800 Years of Women's Letters (44 page)

Letters were acceptable in a protestant culture which advocated introspection and conscience-searching. Elizabeth S. Rowe was one of the authors whose work succeeded in being both religious and easy to read. Her
Letters Moral and Entertaining
(1729) is fiction based on sermons to young ladies; it was often recommended for their moral education. It is a worthy precursor of Samuel Richardson's
Pamela
. In 1773 the
Monthly Review
stated that fiction was almost entirely the domain of women. By then the novel was not only commenting on morals and offering guides to manners, but also offered entertainment to an increasing readership. The Austen family were ‘great novel readers and not ashamed of being so'. Indeed, Jane Austen's first experiments with novel-writing, as a young adolescent, were epistolary: a charming, brief four-page novelette of letters from a young man who sees a pretty girl, asks for her hand in marriage, and gets it.

The nineteenth century gave enforced leisure to middle-class women, who enjoyed longer novels, to read to the family, or on their own. Only a few writers continued with the epistolary form, among them the Irish Lady Morgan (1776–1859), daughter of Owenson, an impoverished actor. To help feed the family she began writing when young. As her
Poems by a Young Lady Between the Ages of 12 & 14
did not sell well she turned to the novel, gaining a reputation as a regional novelist with
The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale
(1806). Like George Eliot she used the novel to present social issues, though her passionate defence of the Irish cause led to ostracism by some English aristocrats. She may be an inspiration for Thackery's
Vanity Fair
. She was the first woman to be granted a literary pension – of £300 a year.

In the late twentieth century, after decades of neglect, we find four experimental novelists turning to epistles. Fay Weldon in
Letters to Alice on Reading Jane Austen
(1983) continues the potential to offer advice; Gillian Hanscombe's
Between Friends
(1983) stresses the power of female directness; Alice Walker in
The Colour Purple
(1983) demonstrates the vigour of black women's discourse by comparing the letters of two sisters; and Lee Smith, an oral historian, in
Fair and Tender Ladies
(1989) displays the strengths of hitherto despised working-class discourse, its directness, ability to analyse, and dramatize. Women's letter-writing has shaped and re-envisioned female experience – and language.

Extracts from twentieth-century epistolary novels may be found in chapters one, two, four and six.

K
ATE
A
MBERLEY
(1842–74) was the mother of Bertrand Russell. She died when he was only two, after a love match with his father, Lord Amberley. Their letter was published by their son.

E
MILIA
P
ARDO
B
AZÁN
(1851–1923) was a Spanish novelist of outstanding ‘realist' works and feminist sympathies, a friend of Galdós.

I
SABELLA
B
IRD
(1831–1904) was a frail child who suffered from back pain all her life. Yet she rejected conventional life to travel to some of the furthest countries. On foot, horseback, yak, even elephant, she visited Japan, Korea, Kurdistan, Persia and the Rocky Mountains. She became the first woman elected to the Royal Geographical Society.

R
OSALÍA DE
C
ASTRO
(1837–85) was a fine poet who lived and worked in Galicia, in the north of Spain. She cared so much about this poverty-stricken area that she preferred it to fame in Madrid.

A
LEXANDRA
D
AVID-NÉEL
(1868–1969) was born in Paris. After studying eastern religions, with a particular interest in Buddhism, she worked for a time as a journalist, and then toured the Middle East and North Africa as an opera singer. In 1904 she married a distant cousin, Philippe Néel, but they separated. The Dalai Lama was in exile in Darjeeling in 1911 when Alexandra David-Néel became the first Western woman to interview him. Her meeting with him inspired her to concentrate on Tibetan Buddhism in her studies. Illegally entering Tibet in 1914, she spent time in a monastery, lived as a hermit in a cave, and became a Lama herself. In 1923, disguised as a Tibetan beggar on pilgrimage with her adopted son, Alexandra David-Néel became the first Western woman to enter the ‘Forbidden City' of Lhasa, where she remained for two months before her identity was discovered. Her last Asian journey ended in 1944, but she went on to write many books about her travels and about Buddhism.

