800 Years of Women's Letters (12 page)

Girls, like boys in the late Middle Ages, might be sent to complete their worldly education in the household of another aristocratic family. When monarchs still possessed parts of France, there was the benefit of learning a foreign language. The main advantage lay in the wider circle of marriageable people to meet.

Lord and Lady Lisle sent their daughter Mary to a Lady Bours in Calais when she was eleven. She grew very fond of her adoptive mother. The formal Tudor language does not quite convey either her real affection for Lady Lisle nor for Madame Bours, but her many letters give proof of it.

5 September 1537

Madame, I recommend me most humbly to the good favour of my lord my father and to you.

Madame, I am right heavy at being so long without tidings of your welfare. And glad am I indeed that Madame de Bours now sendeth to you. It was told me at Abbeville that you had sent me a letter; but the messenger lost it, which grieveth me sore. Madame, I most humbly thank you for that which you sent me by Jehan Semit. I am waiting till he must pass again by Abbeville in order that I may send you tidings of myself.

Madame, I entreat you to be so good lady to me as to send me a pair of sleeves to give to Madame, and a pair for me. She hath very little that is from England. If it please you to send her something I should be very glad. There is a gentleman, who is a good friend of mine, who hath begged a pair of me, and a pair of shoes. I should be very glad to make him a present of them. This bearer will tell you who he is . . .

Mademoiselle d'Agincourt recommendeth her very humbly to your favour. Your very humble and most obedient daughter,

Marie Basset

ED. M. ST CLARE BYRNE, T
HE LISLE LETTERS
(1983)

Although Lady Mary Wortley Montagu recommends education as the ‘amusement of solitude' and ‘to moderate the passions' she cautions her ‘to conceal whatever learning she attains'.

1753

You should encourage your daughter to talk over with you what she reads; and as you are very capable of distinguishing, take care she does not mistake pert folly for wit and humour, or rhyme for poetry, which are the common errors of young people, and have a train of ill consequences. The second caution to be given her (and which is most absolutely necessary) is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness: the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four her acquaintance. The use of knowledge in our sex, beside the amusement of solitude, is to moderate the passions, and learn to be contented with a small expense, which are the certain effects of a studious life; and it may be preferable even to that fame which men have engrossed to themselves, and will not suffer us to share. You will tell me I have not observed this rule myself; but you are mistaken: it is only inevitable accident that has given me any reputation that way. I have always carefully avoided it, and ever thought it a misfortune. The explanation of this paragraph would occasion a long digression, which I will not trouble you with, it being my present design only to say what I think useful for the instruction of my granddaughter, which I have much at heart. If she has the same inclination (I should say passion) for learning that I was born with, history, geography, and philosophy will furnish her with materials to pass away cheerfully a longer life than is allotted to mortals. I believe there are few heads capable of making Sir Isaac Newton's calculations, but the result of them is not difficult to be understood by a moderate capacity.

ED. R. HALSBAND,
THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
(1965)

Upbringing could be neglected in an upper-class eighteenth-century home. Viscount Kingsborough was the biggest landowner in Ireland. His exceedingly rich wife Caroline produced many children, in whom she took virtually no interest. However an exceptional governess was employed by them in the year 1787 – Mary Wollstonecraft. Here one of the daughters, Margaret, describes her upbringing and the impact of the great feminist in a ‘frivolous, injudicious' household, in a letter to her two illegitimate daughters in 1818.

1818

My father Robert King Earl of Kingston, was married very young to his relation, Caroline Fitzgerald. . . . I was the second of their twelve children and being born in that rank of life in which people are too much occupied by frivolous amusements to pay much attention to their offspring I was placed under the care of hirelings from the first moment of my birth – before three years old I was subjected to the discipline of governesses and teachers whose injudicious treatment was very disadvantageous to my temper. As I was advanced in years I had various masters (for no expense was spared to make me what is called accomplished) and at a very early age I was enabled to exhibit before my mother's visitors, whose silly praises would probably have injured me if I had not suffered so much in acquiring the means of obtaining them that they afforded me no pleasure. With this sort of education it is not extraordinary that I should have learnt a little of many things and nothing well. The society of my father's home was not calculated to improve my good qualities or correct my faults; and almost the only person of superior merit with whom I had been intimate in my early days was an enthusiastic female who was my governess from fourteen to fifteen years old, for whom I felt an unbounded admiration because her mind appeared more noble and her understanding more cultivated than any others I had known – from the time she left me my chief objects were to correct those faults she had pointed out and to cultivate my understanding as much as possible.

CLAIRE TOMALIN,
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
(1974)

By the end of the eighteenth century, girls were increasingly closely guarded. The issue of the desirability of respectable women moving freely about alone focused on concern over unmarried girls. Joseph Gibbin's youngest daughter Martha, who was born in 1798 and brought up in central Birmingham, was walking across the town to school by herself when she was nine years old. In a letter to her brother William she described the following incident:

I am become so much of a woman as to go to school by myself. One day, as I was returning from school, a boy was so rude as to offer to
kiss
me, and he called another boy to do the same, so I went into a reputable looking shop and asked the man if he would be so kind as to speak to those boys, for they had been behaving rude to me, and I told him I was Joseph Gibbins' little girl. He came out, sent them away, and I got home without being interrupted again.

