously or not, Isabella had for years envisaged herself and Hennie as being, to an extent, one entity. The letters Isabella wrote home from abroad contain many passionately affectionate passages in which Hennie is referred to as ‘it’. For instance, ‘I delight in my darling and the only pleasure I have is knowing it has something it can like’; and ‘Each letter that I get gives me such a wild despairing wish to get back and see its well-beloved face, for it is my own and only pet’. Occasionally, Isabella refers to herself as ‘it’ also; she signed some of her letters ‘Its being’; a term of mutual endearment was ‘Its own pet’. The implication is that the sisters formed a mutually absorbed and absorbing ‘it’, a being that was indivisible, interdependent, complementary. Anna Stoddart quotes a friend of their early years who saw this clearly: ‘The two sisters were widely different in girlhood, their temperaments and characteristics as well as their
intellectual tastes and acquirements varying greatly, but both were charming companions and able to converse well on many subjects. What one lacked, the other possessed and thus together they formed a perfect combination.’

  Within this ‘combination’ their later roles were clearly defined along lines similar to those of the male and female in primitive societies: Isa was the dominant leader, the wanderer, thinker, ‘man of action’; Hennie was the admiring comforter, home-maker, still centre to whom Ulysses returns. But this is something of a simplification, because, as clearly emerged from the row over the riding-dress, for example, Isabella never consciously aspired to masculinity, rather, she needed Hennie’s warm and simple femininity to complete her as a woman. Again, like many a wanderer’s, her response to the home-maker’s devoted love was ambiguous. Undoubtedly it was true, as Anna Stoddart said, that one very important element in Isabella’s life was ‘her deep home affection’ – for father, mother and then all concentrated on her sister. Nevertheless, Isabella found most of her happiness and fulfilment in far-flung places, and when Hennie made a nest for them in Tobermory, Isabella was never there for more than a few months at a time, because, she asserted, the Mull climate greatly disagreed with her! (And so, perhaps, did living in the one ambience that Hennie had made her own.) When not abroad, therefore, it had long been Isabella’s habit to go away for months on a series of visits to numerous friends and relatives, as she had been doing when Henrietta was taken ill.

  In consequence, added to Isabella’s sense of loss of half of her being was a racking guilt because she had so often neglected her sister’s warm and loving presence in the past. Now she had lost it, and she passed into those involutions of grief through which, as through the circles of birth and love, there is no short cut. She yearned to die herself – ‘I seem hardly to care what happens to me’, she wrote; drearily she reiterated the sad litany of her loss – Hennie was ‘the inspiration of all my literary work, my best public, my home and fireside, my most intimate and congenial friend’, she told John Murray. She went to Tobermory, sorted through the beloved’s possessions, tried to take up her sister’s local charity work; ‘The things I am interested in are her interests and for her sake I have become attached to Tobermory’, she declared.

  The copies of the just-published Unbeaten Tracks in japan arrived, and she put them aside unopened. Murray, with kind intent to ease her sorrow, told her of its reception: ‘How can I convey to you the tidings of your own praises which are resounding everywhere and with a unanimity of which I have had no previous experience in my long career as a publisher?’ Isabella quotes this in a letter to Ella, and adds, ‘But all this avails me nothing’. There was no joy in it for her, though she admitted ‘a lurking satisfaction in having vindicated a woman’s right to do what she can do well’.

  And it was the book about Japan that firmly established her in the public mind as no mere ‘lady adventuress’ but as a perspicacious and very intelligent observer of the social and political scene in the Far East. ‘I am specially pleased’, she told Murray who had sent her a batch of favourable reviews, ‘that the reviewers have not made any puerile remarks on the feminine authorship of the book or awarded praise or blame on that score.’

  Her eventual interest in the book’s reception indicated the first spark of returning life. The following January, six months after Hennie’s death, John Murray may have been a little surprised to read the following from his favourite lady traveller: ‘Perhaps you may remember that before I went to Japan I told you of the possibility that on my return I should accept a very faithful love that had long been mine. However, bad health and the filling up of my life by the affection and companionship of my sister, made me regretfully decide against marrying. It is all changed now, and Dr Bishop’s devotion to her in the last six weeks of her life and her great wish that I should accept the care and devotion of one whose character and worth she had thorough trust in, have largely helped to make me feel that were I now to decide against him I should be casting away a very precious treasure. We shall be married in the spring…’

  It would be crude to suggest that John Bishop was a mere ‘Substitute’ for her dead sister, yet there was some small comfort in the similarity of their temperaments. Now, in addition, John offered his long-tested devotion, a ‘home and fireside’ from her deep sense of loneliness, a sympathetic community of interests and enthusiasms, and a fatherly bulwark against total despair – ‘I now realise’, she wrote later, ‘that his devoted love has stood between me and the worst desolation ever since he led me from the death-chamber in Tobermory.’ The engagement was entirely on Isabella’s terms. ‘It is understood that if I again need change, I am to be free for further outlandish travel,’ she told Murray, and Bishop, accepting the condition, used to say quizzically, ‘I have only one formidable rival in Isabella’s heart, and that is the high tableland of Central Asia.’ Isabella also insisted, with painful single-mindedness, on the paramount claims of her grief for Hennie. ‘It touches me much that he recognised the truth that I should mourn all my days and instead of aspiring to fill the place which will always be vacant, he only asks to be allowed to take care of me and soothe my sorrow’, she wrote to a friend.

