Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  A less grand, but more exciting, connection was the artist Thomas Cheesman. Cheesman, whom the girls referred to affectionately as “Coz,” was a colourful character in a grubby artist’s smock who moved in somewhat raffish circles. His house in Newman Street was cluttered with musical instruments, books and half-finished paintings. Cheesman was a man ahead of his time, who encouraged Agnes and Susanna (the two most determined writers) to press ahead with their literary ambitions.

  Agnes, who had been twenty-two when her father died, moved to London in the early 1820s to capitalize on her literary connections and potential. She was the first Strickland in print: in 1817, the year before Catharine earned her first five guineas, Agnes had published a poem about Queen Charlotte’s death in a Norfolk newspaper. The success of this florid eulogy to royalty catapulted Agnes into rather grand circles, and she never looked back. Soon she was mixing with minor aristocrats, dropping names and insisting that, in addition to the family connection with Catherine Parr, she had the Stuart blood of Scottish kings. With the sense of theatre acquired during their childhood dramatic evenings, and with an imperious toss of her well-dressed silky black hair, Agnes always enjoyed making an entrance at social events. She expended as much creative energy on her appearance as on her literary output. “Last week I was obliged to assist the mantua maker in making and altering my robes,” she wrote to a Suffolk friend. “Fitting and refitting, frilling and grilling …chased from the secret chambers of my brain a multitude of excellent ideas which had I been at leisure to have instituted would have furnished employment for a month.”

  A third ally in the young women’s pursuit of publication was an old friend of their father’s, Thomas Harral, who had moved from Suffolk to London to edit a fashionable magazine entitled La Belle Assemblée. Harral’s daughter, Anna Laura, was one of Susanna’s best friends; his son Francis was Catharine’s first serious beau. Harral introduced the Stricklands to various writers and poets in the capital, and he gave them advice on how to get published. Through Harral, Susanna met a man who quickly became a father figure. Thomas Pringle was a Scottish poet and outspoken leader of the Anti-Slavery League. He found the admiration of a clever, lively young woman immensely flattering, and he frequently invited her to stay with him and his family in their townhouse in the Finsbury district of London, or in their country home in Hampstead. Pringle indulged Susanna, praised her poems and encouraged her to question convention. In turn, Susanna adored him, and she wrote to him daily when they were apart. It was an intoxicating relationship: a mix of paternal and erotic affection. Susanna took to calling Pringle “Papa.”

  With the help of people like Harral and Pringle, the Stricklands were able to take full advantage of the latest literary fashion—literary “annuals.” These lavishly bound, expensive anthologies offered short narratives of love and chivalry. Specially commissioned steel engravings depicted pensive maidens gazing at the heavens, or sitting in solitude by a roaring sea. To a modern reader, the annuals offer only sentimentality and bad writing; to the Stricklands, they offered liberation. They gave women the opportunity to support themselves. For example, Mary Shelley (Wollstonecraft’s daughter, the author of Frankenstein and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley) earned enough money from the gushing romances she contributed to The Keepsake, edited by Lady Blessington, to keep her son in school at Harrow.

  By 1829, five of the six Strickland sisters—Eliza, Agnes, Jane, Catharine and Susanna—had established toeholds in London’s literary cliffs. Eliza, who always hated Reydon Hall, was living in a furnished room in London and editing The Court Journal, a jaunty and rather snobbish periodical stuffed with fashion tips, gossip about the royal court and theatre notices. Agnes was publishing rapture-filled epic poetry and being mentioned as a writer of considerable promise (although a waspish reviewer suggested that “‘poems long and legendary’ are above the calibre of your muse”). Catharine quietly and methodically published a children’s book almost every year from 1825 onwards. Her income steadily rose, so that by 1830 she was being paid more than twelve pounds for The Sketchbook of a Young Naturalist. It is hard to estimate what this is worth in modern terms: the working rule for British historians is to multiply early-nineteenth-century values by fifty to render them in late-twentieth-century terms. Any equivalence is crude, since there were fluctuations within decades and the cost of services rose much more rapidly than the cost of manufactured goods. But Catharine was probably earning roughly six hundred pounds for each book in today’s money. Her annual income of twelve pounds would have made a significant difference to life at Reydon Hall, but it would not have been enough to live on in an era when an English farm labourer earned about thirty pounds a year.