L
UCIE
D
UFF
G
ORDON
(1821–69) was the only child of a privileged intellectual couple. At eighteen she fell in love with Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, a civil servant. They knew many writers, including Charles Dickens, Caroline Norton, Meredith and Tennyson. The couple had three children. In the 1850s when Lucie began to suffer from tuberculosis, the doctor advised her to go to South Africa, where she wrote
Letters from the Cape
(1864). Then she went to Upper Egypt for seven years, a longer stay than any other European, subsequently publishing
Letters from Egypt
(1865) which was reprinted three times in the first year. She died in Cairo in 1869.

E
LIZABETH
E
LSTOB
(1683–1756) is one of the best known governesses, as she wrote the first ‘English Saxon Grammar'. Though brought up by a narrow-minded uncle, she was fortunate with her aunt, who taught her languages. She worked in a village school, and for the Duchess of Portland.

M
ARY
H
AYS
(1760–1843) was born to a Dissenting family, which sympathized with the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Her fiancé died before their wedding, and she devoted her time to remarkable writing about the wrongs suffered by women.

H
ILDEGARD OF
B
INGEN
(1098–1179) was born in a German province bordering the Rhine, where her family owned estates. She was their tenth child, offered to the local Benedictine monastery as a gift at the age of eight. She lived immured with an anchoress till she was fifteen, learning the liturgy, and to pray in Latin. From childhood she experienced frequent religious visions, and felt called to preach, and she later became well known both for her visions and her spiritual advice. Her writings include three visionary books:
Know the Ways
(1141–51),
The Book of Life's Merits
a moral treatise (1158–63); and her most mature work,
The Book of Divine Works
. She also wrote a book on
Medicine
based on her knowledge of healing herbs, and analysis of the four elements, and was an outstanding composer of plainsong.

L
A
P
ASIONARIA
(1895–1980) was born Dolores Ibarruri, in an impoverished district of the Basque country. She and her worker husband joined the communist party when they were young. At the time Spain suffered from oligarchic governments and unjust distribution of wealth. The Basques were particularly discriminated against by the right-wing government of 1934. When Franco led the uprising of soldiers from Africa in 1936, which caused the Civil War, Dolores held meetings all over Spain to persuade workers to support the Republic. Her oratory gained her the name of ‘La Pasionara', passionate.

L
ADY
H
ONOR
L
ISLE
(?–1563) was married to Lord Lisle, illegitimate son of Edward IV. He was her second husband, and she hoped to produce a Plantagenet heir. She was disappointed in this, but enlarged her ample estates in Devon, and ensured the worldly success of the children by her first marriage to Basset. Her husband was appointed Lord Deputy of Calais, where she accompanied him. Their correspondence with England, which spans the years 1533 to 1540, gives an unusual insight into the way such a family lived.

C
AROLINE
N
ORTON
(1808–77), writer, was a granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In 1827 she married George Norton, a barrister and Member of Parliament. She had an unhappy and violent marriage, was forcibly separated from her children, and devoted years to fight for Parliament to allow divorce.

M
ARGARET
P
ASTON
(
c
. 1420–84) inherited property from her father John Mautby of Caister. She had an arranged marriage with John Paston whose father made money by studying law and buying up property near the small Norfolk village of Paston, where he was born. John worked in London, an absence which has provided us with one of the most fascinating collections of letters to survive the Wars of the Roses. They include details about the daily life and requirements of a large estate, and give us unique knowledge of the duties and skills of a lady of the manor, in peacetime, and under siege.

C
HRISTINE DE
P
ISAN
(
c
. 1364–
c
. 1430), was born in Venice. She was the daughter of an Italian physician in the service of Charles V, and brought up in Paris. She was left a widow at twenty-five with three small children and an elderly mother to support. She became the first professional woman writer. Her prose works include
La Cité des dames
and
Le Livre des Trois Vertus
(a treatise on women's education). In her
Epître au dieu d'amour
(1399) and
Dit de la Rose
(1400) she ardently took up the defence of her sex against the strictures of Jean de Meung. Her poetry comprised
ballades
and longer poems on themes of love.

