Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Susanna’s interest in the novel flagged. But even as a youngster, Catharine was the kind of person who liked to finish anything she began. She plodded on with the story entitled “The Swiss Herd-boy and his Alpine Marmot,” which enthralled Susanna and Sarah. However, Mrs. Strickland and Eliza—the bad-tempered eldest sister who always regarded herself as a third parent to the youngest children—discovered Catharine’s manuscript one day when they had returned from Norwich. They were horrified that Catharine was “scribbling such trash” and confiscated it. Susanna, who was far too headstrong to accept rebuke meekly, was outraged. Catharine, a much more easygoing child, made less of a fuss—and was allowed to keep her manuscript when she promised to use it for curling papers.

  A flat-bottomed wherry making its way down the winding River Waveney.

  On fine days, the girls often left their books behind and walked between dense hawthorn hedgerows to Southwold, a mile from Reydon. In those days, Southwold was a busy fishing village with its own cod fleet and a reputation as a smuggler’s haven. Great black-sailed wherries—slow, flat-bottomed boats that could navigate East Anglia’s shallow, silty rivers—brought sackloads of corn and barley into the harbour, where they were transferred to London-bound brigs and schooners with heavy, seaworthy keels. Barrels of malt were unloaded onto the quay and trundled off to the local brewery, owned by the Adnam family. The Stricklands could watch all this maritime activity, visit the library and shops, or on summer evenings cheer their brother Sam’s successes when he played cricket for the Southwold village team. They could brave the stiff sea breezes and, clutching their bonnets to their heads, climb up Gun Hill overlooking Sole Bay and inspect the ancient cannon there. Or they could walk along the miles of flat pebble beach. “We loved to watch the advance and recoil of the waves, the busy fishermen among the nets and boats, and the happy children on the sands,” Catharine later recalled. “But there was a greater fascination still to us in the search for treasures left by the flood-tide or cast upon the shore by the ever restless waves.” Shining pebbles, bits of jet or amber swept south from the Yorkshire coast, shells and fossils accumulated along the window ledges of the children’s bedrooms.

  Most of the information about the Stricklands’ Suffolk childhood comes from Catharine herself, who at the end of her life wrote out her memories for her grandchildren. Her account reflects her own sunny view of life, and her preference for “bright glad thoughts” over dreary memories of reduced circumstances. Catharine had an enviable sense of her self and confidence in her place in the world. Throughout her life, she radiated grace, good cheer and affection for everyone around her. Her sister Sarah spoke of her as “the Katie … the pet of the household.” Her blue eyes always sparkled with happiness and curiosity about the world. She had a warm smile and an air of stolid contentment, and even as a baby Catharine “never cried like other children—indeed we used to say that Katie never saw a sorrowful day—for if anything went wrong she just shut her eyes and the tears fell from under the long lashes and rolled down her cheeks like pearls into her lap. We all adored her.”

  The key to this sense of self-worth and extraordinary invulnerability must be the unusual relationship she had with her father. Catharine’s sisters all acknowledged that she was her father’s favourite child. No matter how irritable Thomas Strickland might be with the gout, or the noise and mess made by his large brood, he never snapped at Katie. She was such an easy companion: Katie listened attentively to others, and always fit in with other people’s plans. As a result, her parents and siblings loved to be around her. “My father idolized her,” Sarah told a great-niece decades later. Katie was his chosen companion for fishing trips and walks through the woods, during which he would impart his own serious interest in botany to his daughter by revealing the mysteries of plant and wildlife to her.

  Thomas’s affection gave his beloved Katie a psychological cushion against misfortune. It also nourished an interest in natural history that was at the same time an intellectual stimulus, a distraction from setbacks and a confirmation of her deep and simple Christian faith. “It is fortunate for me that my love of natural history enables me to draw amusement from objects that are deemed by many unworthy of attention,” she wrote. “The simplest weed that grows in my path, or the fly that flutters about me, are subjects for reflection, admiration and delight.” Catharine’s love of natural history was an extension of her belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God. Her mind was steeped in religion in a way that is difficult to grasp today. Her religious beliefs were quintessentially early-nineteenth-century—romantic, rather sentimental and absolutely trusting. In future years, Catharine would rely on her love of nature, the beauties of which she saw as the expression of God’s will, to carry her through one disaster after another. “Strength was always given to me when it was needed,” she noted at the end of her life. “In great troubles and losses, God is very Good.”

  It must have been hard for Susanna to watch her father and sister disappear together. As the youngest daughter, she might have expected to occupy the niche of family favourite. Instead, she felt like the runt of the female litter, excluded from one of the most important relationships in her small world. She reacted to this exclusion with defiance rather than submission. While Catharine played with dolls and learned to identify birds and press flowers, Susanna collected frogs, toads and lizards. She spun impossible tales of seeing snakes and crocodiles in the Suffolk hedgerows, just to shock her father. Tired of being told, when she was naughty, that “Boney will come and catch you,” Susanna declared that she was madly in love with Napoleon Bonaparte. Thomas Strickland was horrified that his youngest daughter should admire the Corsican monster who was Britain’s mortal enemy. One night in 1815, when the Strickland family was sitting around the dining-room table, a neighbour ran in shouting, “Boney has escaped from Elba!” Susanna whooped for joy. Her enraged father immediately sent her to her bedroom.