  In addition, there was a Strickland assembly line for the production of poetry, reviews and stories which regularly appeared in several of the seventeen annuals being published. The sisters often co-wrote stories, and several times an editor would attribute a certain piece to the wrong sister. Payment was meagre for most of these pieces, and the letters that the women wrote to their editors suggest more craven gratitude than aggressive pursuit of a fair fee. But anything was better than nothing. “I should be enabled to leave a sum for home expenses in Mamma’s hands,” a hopeful Catharine wrote to Susanna, in one note about a few shillings that were due for a particular article.

  The Stricklands’ contributions to glossy anthologies were terribly conventional. Maidens swooned, lions roared, Byronic heroes martyred themselves. For Eliza, Catharine and Jane, this was enough. But Agnes and Susanna pushed at the limits of convention. Competition crackled between these two young women. Each recognized in the other a talent for expression that their sisters could never claim. All their lives, Susanna and Agnes envied each other’s successes even as they exchanged congratulations on achievements. The edge of competition was blunted only by the difference in their writing styles. At this stage, Susanna was pouring more and more of her creative energy into verse. She was also using, in some of her stories for La Belle Assemblée, a first-person narrative voice, which allowed her to include her own wit, and interest in magic and spiritualism, in her sketches of Suffolk characters. Agnes was going in a different direction. Acknowledging that she couldn’t make it as a poet, she had begun to interest herself in the past and to haunt the newly completed British Museum. Amongst its untidy piles of stilluncatalogued collections of state and private records, she took her first step towards her lifetime avocation: history.

  As Susanna approached her late twenties, she became increasingly irritated by the dainty constraints of the glossy anthologies. At the same time, she was enmeshed in religious doubts. She was a young woman in search of herself, torn between her literary aspirations and a fierce religious faith. A close friend told Susanna that she sounded like “a mad woman and a fanatic” when she gave vent to the intensity of her emotions. Perhaps the young writer was simply disgusted by the vicar of Reydon’s preference for “huntin’ and fishin’” over giving sermons; perhaps she was swept away by the fervently anti-establishment views of her hero, Thomas Pringle, a Methodist. Pringle denounced Tory smugness with histrionic passion. For whatever reason, in 1830, Susanna turned her back on the pomp and rituals of the Church of England, whose comfortable pews were occupied each Sunday by the carriage set, and was admitted into a Nonconformist congregation in a village church three miles from Reydon. Most of her co-worshippers were farmers and their labourers, who arrived on foot or in creaking hay-wagons.

  Mrs. Strickland and her three elder daughters, who were all busy clinging to the upper rungs of society, were horrified. This was a most unconventional step for a young woman of Susanna’s breeding. They had already had to deal with the fact that the fourth Strickland sister, Sarah, had also become a Dissenter. But Sarah’s conversion was less threatening than Susanna’s, since it had remained a private matter. The family knew that Susanna, unlike demure Sarah, would immediately rush into print, to embarrass her relatives with fervent proclamations of her new alle
giance and criticisms of the spiritually slack. Sure enough, Susanna soon published an ambitious and heartfelt poem entitled “Enthusiasm.” She belittled “men of pleasure” in this epic work and glorified “the unlearned and those of low estate” who, with their simple faith, are the only Christians who will attain salvation. Agnes was mortified, wondering what her smart friends would think. It wasn’t the last time that Susanna would embarrass her.

