800 Years of Women's Letters (9 page)

Affectionately yours,
J.A.

ED. R.W. CHAPMAN,
JANE AUSTEN: LETTERS
(1932)

Female friendships were supportive and enduring to many girls who needed to share their problems, their happiness or their loneliness. Here Charlotte Brontë, aged eighteen, is wretched as an assistant teacher. She writes to her lifelong, emotionally stable friend Ellen Nussey.

Feb. 20, 1837. – I read your letter with dismay, Ellen – what shall I do without you? Why are we so to be denied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality. I long to be with you because it seems as if two or three days or weeks spent in your company would beyond measure strengthen me in the enjoyment of those feelings which I have so lately begun to cherish. You first pointed out to me that way in which I am so feebly endeavouring to travel, and now I cannot keep you by my side. I must proceed sorrowfully alone.

Why are we to be divided? Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well – of losing sight of the
Creator
in idolatry of the
creature
. At first I could not say, ‘Thy will be done.' I felt rebellious; but I know it was wrong to feel so. Being left a moment alone this morning, I prayed fervently to be enabled to resign myself to
every
decree of God's will – though it should be dealt forth with a far severer hand than the present disappointment. Since then, I have felt calmer and humbler – and consequently happier. . . .

I have written this note at a venture. When it will reach you I know not, but I was determined not to let slip an opportunity for want of being prepared to embrace it. Farewell; may God bestow on you all His blessings. My darling – Farewell. Perhaps you may return before midsummer – do you think you possibly can? I wish your brother John knew how unhappy I am; he would almost pity me.

EDS. T.J. WISE AND J.A. SYMINGTON,
THE BRONTËS: THEIR LIVES, FRIENDSHIPS AND CORRESPONDENCE IN FOUR VOLUMES
(1932)

Geraldine Jewsbury wrote with sense and sensibility yet her name is scarcely known. Here she writes to a close friend, Jane Carlyle (the wife of writer Thomas) to comfort her after the death of her mother, for which she was grieving.

Seaforth: Friday (Postmark, May 30, 1842)

My Darling – Your note has made me very sad. There is nothing to be said to it, as you cannot be comforted, but time – time, that is the only hope and refuge for all of us! I know full well what it is to cease to see the necessity of struggling; it would puzzle the wisest of us to point it out at the best of times, but the inscrutableness does not always press upon us so heavily – it does not come till we see into some deep trouble, and then are like to go mad. To all of us life is a riddle put more or less unintelligibly, and death is the only end we can see – for we may die, and that is a strong consolation, of which nothing can defraud us. We cannot well be more dark or miserable than we are: we shall all die – no exception, no fear of exemption. Every morning I say this to myself. When I am in sorrow, it is the only comfort that has strength in it. Why, indeed, must we go on struggling, rising up early and late and taking rest? ‘Behold, He giveth His beloved sleep!' And yet it is not well that you feel this so constantly that it swallows up all other feelings. Life is not strong in you when you are thus – it will not be so always. There is a strength in life to make us endure it. I am astonished sometimes to find that I am glad to be alive – that the instinct of feeling that it is a pleasant thing to behold the sun, and that light is good. And this is a feeling that will spring up in your heart after a while, crushed and dead as it seems now. When my father died I cannot tell you the horrible sense of desolateness and insecurity that struck through me. I had friends to love me, who would do anything for me, but I had no right to count on their endurance. I had lost the one on whose love I could depend as on the earth itself – the one whose relationship seemed to revoke the law of change pronounced against all other things in this world. Our parents and relations are given us by the same unknown Power which sent us into this world, given to us like our own bodies, without our knowing how or where, and when they are taken from us our ties to this life are loosened, and all seems tottering – nothing can supply their place. But yet even this gets blunted after a while; we can and do live, when we are put to it, on wonderfully little, without all we at first fancied indispensable, and then for ever after the love of such friends as are left or raised up to us becomes strangely precious in a way no one else can understand. We strain them to us with all our force, to try to supply the place of that natural necessity which united us without effort on our part to those who are gone! We have always a fear that the friends we have made for ourselves will leave us; we were only afraid for the others that they would be taken away. Dear love, this present strange, stunned state you will recover from. No fear of your sinking down into apathy – there is too much for you to do. You are necessary to the welfare of too many, your life will take shape again, though now it seems nothing but confused hoplessness. The thought of you brings tears to my eyes any moment it comes. Do not be so very wretched I can give you no comfort – there is none – but from time to time write when you can, but don't plague yourself. I will also write without waiting. I am most thankful the dear little cousin still stays with you. Give my love to her. I am glad that your husband is well, and that he has his book to busy himself in. It is like a child to him. I am here since a week. I go home in a few days. Mrs —— sends her love to you. I wish you could be within reach of her; she would be a comfort to you, as she has been to me. Good bye, dear love: take care of yourself for the sake of others besides yourself!

ED. A. IRELAND,
SELECTIONS FROM THE LETTERS OF GERALDINE E. JEWSBURY TO JANE WELSH CARLYLE
(1892)

Madame de Staël (1766–1817), daughter of the influential Necker, became the best-known woman writer in Revolutionary France. Today, she is possibly remembered for her novel
Corinne
(1807). She was also a leading critic on ‘everything concerned with the exercise of thought in writing', as she said in
De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les Institutiens sociales
(1800). The book which most influenced contemporaries was
De l'Allemagne
(1810), which includes a philosophy of history, ethics and politics.

