800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  I really believe she was just like Eve before she ate the apple, at least she answers to Milton’s description of her. She would have preferred her husband’s discourse to the angels. I am afraid you and I my dear friend should have entered some metaphysical disquisitions with the angel, we are not so perfectly the rib of man as woman ought to be.4

  That century has given us some outstanding letters from women. We have now rediscovered amusing, emotional, informed and well-argued letters which both influenced newly emerging fiction and were influenced by it. The most striking collections come from bluestockings with both the leisure and the learning for long correspondence. They often shared ideas and discussed projects, such as women’s education. At times they recounted scandals in court, which could be salacious; at times they described the latest Paris fashions, providing a need for information only fulfilled much later by women’s magazines.

  Middle-class women were usually more preoccupied with their emotions, and used letters for self-analysis, an occupation encouraged by the Protestant Church with its emphasis on the individual conscience. In this letter of 1744, for example, salon topics are rejected in favour of a discourse of feeling, suitable both for the sharing of friendship – and for epistolary fiction:

  There are times when even the magnificence of the sky, the fair extensions of a flowery lawn, the verdure of the groves, the harmony of rural sounds, and the universal fragrance of the balmy air, strike us with no agreeable sensations, nothing surely but the ungrateful perverseness of one’s own humour. This reflection throws human happiness in a most mortifying light.5

  Women who needed to earn money now took to publishing collections of letters, often with a moral aim, sometimes with the didactic message transformed into an epistolary novel. Among these, one of the most successful was Eliza Haywood (1693–1756). Prolific and versatile, she developed sentimental, realistic, didactic and epistolary novels – and books on how to conduct oneself. She even set up a newspaper for women and composed its agony column! Booksellers co-operated with her in declaring that every epistolary work was genuine. The preface usually claimed that the letters had never been intended for publication, had been stolen or lost and only printed at great risk to the bookseller. Amazingly, letters became one of the most bought genres, perhaps because they seemed truthful. They proved a suitable vehicle for travel reports, and even for tales of adventures in distant countries. They also conveyed contemporary news reports; and public scandals; in fact, newspapers were often composed of topical letters. Hack writers tended to disguise their sensational accounts as eyewitness reports. The now respected ‘foreign correspondent’ began work in this half-fictional letter form.

  Letters on conduct served as manuals to the rising bourgeoisie. Designed as a guide through the complexities of social life, they explained morals, discourse and etiquette. Daniel Defoe went further in his The Family Instructor (1715) with advice on problematic situations between relatives and do-it-yourself counselling for parents and offspring. His Conjugal Lewdness (1727) even warned partners against indulgence in the sexual aspects of their marriages. The saleability of letters proved an asset to women. It was one of the few forms of writing familiar to them, unlike the epic poem or academic treatise.

  Who was buying these letters? Respectable women could not easily enter bookshops, or the new coffee shops where newspapers were read; but by the middle of the eighteenth century they could subscribe, through catalogues. Publishers were as disinclined then as now to take risks, so readers were asked to subscribe in advance. Thus women with a little money of their own could exercise some influence and encourage wealthy friends, in both their reading – and writing.

  By the time of the French Revolution the tone of women’s letters became bolder on social issues, during a short-lived belief in the possibility of equality. The Romantic Movement was beginning to affect sensibility, and many writers felt able to discuss emotions at length. Both these aspects are present in the correspondence of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) remains a skilfully argued, path-breaking contribution to feminist thought. When she fell in love with an American businessman, Gilbert Imlay, she wrote passionate letters to him, particularly once she realized he was deceiving her. Nevertheless, she bore his child and agreed to go on a business journey for him round Scandinavia. Her travel letters range from philosophical, social and personal reflection to brilliant description, an example variously followed by a wide variety of Victorian women travellers, from the well-born Emily Eden, whose brother was Viceroy of India, to Mary Kingsley who funded her innovative studies of the Congo by useful, small-scale trading.

