by Mary Hoban
AN UNCONVENTIONAL WIFE
Mary Hoban is a Melbourne-based writer and historian. Her first book was a history of Melbourne’s celebrated Queen Victoria Market. She has also authored, co-authored, and edited various textbooks, papers, and journal articles in Australian and Asian history and cultural studies. For some years she was employed in the philatelic section of Australia Post as a writer, editor, and researcher for the nation’s postage stamps, where she wrote and edited books on subjects ranging from Christmas Island to the Antarctic, from royalty to rugby. She holds a graduate diploma in biography and life writing from Monash University and an MA in public history from the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2012 she was awarded the inaugural Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship to write the biography of Julia Sorell Arnold.
Scribe Publications
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Published by Scribe 2019
Copyright © Mary Hoban 2019
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
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Excerpt from ‘Jimmy and I’ in Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson, 2015 © Heirs of Clarice Lispector, 1951, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1978, 2010, 2015. Translation © Katrina Dodson, 2015. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
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The author acknowledges with gratitude the assistance provided by the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.
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9781912854387 (UK edition)
9781947534827 (US edition)
9781925693539 (e-book)
CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.
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To my mother
Contents
Introduction
The Family of Julia Sorell Arnold
The Family of Thomas Arnold the Younger
1 A Tumultuous Inheritance
2 Entering Society
3 A Colonial Belle
4 An Unusual Man
5 Finding Love
6 A Woman’s Destiny
7 An Impossible Choice
8 Between Two Worlds
9 Facing Reality
10 A New Beginning
11 Adrift
12 A Dark World
13 Returning to the Fold
14 A Landscape of Desire
15 Coming Adrift
16 Into the Abyss
17 Separate Lives
18 A Revolutionary Wife
19 Disintegration
20 Aftermath
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Chapter Notes
Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emilia, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about … liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter.
CLARICE LISPECTOR, ‘JIMMY AND I’ (1941)
Introduction
I discovered Julia Sorell Arnold in the pages of her grandson’s memoirs. He was the renowned English scientist and first director-general of UNESCO, Sir Julian Sorell Huxley. She is a fleeting presence in his book, but nonetheless a startling one. On a January day in Hobart in 1856, as her husband was being received into the Catholic Church, Julia, a staunch Protestant, collected a basket of stones, walked to the church, and smashed the windows with this protesting ammunition …
These words immediately evoked a long-forgotten memory from my childhood when I too threw stones. I had joined a motley group of young Catholic kids making their feelings of rejection palpable as they tossed ‘yonnies’, or little stones, onto the roof of the building where the local Brownies were meeting. It was claimed the Brownies wouldn’t accept Catholics as members. I don’t remember testing the allegation, nor even being particularly interested in being a Brownie, but I did like the idea of testing my arm. No windows were in our sights, though, just the roof, and most of the yonnies didn’t even carry that far, but we exorcised our demons and believed the Brownies felt our presence at their meeting.
Strangely, though, it was not the stone throwing that stood out in my memory of that day, nor even the satisfaction it engendered. Instead, it was my mother’s unambiguous reprimand, rendered with utter conviction, that ‘young ladies do not throw stones’. How then, I thought, could Julia Sorell, a woman at the forefront of her society, a mother of three, have done exactly that? What drove her to behave in such a dramatic, ‘unladylike’ way? What emotion was inscribed into each of her tossed stones? Was it bigotry, anger, ignorance, or something else — despair perhaps? How could such a public and violent demonstration in the middle of the Victorian era be understood?
Her behaviour was too compelling to put aside, but in a world where biography has traditionally focused on quest, on achievement, on destination, how would I ever uncover the life of an ordinary woman whose oblique and private life was determined by whose daughter she was and whose wife or mother or even grandmother she became? Such lives may be the stuff of novels, but they have rarely been deemed worthy of biography. It’s all very well for Virginia Woolf to call for the true history of the girl behind the counter rather than the hundred-and-fiftieth life of Napoleon or the seventieth study of Keats, but who apart from Virginia Woolf might be interested in reading it and what publisher would be brave enough to take it on? Only recently, a reviewer of a biography about Betsy Balcombe — as a young girl she had shared a house with Napoleon — reflected that she was, after all, a fairly insignificant character, one who had no perceptible impact or influence on the great man. Why then, he asked, was there interest in this girl? Why indeed! Seldom are the letters or papers of such people gathered in archives or recorded in newspapers or books. Almost never are their names and deeds etched onto monuments or their portraits hung on gallery walls. This absence is emblematic of a deeper reality about the lives of women, governed as they have been by the routines and rhythms of domestic life and the expectation that they be quiet, never shrill, never loud, certainly never scream or do anything that might shatter glass or disturb the peace.