Rosalie de Constant, the favourite among Benjamin Constant's innumerable cousins and who later detested Germaine, was enchanted by her on first acquaintance (novelist Benjamin Constant was one of Germaine's lovers):

She is an astonishing woman. The feelings to which she gives rise are different from those that any other woman can inspire. Such words as
sweetness, gracefulness, modesty, desire to please, deportment, manners
, cannot be used when speaking of her; but one is carried away, subjugated by the force of her genius. It follows a new path; it is a fire that lights you up, that sometimes blinds you, but that cannot leave you cold and indifferent. Her intelligence is too superior to allow others to make their worth felt, and nobody can look intelligent beside her. Wherever she goes, most people are changed into spectators. And yet, at the same time; it is astonishing to find in this singular woman a kind of childlike good humour which saves her from appearing in the least pedantic.

J.C. HEROLD,
LIFE OF MADAME DE STAËL
(1959)

In 1792, de Staël fled France with her then lover, Narbonne, and General d'Arblay, who was to marry Fanny Burney. The novelist felt admiration for Madame de Staël and the cultured émigrés with whom she came over after the French Revolution. However, her father wrote to warn her about rumours of adultery. Her answer shows warmth of affection to her new friends, but care about her reputation, since she needed her earnings as lady-in-waiting.

Mickleham, February 22, '93

What a kind letter is my dearest father's, and how kindly speedy! Yet it is too true it has given me very uncomfortable feelings. I am both hurt and astonished at the acrimony of malice; indeed, I believe all this party to merit nothing but honour, compassion, and praise. Madame de Staël, the daughter of M. Necker – the idolising daughter – of course, and even from the best principles, those of filial reverence, entered into the opening of the Revolution just as her father entered into it; but as to her house having become the centre of revolutionists before the 10th of August, it was so only for the constitutionalists, who, at that period were not only members of the then established government, but the decided friends of the king. The aristocrats were then already banished, or wanderers from fear, or concealed and silent from cowardice; and the jacobins – I need not, after what I have already related, mention how utterly abhorrent to her must be that fiend-like set.

The aristocrats, however, as you well observe, and as she has herself told me, hold the constitutionalists in greater horror than the Convention itself. This, however, is a violence against justice which cannot, I hope, be lasting; and the malignant assertions which persecute her, all of which she has lamented to us, she imputes equally to the bad and virulent of both these parties.

The intimation concerning M. de Narbonne was, however, wholly new to us, and I do finally believe it a gross calumny. M. de N. was of her society, which contained ten or twelve of the first people in Paris, and, occasionally, almost all Paris; she loves him even tenderly, but so openly, so simply, so unaffectedly, and with such utter freedom from all coquetry, that, if they were two men, or two women, the affection could not, I think, be more obviously undesigning. She is very plain, he is very handsome; her intellectual endowments must be with him her sole attraction.

M. de Talleyrand was another of her society, and she seems equally attached to him. M. le Viscomte de Montmorenci she loves, she says, as her brother: he is another of this bright constellation, and esteemed of excellent capacity. She says, if she continues in England he will certainly come, for he loves her too well to stay away. In short, her whole côterie live together as brethren. Indeed, I think you could not spend a day with them and not see that their commerce is that of pure, but exalted and most elegant, friendship.

I would, nevertheless, give the world to avoid being a guest under their roof, now I have heard even the shadow of such a rumour; and I will, if it be possible without hurting or offending them. I have waived and waived acceptance almost from the moment of Madame de Staël's arrival. I prevailed with her to let my letter go alone to you, and I have told her, with regard to your answer, that you were sensible of the honour her kindness did me, and could not refuse to her request the week's furlough; and then followed reasons for the compromise you pointed out, too diffuse for writing. As yet they have succeeded, though she is surprised and disappointed. She wants us to study French and English together, and nothing could to me be more desirable, but for this invidious report.

J.C. HEROLD (1959)

The openness of the relationship between Narbonne and de Staël seems to have shocked the more prudish English middle class, and unfortunately, Fanny Burney was terrified this friendship might jeopardize her pension from the Queen; she refused all further invitations. In vain Germaine tried to reassure her that far from being Jacobins, she and her friends had ‘barely escaped the Jacobins' knives'. When Susan Phillips tried to explain her sister's conduct, Germaine was dumbfounded: ‘Do you mean to say that in this country a woman is treated as a minor all life long? It seems to me that your sister behaves like a girl of fourteen.'

Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf had an affair which lasted some months, until it changed into a literary, supportive friendship. Woolf's novel
Orlando
(1928) is partly based on the flamboyant Vita, born at Knole. Here, Vita analyses her first reactions:

 

Long Barn

Weald

Sevenoaks

11 October

My darling

I am in no fit state to write to you – and as for cold and considered opinions, (as you said on the telephone) such things do not exist in such a connection. At least, not yet. Perhaps they will come later. For the moment, I can't say anything except that I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell. It seems to me the loveliest, wisest,
richest
book that I have ever read, – excelling even your own
Lighthouse
. Virginia, I really don't know what to say, – am I right? am I wrong? am I prejudiced? am I in my senses or not? It seems to me that you have really shut up that ‘hard and rare thing' in a book; that you have had a complete vision; and yet when you came down to the sober labour of working it out, have never lost sight of it nor faltered in the execution. Ideas come to me so fast that they trip over each other and I lose them before I can put salt on their tails; there is so much I want to say, yet I can only go back to my first cry that I am bewitched. You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I can only tell you that I am really shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation, – and then after all it does touch me so personally, and I don't know what to say about that either, only that I feel like one of those wax figures in a shop window, on which you have hung a robe stitched with jewels. It is like being alone in a dark room with a treasure chest full of rubies and nuggets and brocades. Darling, I don't know and scarcely even like to write, so overwhelmed am I, how you could have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg. Really, this isn't false humility;
really
it isn't. I can't write about that part of it, though, much less ever tell you verbally.