M
ADAME DE
S
ÉVIGNÉ
(1626–96) was born in Paris and married at eighteen to the Marquis de Sévigné, who left her a widow at twenty-five. She lived near the brilliant court of Louis XIV at Versailles, hearing of the changes and scandals first hand. These she recounted with unusual vivacity and humour, mainly for her beloved daughter. She was a friend of the writers Madame de la Fayette and La Rochefoucauld, and went to the plays of Corneille, Molière and Racine. Her letters provide an invaluable chronicle of forty years of the French monarchy.

C
HARLOTTE
S
MITH
(1749–1806) was a prolific novelist, and a poet of considerable skill. She was forced to support her large family when her husband was imprisoned for debt, and she produced fairly popular ‘Gothick' novels; the best known is
Emmeline
(1788).

F
LORA
T
RISTAN
(1803–44) was a Peruvian Spanish colonel's daughter and her uncle was President of Peru, yet she was brought up in poverty in Paris by her widowed French mother. In 1821 she married her employer, the painter and engraver André Chazel, but left him in 1824, initiating a long battle over custody of their children. From 1825 to 1830 she worked as governess to an English family. In 1830 she went to Peru, in a vain attempt to persuade her uncle to support the family. Eight years later the frank revelations in her autobiography,
Pérégrinations d'une paria
, provoked her husband to attempt murder, for which he was sentenced to twenty-two years' hard labour. On returning to France in 1834 she wrote skilful feminist articles. A great admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft, she was first influenced by the libertarian philosophy of Fourier, and then by the social reformation of Robert Owen, whom she met in 1837. She continued to write, publishing the novel
Mephis
in 1838. During a long visit to England she studied Chartism and made a detailed analysis of social conditions which resulted in her
Promenades dans Londres
(1840). Her travels had crystallized her strong socialist and feminist views and in 1843 she published her
Union ouvrière
, the first proposal for a Socialist International. She died of typhoid in Bordeaux while travelling around France to publicize her ideas.

N
ELLIE
W
EETON
(1776–1844) is one of the few governesses of whom we know detailed experiences, thanks to her letters published in 1936 by E. Day as
Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess
.

Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

Louisa May Alcott:
Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals
, ed. E.D. Cheney, Boston, 1889.

Kate Amberley:
The Amberley Papers
, ed. Bertrand Russell, Hogarth Press, 1937.

Jane Austen:
Jane Austen: Letters
, ed. R.W. Chapman, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1932; New York, 1952.

Jane Austen: Her Life
, Honan Park, Weidenfeld, 1987.

Mariama Bâ:
So Long A Letter
, trans. M. Bodé-Thomas, Virago, 1982.

H.E. Back: H. Robinson Papers, A. and E. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Honoré de Balzac:
Lettres de femmes addressées à Honoré de Balzac 1832–6
, Cahiers Balzaciens, pp. 43–4, Paris, 1924.

Jane Bassett:
The Lisle Letters
, ed. M. St Clare Byrne, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983; Penguin, 1985.

Emilia Pardo Bazán: in private collection, trans. O. Kenyon.

For further reading,
Cartas a Benito Pérez Galdós 1889–90
, Madrid, Ediciones Turner, 1975.

Aphra Behn:
Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister
, Virago, 1987; first published in three volumes,
c
. 1676–7.

Williamson's State Papers, PRO, SP 29/167.

Gertrude Bell:
The Letters of Gertrude Bell
, selected and edited by Lady Bell, Benn, 1930.

Annie Besant:
An Autobiography
, A. Besant, Philadelphia, 1893.

Isabella Bird:
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
, I. Bird, Virago, 1982.

The Travels of Isabella Bird
, ed. C. Palser Havely, Century Press, 1971.