I was fortunate with my stone-thrower. Julia Sorell was born in Hobart Town in 1826, the granddaughter of Lieutenant-Governor William Sorell of Van Diemen’s Land and Anthony Fenn Kemp, the so-called ‘father of Tasmania’. Whether he gained that name because he had eighteen children or because he was one of the wealthiest and most influential of the early white settlers is unclear. Julia’s marriage propelled her into one of the most eminent intellectual families of Victorian England. Her father-in-law was the renowned educationalist Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, and her brother-in-law the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold. One of her daughters became a bestselling novelist at the end of th
e nineteenth century, another became a suffragette and journalist, while another established a school for girls that still exists today. A granddaughter was the author Janet Penrose, who married and worked alongside one of the great historians of their generation, George Macaulay Trevelyan, while two of Julia’s grandsons, Julian Huxley and his brother, the novelist Aldous Huxley — most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World — distinguished themselves in twentieth-century science and literature. Precisely because of these connections, many of Julia’s letters have been saved, and through these and other documents and biographies relating to the wider Arnold and Sorell families, it is possible to extract her from the covers of married life and to paint a portrait of a woman living through an extraordinary period, when the fields of education, science, politics, industry, feminism, and religion clashed and converged, creating a new landscape and forging profound change.
You might wonder at that word ‘religion’, but Julia lived in an era when church bells charted the passage of time and when the brand of one’s religion mattered deeply. From the time Henry VIII proclaimed himself the head of the Anglican Church — the new Church of England — and declared Catholics, and any others who did not conform to Anglicanism, traitorous to the English nation, anti-Catholicism had evolved as a core element of Englishness. It was the norm in the circles Julia was reared in; it took root in Australia from the very beginning of white settlement; and it was still in play when I threw my yonnies. But as people became more literate and a more democratic and industrialised state began to take shape, intense cultural and intellectual debate erupted about the place of religion. Among the key leaders, on opposing sides of this ‘culture war’, were Thomas Arnold of Rugby and John Henry Newman, two men of significant influence on Julia as she lived the effects of these changes in the colonial societies of Hobart and Dublin, in the great manufacturing town of Birmingham, and in the intellectual centre of Oxford.
For all the wonder and luck of discovering Julia’s own letters, there was also great disappointment that so many had been destroyed. If only she had kept a diary, one of those ‘wretched friends’, into whose pages she poured out her heart. But she did not or, if she did, it too has been destroyed. Yet such gaps only made me more determined to delve deeper and wider, and the further I went, the more I felt I had been thrust into a novel by George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë, written in an era when a woman’s desires and quests were always secondary to the man at the centre; when, according to the law, her condition as a married woman was coverture — under the cover, influence, power, and protection of her husband. But what happened in this world when the contractual exchange of feminine docility and obedience for masculine power and provision failed?
Slowly, as the arc of Julia’s life unfolded, her ‘ordinary life’ revealed a powerful tale of sexual politics where two deeply committed lovers differed fundamentally in their understanding of the marriage contract. It is a story of one woman and all women in its depiction of the complexity of marriage, the drama of betrayal and abandonment, the humiliation of failure. It is a story of how women lived with and apart from men, of how they endured loss, and of the boundaries that existed in their lives. It is the story of the forces that have shaped our lives and the lives of those who have come before us.
The Family of Julia Sorell Arnold
The Family of Thomas Arnold the Younger
1
A Tumultuous Inheritance
The dreadful shuddering finally ceased, and Julia knew instinctively that the Calcutta had reached the channel. Abandoning any pretence at packing her portmanteau, she gathered her brothers and sisters and gleefully sought the deck. Just a little further north was Hobart, and waiting there on the wharf would be her beloved father. It had been nearly three years since she had seen him, and if at times during that period Julia had believed she would never see him again, she felt she could still smell the jacket he had worn when he had given her a last hug and she could still hear the sound of the oars as his form vanished into the mist. These had remained with her, but now, as she reached the deck, it felt as if these sensations were surging out of her body, no longer needing to dwell inside her.
Even the air around her bristled. The wide expanse of blue sky held no warmth, and the wind, unchallenged on its route from the Antarctic, whistled by her, unsettling a flock of screeching birds from their nesting roosts. Julia watched them rise above the trees on the bank, and, as she did, her eye caught the swinging gibbet in the tree. It was holding two blackened bodies. She remembered such sights, but her little brother, standing close to her, was puzzled. She did not explain it to him. Instead she took his face in her hands and turned it away. He would grow oblivious soon enough to the gruesome colliding with the exquisite. Van Diemen’s Land was like that, its shimmering surface had always belied a grim, silent underside.