  Susanna was not only taking an unconventional spiritual path, she was also being politicized. Thanks to Thomas Pringle, she was increasingly involved in the abolitionist movement—as radical a political movement in the early nineteenth century as feminism would be in the mid-twentieth century. Pringle invited Susanna to transcribe the stories of two former slaves from British colonies, a twenty-four-year-old man called Ashton Warner from St. Vincent, and a forty-year-old woman, Mary Prince, from Bermuda. Mary, now working in the Pringle household, dictated “a recital of revolting cruelty” to the impressionable young Susanna, who carefully wrote down and shaped the narrative of exploitation. Susanna downplayed the project’s importance in a letter to a friend: “It is a pathetic little history and is now printing in the form of a pamphlet to be laid before the Houses of Parliament. Of course my name does not appear.” But the impressionable twenty-seven-year-old was gripped by Mary’s account of physical and sexual brutalities at the hands of her masters. She had seen with her own eyes the appalling crisscross of scars, evidence of repeated lashings, on the older woman’s back. Mary Prince was a tough, outspoken survivor, but her experiences as a malnourished, poor, powerless woman in a distant British colony fed Susanna’s fascination with the darker side of human existence. When Susanna subsequently published Ashton Warner’s story, she reproached her fellow countrymen with the “gross injustice and awful criminality of a free nation suffering such an abomination as negro slavery to exist in her dominions.”

  Susanna’s letters reveal how much she enjoyed mingling with publishers, essayists and writers when they congregated in the Pringles’ London drawing room. She was flattered when the intelligentsia made a fuss of her, assuring James Bird with blatantly false modesty, “I am almost sick of flattering encomiums on my genius. How these men in London do talk. I learn daily to laugh at their fine love speeches.” She was eager for friendship with other “bluestockings,” as women writers were often called. Most of all, the ambition to be a much-published, well-known author—a path on which her sister Agnes was already launched—began to burn in her with a frightening fierceness. Although the Strickland girls were raised to respect intellectual achievement, they were also brought up to be docile wives to whomever they might marry. Susanna was both intoxicated and embarrassed by her hunger for fame—a hunger, she worried, that was “not only a weak but a criminal passion.” Her angst cannot have been helped by the fact that she was now over twenty-five and, like all her sisters, seemed fated for spinsterhood.

  Rivalry between Agnes and Susanna continued to seethe as Susanna began to catch up with her sister’s success. The two women managed a temporary truce in 1830 when they co-produced a small pamphlet entitled Patriotic Songs, including eight poems, four by each sister, that celebrated England and the monarchy. King William IV was so impressed that he called its authors “an ornament to our country.” And Catharine was relieved to see Agnes and Susanna on better terms. “Could I tell you the joy that fills my heart at the reunion of two sisters, you would rejoice,” wrote the family peacemaker to “kindest and most affectionate Susy.” “May no worldly consideration, no prejudice, no contradiction of opinion on indifferent subjects ever disturb your love.”

  Then, in May 1830, Lieutenant John Dunbar Moodie, an exuberant and cheerful thirty-three-year-old Scot who had just returned from South Africa to look for a wife, turned up at the home of his old friend Thomas Pringle. Soon, he and Susanna were taking walks together on Hampstead Heath, sharing their love of music and reading aloud to each other. Within two months of John’s arrival, Susanna’s interest in theological debate had been overtaken by her enthusiasm for the dashing lieutenant. In the words of her sister Catharine, she had “become a convert to Lieutenant Dunbar Moodie.” And John Moodie was petitioning Mrs. Thomas Strickland for her youngest daughter’s hand in marriage.

  Chapter 3

  Sweet Dreams

  John Dunbar Moodie marched into Susanna Strickland’s life with the verve of a fife-and-drum band. He appeared to offer everything Susanna wanted in a lover. He could match her emotional intensity, and (like her sister Catharine) he could lift her spirits with his infectious optimism and zest for life. Short and stocky, with unruly dark hair, John was just too damn cheerful and healthy to fit the languid ideal of the era, but there was an attractive gallantry to him. He had a score of thrilling anecdotes about his military experiences in the Napoleonic wars and his adventures on the South African veldt, where he had settled after he left the army. As Susanna’s mother noted approvingly, he was a “gentleman of family and high moral character.” And the Scotsman, who was six years older than Susanna, played the flute, composed poetry and wrote the most beautiful love letters. “I feel we cannot live but in each other’s arms,” he told his “beloved Susie” within weeks of meeting her. “My whole soul is absorbed in one sweet dream of you—you must and shall be mine …I care for no luxuries, dearest, let me but press you to my heart and I will live upon those dear lips, and these worldly cares would be forgotten …”

  His passion was enough to persuade Susanna, her mother and her older sisters to overlook what Mrs. Strickland politely referred to as an “income too confined to support a wife.” The wolf was not far from the door for John Dunbar Moodie. He belonged to a class disastrously familiar to mothers of eligible daughters in early-nineteenth-century England: officers who had defended King and country during the Napoleonic wars and had now been pensioned off on half-pay; at any time, they could be recalled for active service. Britain’s wars with France in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries had been a boon for younger sons of impoverished gentry. Fighting “Boney” had given them an income and a way of life otherwise unavailable.