  A miniature of Susanna, painted by her cousin Thomas Cheesman when she was in her early twenties, reveals a young woman with a dimpled chin, wide grey eyes ablaze with spirit and an expression of nervous anticipation. Red-haired and short-tempered, she could be careless of others’ feelings. Her elder sisters found her “a curly-headed emotional creature, rather Keatsian in appearance.” Susanna admitted to a friend that she was “the creature of extremes, the child of impulse.” She poured much of her uncertainty and sense of being unloved into childish poems—poems that, when she was in her fifties, she described as “the overflowing of a young warm heart, keenly alive to the beauties of creation.”

  All in all, the Strickland sisters enjoyed an idyllic childhood. But it came to a crashing halt in 1818. War with France had drawn to a triumphant close in 1815 with Britain’s victory at Waterloo. But in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, England lurched into a severe depression. The economic downturn menaced the kind of mercantile enterprises in which Thomas Strickland had invested. Thomas had made the mistake of guaranteeing a loan to his Norwich partner to keep a business afloat in bad times. When the business collapsed, his capital was wiped out. The shock of near-bankruptcy triggered his death at the relatively young age of sixty.

  Elizabeth Strickland, now forty-six, was left a widow, with a meagre income, six unmarried daughters (three still in their teens) and two sons, thirteen and eleven, still at an expensive grammar school.

  Chapter 2

  “The Scribbling Fever”

  Elizabeth Strickland was determined not to let the family’s social status slip after her husband’s death in 1818. Until she herself died forty-six years later, at the robust age of ninety-two, she continued to live at Reydon Hall and cling to the position Thomas had established for them. In the early years of her widowhood, she even maintained the house in Norwich so the boys could carry on attending school there, and she sent her daughters Eliza, Agnes and Catharine to run that household. But with the loss of the family breadwinner, the Stricklands were plunged into a penny-pinching existence behi
nd the brave front. Cooks, maids and gardeners all disappeared, and so did General Wolfe’s desk and the elegant carriage. The family tended the vegetable garden, and went out less and less.

  Keeping up appearances was a strain on Mrs. Strickland; her temperament soured and she took to her bed. Many of the rooms of Reydon Hall were closed up, and one guest would remember that it smelled of “rats and dampness and mould.” When the girls travelled anywhere, they either had to borrow a neighbour’s donkey to pull their donkey cart or take the public coach. Invitations from neighbouring gentry dried up, since the Stricklands were unable to return the hospitality. Nor was there any hope of staying abreast of the rapidly changing fashions of the 1820s. This was an era when female clothing was increasingly influenced by Romantic attitudes. Puffy sleeves, tightly corseted waists and wide girlish skirts, in flower-bed colours of lilac and rose, transformed women into fragile Fragonard heroines, dependent on male protection. But Susanna and Catharine could barely afford to renew their wardrobes, let alone play out a fantasy that had little to do with the threadbare reality of their lives.

  The lives of the Strickland sisters were now constricted by genteel poverty and rural isolation. They were excluded from the masculine world of army, navy, commerce or politics. Their brothers both embraced one of the few options open to gentlemen without means as soon as they were old enough to flee the stifling matriarchy of Reydon Hall. Both set off to settle in the years old when, in 1825, a family friend encouraged him to cross the Atlantic and try his hand at farming in the colony of Upper Canada. Within a few months, young Thomas too was gone, on his way to India and a life in Britain’s merchant fleet. After their brothers’ departure, the Strickland girls had few opportunities to meet men of the standing required for marriage. Socially, they fell between two stools—they were not wealthy enough to claim membership in the landed gentry class, but their residence in the country meant they were excluded from the new urban merchant class.

  Catharine Parr Strickland, sweet-tempered and placid, was her father’s favourite child.

  Catharine and Susanna were sixteen and fifteen when their father died. In the crisis of quiet desperation that followed, they forged a close alliance, based on their position as the two youngest daughters and on their shared love of reading. Both clung to the catalogue of family maxims—a belief that the darkest hour comes before the dawn, and a certainty that God helps those who help themselves. The difference in their personalities reinforced their reliance on each other. Catharine wrote of herself, “I think that I have a happy faculty of forgetting past sorrows and only remembering the pleasures,” and she often found herself reassuring her sensitive younger sister when Susanna plunged into the depths of despair. Only Catharine could cope with Susanna’s emotional intensity. While Susanna resented Catharine’s imperturbable patience, she also adored her. “I know I would rather give up the pen,” Susanna wrote to a friend in 1829, “than lose the affection of my beloved sister Catharine, who is dearer to me than all the world—my monitress, my dear and faithful friend.”

  Susanna Strickland was impulsive and defiant, with a wicked sense of humour.