When she turned her head back to look at those receding bodies, she was struck by how much they resembled the hanging Christs that had lined the cloistered hallways of her school in Brussels, and she was back there again in the midst of those whispering, condescending girls who had belittled her for being ‘la fille anglaise’, the girl who could not recite her rosary and whose mother was said to be very bad. She had grown to hate them and their morbid, gothic Catholicism. It was one thing to hear her grandfather talk about his ancestors who had been expelled from Catholic France, but it was quite another thing to be with those girls, who believed that ghoulish nonsense about the Saviour’s blood shielding them while they lied and bullied. Those hanging bodies might recede behind the ship, but the pain of that spite would not.
As Hobart came into view and the babble from her fellow passengers rose, Julia remained strangely quiet, uneasy and unknowing. She had left Hobart as a child and now she was returning as a young woman, ready to enter society. But without her mother, and with her wider family divided, how would she be treated? Would she be accepted, or would she always have to bear the mark of scandal? She had spent the voyage home determined to loosen the hardness that had formed in her during these last few years. She wanted only love and laughter to fill her days and, until those swinging bodies swayed before her, she had believed she had thrown overboard all the sadness and the bitterness and the hatred. But the past was not so easily cast aside.
Three years before, in February 1839, when Julia Sorell had sailed from Hobart, she’d had no inkling that her life was about to change dramatically. She had turned twelve just six months earlier. In the lead-up to the voyage, there had been bitter disputes between her parents. Her mother, Elizabeth, had insisted that her children should see Europe just as she had done as a child, and had pressured her father relentlessly until he submitted to her plan. He would come to bitterly regret his decision, but it was inevitable. Julia’s father was a gentle man, while her fiery mother was used to having her own way. It ran in her family. So did betrayal.
Both Julia’s grandfathers, Anthony Fenn Kemp and William Sorell, were men of power in the colony. Anthony Fenn Kemp was one of its richest and most rambunctious characters, a man who let nothing stand in his way — a man it was not safe to contradict. He had a long history of opposing authority in the colonies, having been prominent among the group of officers who had instigated the famous Rum Rebellion in 1808, and had been court-martialled for his behaviour. When he settled in Van Diemen’s Land, he continued to build not only his fortune, but also his reputation for trouble, and his tendency to governor-baiting, on one occasion being thrown out of Government House for extreme rudeness. William Sorell, appointed Lieutenant-Governor in 1817, was a professional military man, administratively adroit and well-regarded, but with a less-than-spotless personal life. It was inevitable that these two men would clash, and when they did, their very public political battles became the stuff of colonial history, making Kemp’s previous skirmishes with governors appear minor. But it would be Sorell’s tempestuous private life that brought their children together.
Unbeknown to the colonists, ‘Mrs Sorell’ was not the Governor’s wife but his mistress, Louisa Kent. Sorell had abandoned his wife years before in England, leaving her with their six children. Anthony Fenn Kemp had discovered this when Louisa Kent’s husband, Lieutenant William Kent, brought an action in London against Sorell ‘for criminal conversation’. This coyly named suit could be brought by an injured husband for damages against an alleged seducer of his wife. Kemp kept it to himself until Sorell suspended him from the magistracy for being the most seditious, mischievous and the man least meriting favour or indulgence from the Government in the whole settlement. Kemp retaliated immediately by exposing the Governor’s private life and complaining bitterly that his mistress accompanied him to church and that they and their children were seen parading about in the government carriage. It mattered little to Kemp that he himself had abandoned a mistress and two children in Sydney. He was now spearheading a campaign to have Sorell recalled from his position as Governor.
It took nearly six years and a far-reaching Commission of Inquiry before this objective was achieved, by which time Kemp, now used to the ways of Sorell and uneasy at the prospect of a new governor, chaired a committee of fifteen influential citizens petitioning the King to allow Sorell to remain. It was too late.
But in early 1825 in the months leading up to Sorell’s departure from the colony, his eldest legitimate son, also named William, arrived in Hobart to confront his father over the destitution and pain he had caused his family when he had abandoned them. Whether young William managed to gain any help for his family is unknown, but his own fate was determined the moment he saw a beautiful and lively young woman sitting across the aisle in church. In her, he believed he had found everything he could wish for — that the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Kemp was the daughter of his father’s old rival was immaterial. Their courtship was swift and on 24 September 1825, at St David’s Church in Hobart, William and Elizabeth married. The young couple settled in New Town, and within months Elizabeth was pregnant. Their first child, Julia Sorell, was born on 17 August 1826.