  The youngest of five sons of an ancient but obscure Scottish family, John Moodie was born in 1797 on his family’s estate on the bleak and craggy Isle of Hoy in the Orkneys. Melsetter, the family seat, was a large, ugly brick manor house, built about forty years earlier and already heavily mortgaged. John’s eldest brother, Benjamin, sold it at the first opportunity. John joined the army as soon as he was old enough: at sixteen, he became a second-lieutenant in the 21st Royal (Northern) Fusiliers. But within two years he had been wounded in the left wrist during an engagement on Dutch soil and retired on half-pay, with few prospects and little education. His income would barely cover the needs of a bachelor of modest tastes—and though John wasn’t extravagant, throughout his life he was immoderately generous to those he loved.

  In 1817, John’s brother Benjamin Moodie had emigrated to the Cape Colony, at the southern tip of Africa. The British government was offering free passage and a hundred acres of land to anyone who would settle the land and quell the Bantus, or “Kaffirs,” as the settlers contemptuously called them (kaffir means “infidel” in Arabic). So in 1819 John decided to join Ben. The following year, a third brother, Donald, sailed off to the Cape as well. John Dunbar Moodie spent eleven years farming the red soil of southern Africa, and there were aspects of life in the colony that he loved. Rising at dawn and shouldering his rifle, he would ride out across the open grasslands to hunt elephants and “sea-cows,” as the Boers called hippopotamus. But it was a miserable and lonely existence for a sociable man in his twenties: speaking broken Dutch to his Boer neighbours in the Groote Valley, scratching a subsistence living from the dry and stony terrain and repelling Bantu raids on his livestock. “I lived for years without companionship, for my nearest English neighbour was twenty-five miles off….My very ideas became confused and limited, for want of intellectual companions to strike out new lights.” Jo
hn dreaded the idea that he might turn into another crusty, sunburnt old misanthrope, grumbling to newcomers about the way that West-minster ignored South Africa’s potential. So in 1830, he returned to England, “with the resolution of placing my domestic matters on a more comfortable footing.”

  Within weeks of his return, John Moodie had secured Susanna’s heart. Within months, he had her mother’s permission to marry his beloved. But he faced a monumental challenge: how could he afford a wife? There were so few avenues open to a young man who was neither rich nor landed, and who had neither the skill nor the inclination to set himself up as a merchant of some sort. John resorted to a tactic popular amongst penniless young men of his day, as well as several heroes of novels by Jane Austen, William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. He turned to his rich relatives, in hopes of a settlement or promise of future legacy. He rushed up to Scotland to visit a smattering of elderly and, he hoped, benevolent uncles, but kept in touch with his beloved Susie in daily letters.

  The ardour in those letters burns as brightly today as it did when he sharpened his goose quill and dipped it into the ink: “Believe me you are indeed with me when I lie down and when I rise my thoughts are still with you—you still are present in my dreams with your smiles and the looks you wore when first I loved you.” In page after page, John described to his fiancée the tortuous process of chasing family money from elderly relatives. They all seemed to be ensnared by debts, complicated entails on their properties and lawsuits. But John was never one to let setbacks lower his spirits; he quickly moved on to exuberant, thigh-slapping descriptions of various adventures. “My old craze for boat sailing seized me one day,” began a five-page account of a terrifying sail, in which John was nearly shipwrecked in the Pentland Firth. Despite a savage storm, and the inexperience of his young companion, John managed to haul his dinghy off the rocks. He then took refuge in the harbour at Hoy, his birthplace. The locals greeted him rapturously, to his delight. “A poor old woman near a hundred years of age, who had been a servant of my grandfather’s, sent her grand-daughter to me with a pair of worsted stockings….Ah! my Susie had you been with me this would indeed have been one of the happiest moments of my life.”