I. DAVIDOFF, AND C. HALL,
FAMILY FORTUNES: MEN AND WOMEN OF THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS
(1987)

Mrs Oliphant (1828–97) grew up in a radical middle-class family. I include this extract from her
Autobiography
both for the representation of a nineteenth-century family, and for its discourse, so similar to a letter. This suggests that experience in letter-writing gave women the confidence to use one of their few saleable skills. Mrs Oliphant, when widowed, not only supported her own children, but those of one of her brothers, by her skilful, popular novels.

. . . I can see myself, a small creature seated on a stool by the fire, toasting a cake of dough which was brought for me by the baker with the prematurely early rolls, which were for Frank. (This dough was the special feature of the morning to me, and I suppose I had it only on these occasions.) And my mother, who never seemed to sit down in the strange, little, warm, bright picture, but to hover about the table pouring out tea, supplying everything he wanted to her boy (how proud, how fond of him – her eyes liquid and bright with love as she hovered about); and Frank, the dearest of companions so long – then long separated, almost alienated, brought back again at the end to my care. How bright he was then, how good always to me, how fond of his little sister – impatient by moments, good always. And he was a kind of god to me – my Frank, as I always called him. I remember once weeping bitterly over a man singing in the street, a buttoned-up, shabby-genteel man, whom, on being questioned why I cried, I acknowledged I thought like my Frank. That was when he was absent, and my mother's anxiety reflected in a child's mind went, I suppose, the length of fancying that Frank too might have to sing in the street. (He would have come off very badly in that case, for he did not know one tune from another, much less could he sing a note!) How well I recollect the appearance of the man in his close-buttoned black coat, with his dismal song, and the acute anguish of the thought that Frank might have come to that for anything I knew. Frank, however, never gave very much anxiety: it was Willie, poor Willie, who was our sore and constant trouble – Willie, who lives still in Rome, as he has done for the last two- or three-and-twenty years – nearly a quarter of a century – among strangers who are kind to him, wanting nothing, I hope, yet also having outlived everything. I shrank from going to see him when I was in Italy, which was wrong; but how can I return to Rome, and how could he have come to me – poor Willie! the handsomest, brightest of us all, with eyes that ran over with fun and laughter – and the hair which we used to say he had to poll, like Absalom, – so many time a-year. Alas!

What I recollect in Lasswade besides the Monday morning aforesaid is not much. I remember standing at the smithy with brother Willie, on some occasion when the big boy was very unwillingly charged to take his little sister somewhere or other – standing in the dark, wondering at the sparks as they flew up and the dark figures of the smith and his men: and I remember playing on the road opposite the house, where there was a low wall over which the Esk and the country beyond could be seen (I think), playing with two little kittens, who were called Lord Brougham and Lord Grey. It must have been immediately after the passing of the Reform Bill, and I suppose this was why the kittens bore such names. We were all tremendously political and Radical, my mother especially and Frank. Likewise I recollect with the most vivid clearness on what must have been a warm still summer day, lying on my back in the grass, the little blue speedwells in which are very distinct before me, and looking up into the sky. The depths of it, the blueness of it, the way in which it seemed to move and fly and avoid the gaze which could not penetrate beyond that profound unfathomable.

ED. MRS H. COGHILL,
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS OF MRS M.O.W. OLIPHANT
(1899)

Children in India might be as badly treated by drunken fathers as those in London. Emily Eden, sister of the Governor-General, went so far as to ‘buy' two orphan girls, to help get them to a respectable orphanage.

Thursday, March 7 1839

I have made such a nice little purchase to-day – two little girls of seven years old, rather ugly, and one of them dumb. I gave three pounds for the pair – dirt cheap! as I think you will own. They are two little orphans. The natives constantly adopt orphans – either distant relations, or children that they buy – and generally they make no difference between them and their own children; but these little wretches were very unlucky. They belonged to a very bad man, who was serving as a substitute for a sick servant whom we sent back to Calcutta. This man turned out ill and got drunk, upon which all the other Mussulmauns refused to associate with him, and he lost caste altogether. Giles was very anxious to get rid of him, as a drunken Mussulmaun is something so shocking we are all quite
affected
by it. On Monday he gave us an opportunity to leave him at Kurnaul. I had tried to get hold of these children at Simla, hearing they were very ill-used, and that this man was just going to take them down to Delhi to sell them into the palace, where thousands of children are
swallowed up
. Luckily, his creditors would not let him go, and I told A. to watch that he did not carry off the little girls; so to-day he sent word I might have them if I would pay his debts, and the baboo has just walked in triumphantly with them. They have not a stitch of clothes on; and one of them is rather an object, the man has beat them so dreadfully, and she seems stupified. I hope to deposit them finally at Mrs Wilson's orphanage near Calcutta.

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

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.