  Isabella was to be married from the home of her Warwickshire relatives, and John Bishop joined her there a day or so before the ceremony. ‘The dear soul arrived early on Saturday’, she told Ella, ‘radiant, gentle, unselfish and well-dressed. I never saw him appear to so much advantage and my critical family are all quite delighted with him.’ Impeccable though the bridegroom’s behaviour was, Isabella, the fifty-year old bride, deliberately blighted the ceremony by her dramatic and ruthless insistence that it should resemble a second funeral. Just beforehand, she was ‘half-blinded with tears, shrinking from all congratulations’, she told Ella. For the actual wedding, which took place on 8 March 1881, she wore deep mourning of braided black serge and a black hat; there were no wedding guests; the church, she told her friend, was old and beautiful, and on its stained-glass windows ‘the gridiron of St Lawrence is conspicuous’. Presumably, no one even suggested anything so joyously intimate as a honeymoon.

  Back in Edinburgh, Isabella’s behaviour would have strained to breaking-point the adoration of a lesser man, and she herself wondered ‘If even his devoted love will grow weary of my abiding grief.’ She returned to Tobermory, still ‘drunk with loss’, fearing now that she had ‘ventured all that I had to give upon her life and exhausted my power of absorbing love upon her’. And if she had no use for Bishop’s devotion, then their marriage would be barren indeed. Perhaps for his sake she concealed this turn of the screw at least, for he seemed ‘very happy … his refined and reverential tenderness is truly beautiful’. It could not but also be just a little dull; it did nothing to satisfy Isabella’s secret craving for drama and romance; Bishop did not have in his whole body one single spark of that brilliant reckless dazzle that had fired the fascinating Jim Nugent. ‘I wish it had seemed more of a step’, she confessed soon after the marriage, ‘more novel and exciting, but I was so used to him before and the great intimacy of the terrible time at Tobermory makes meals and going about together seem merely a continuation of that’. And that others both recognised her plight and regarded it with some malicious amusement is suggested in a story current at the time: that, before her marriage, Isabella had intended to travel in New Guinea, but had given up the idea because it was not the sort of place you could take a man to!

  And so, defiantly, and probably in the face of a good deal of unexpressed scepticism, Isabella tried to come to terms with what she called ‘the everyday drudgery of life’ that constantly defeated her. She moved into the marital home in Walker Street, Edinburgh; she gave the drawing-room ‘an Oriental character, sustained by Eastern cabinets and palms which stood in the daimyo’s bath’, Anna Stoddart says; she filled the rooms too, ‘with picture of my darlings’ – her family. ‘We are just renewing the lease on the Cottage’, she tells a friend. ‘It is a shrine, but
a pivot also … My husband is considerate, devoted and unselfish beyond anything … for him I truly regret the incurable nature of my grief.’ And that apparent incurability induced self-pity. Soon she was complaining to Ella that she had hardly seen John for days, that he was always out while she was cooped up alone with her back trouble. This was wilful; she was seldom alone except by choice. The Bishops entertained and dined out, and Isabella habitually left her husband ‘alone’ for weeks on end, when she was fit enough, to go and stay with friends in London.

  During one of these visits, her publishers held a party in her honour, at which Marianne North, a somewhat less adventurous ‘adventuress’, was introduced to Isabella. According to Miss North, Isabella was attired with considerable bravura for the occasion: ‘She was seated in the back drawing-room in a big armchair, with gold-embroidered slippers and a footstool to show them on, a petticoat all over gold and silver embroidered wheels, and a ribbon and order across her shoulders, given her by the King of the Sandwich Islands’. She was, Miss North concluded, ‘a very solid and substantial little person, short but broad, very decided and measured in her way of talking, rather as if she were reciting from one of her books’. This was not very flattering, but Isabella’s earnest, unruffled demeanour did not rouse everyone’s enthusiasm, and in any case she was seldom at her best during this period of her life. Even Anna Stoddart intrudes an unusual note of censure with her comment that, in the months following her marriage, Isabella ‘had allowed herself to be captured by a morbid obsession’ over Hennie’s death and that ‘this morbid strain exaggerated her personal moods’.