  At the same time, Catharine enjoyed the fact that Susanna was, in her younger sister’s own words,a “wild Suffolk girl so full of romance.” Susanna could infuse placid Catharine with her own giddy joie de vivre. “Possibly it was the contrast between us that had the effect of binding us nearer to one another,” Catharine mused later in life. The primal bonds between the two women—far stronger than either felt for their four sisters and two brothers—were deep-rooted and comforting to both.

  In Norwich, Catharine was a frequent visitor at the city library, and she was soon venturing “once more to indulge the scribbling fever.” At first, she didn’t see her little stories as a way to make money. Nor did her sisters, although by now both Agnes and Eliza (her contempt for “trash” notwithstanding) were experimenting with poetry and simple literary sketches. Their mother, clinging to respectability, would have decreed that it was unthinkable for a gentlewoman to consider earning her living. This was, after all, the era in which Jane Austen, the parson’s daughter from Hampshire, covered her notebooks with a piece of muslin when she heard somebody approach her room, and when the Norwich writer Harriet Martineau wrote her articles for a church magazine in her freezing bedroom between five and seven o’clock in the morning so her mother wouldn’t discover what she was up to. It was dangerous for a woman even to suggest that she had a brain: the eighteenth-century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had once advised her daughter to hide her intellect “with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness.”

  Yet Catharine, Susanna and their sisters were aware of the intellectual ferment of the age in which they lived. Their father’s own library, inherited from Sir Isaac Newton, was out-of-date by the time they were old enough to take down the leatherbound volumes. Nevertheless, it contained enough early examples of Enlightenment thinking—the works of John Locke, several accounts of exotic travel and Sir Isaac Newton’s own scientific publications—to give them a sense of what was happening in the wider world. All the old institutions were under scrutiny—religion, monarchy, slavery and patriarchy. With their father’s death and their plunge into genteel penury, the sisters had a particular interest in some of the new thinking about women’s lives, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, first published in 1792. Wollstonecraft (who died in childbirth in 1797, before Catharine and Susanna were born) passionately championed women’s claim to equal treatment in the spheres of education, the professions, the law and politics.

  The boldness of Wollstonecraft’s thinking was anathema to establishment figures such as Horace Walpole, who dismissed the author and her followers as “hyenas in petticoats.” Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft’s legacy directly touched the Strickland sisters’ lives. The spread of literacy among women during the previous hundred years meant that Wollstonecraft’s manifesto was widely read. And, thanks in part to her success, publishers realized that there was a growing market for works by lady authors. The tradition of women writers in England began to gather momentum: gentlewomen were producing belles-lettres, travel memoirs and domestic tales. Fanny Burney had already published four successful novels, the best-known of which was Camilla, depicting the lives of virtuous but inexperienced girls entering society. By 1815 Jane Austen had two bestsellers to her name (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice) and had been invited to dedicate her new novel, Emma, to the Prince Regent. Writing was beginning to be both respectable and lucrative for women.

  England had not yet been engulfed in the claustrophobic glorification of the family, and the idea of woman as the “angel in the house,” that would later characterize middle-class attitudes in Victorian Britain. Regency London was permeated with the elegance, extravagance and sartorial splendour that defined the age. It was a jolly, if exhausting, time to be alive, for both men and women. The preferred literary style was urbane and fastidious, and women excelled at it.

  For the Stricklands, stuck in East Anglia, opportunities for women with literary ambitions still seemed hopelessly out of reach. But one day an old friend of Thomas Strickland’s came to visit, and chanced upon a children’s story about a highland piper that Catharine had written. When he left, he took it with him and showed it to a publisher in London. To Catharine’s delight, the friend arrived a month later and pressed five golden guineas into her hands. The publisher wished to produce a little book under the title The Blind Highland Piper and Other Tales. Five guineas was a considerable sum in those days, enough to finance a trip to London. It was particularly exciting for a young woman who had no expectations of legacies or marriage settlements. Catharine’s success encouraged the literary efforts of four of her sisters: Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Susanna. All five began to see that writing might offer an escape from their pinched circumstances, and an opportunity to shape better lives for themselves. Only pretty Sarah, known within the family as “the baker
” because she made such delightfully light loaves, never showed any interest in publication.

  Agnes, the brilliant and bossy elder sister, was the first of the Stricklands to see her work in print.

  By the early 1820s, the Strickland girls had secured a limited entrée into the kind of London literary circles where Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas were debated and Fanny Burney’s latest novel discussed. Their second cousin, Rebecca Leverton, was a wealthy widow who held court in the elegant terraced house in Bedford Square bequeathed to her by her husband, Thomas Leverton, the square’s architect. Bedford Square was one of the “best addresses” in the newly built district of Bloomsbury. Rebecca often invited her cousins to stay with her. She certainly appreciated their willingness to run errands and bring glasses of warm milk to her before she rose each morning, but she also tried to expand their horizons. Catharine particularly enjoyed the visits. “I am indeed very happy and enjoy the society of my London friends,” she wrote to her friend James Bird, a well-known poet who ran a stationery shop in the Suffolk village of Yoxford, and his wife Emma. “Mrs. Leverton takes me abroad in the carriage everyday to shew me some building or public place of note….I am so enchanted with [Westminster] Abbey that I could stand for hours looking on it.”