  Though Victorian women had few legal and no voting rights, the slow increase in education allowed wider access to literacy. Isolated governesses wrote to friends, schoolteachers described their lot, while educated mothers found momentary release from large families. By the middle of the nineteenth century more men are proposing that their women write, from Shelley and George Lewes to Mr Gaskell. Though the motives may have been therapeutic and financial, the results are outstanding novels – and letters.

  The example of well-known women publishing with impunity (from the time of Jane Austen’s later novels, praised by the Prince Regent) made lesser-known females less inhibited about attempting to write, demonstrated in the many letters to novelists such as Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot requesting advice. These two deeply moral writers exemplify the social conscience of some intellectual Victorians. Concern with lack of welfare provision led many women to campaign publicly, through talks and above all letters, to redress wrongs. Caroline Norton worked for fairer divorce laws, attempting to free wives from overtly tyrannical husbands. Josephine Butler spent ten years in persuading men to repeal the repressive Contagious Diseases Acts, which discriminated against prostitutes and poorer women. Octavia Hill campaigned for better living conditions in the East End of London. And, of course, Florence Nightingale spent most of her life, while ostensibly resting on a couch, in her celebrated correspondence, which improved the standard of nursing care and education not only in Britain but worldwide.

  Thanks to the penny post, reducing costs considerably, women’s friendships were able to flourish in correspondence. There are many examples of talented wives, such as the undervalued Jane Carlyle and Geraldine Jewsbury, who shared insightful reflections on their society in remarkable epistles. A few decades later, well-known writers such as Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West sound more self-consciously literary, more openly emotional. They had achieved a standing in the twentieth century which gave them greater confidence in their worth and in their lesbian love.

  In our century obviously there are far more women writing. Primary school education allowed many working-class women to write, virtually for the first time. Evidence of their letters, particularly during the enforced separations of the two World Wars, lies in the collections of the Imperial War Museum, London. Women have now resumed the eighteenth-century occupation of publishing books of their letters in order to earn a living, from travel writers such as Freya Stark, to novelists, including Françoise Sagan and Fay Weldon.

  The telephone is often blamed for what some consider a dearth of good letter-writing today. For this reason I include letters written to me, by friends, on topics such as living alone, travelling in India, coping with a small boy while studying, and on how to live a full life on a tiny income. They testify to the continuing qualities of women’s letters.

  Although these letters, written over eight centuries, display a variety of concerns, they also reveal similarities which can now be seen as forming a tradition of women’s writing. Certain aspects stand out. First, the need to use writing to communicate with a wider circle than the family, or small community, in which the women lived. Writing was obviously of tremendous importance in replacing lack of freedom to move physically with this freedom to correspond with the outside world.

  The women letter-writers’ ability to use many types
of discourse is evident. They include the conversational, the descriptive, the dramatic, the caring, the spiritual – some of which may be termed ‘feminine’ – and rational, philosophical discourse, sometimes termed ‘patriarchal’, since it was too frequently the preserve of males in power, in law and in the Church. With many women, skill in using the pen to persuade was highly developed. This can be seen, for instance, in the missives of Hildegard of Bingen to Popes, Elizabeth I’s letters to her father, and in recent epistolary novels.

  The warmth of female relationships, which male society scarcely recognized until recently, can also be seen significantly in sisters, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fanny Burney, and Jane Austen, who developed close lasting relationships with their sisters. Their letters, despite radical differences, reveal honesty, love, compassion, truthful analysis and humility – values extolled by ethical and religious codes but seldom seen in the more public world of men. Furthermore these letters form a precious new primary source for study of the past. Women’s letters give us a new type of history. The lost voices of the past are restored to the reader of this book.

  NOTES

  1. Women, Letters and the Novel, Ruth Perry, A.M.S. Press, N.Y., 1980.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Preface to Sociable Letters, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1664.

  4. To Elizabeth Carter, 1782. Mrs Montagu ‘Queen of the Blues’: Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800, ed. R. Blunt (Constable n.d.) pp. 11, 119.

  5. ‘A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from 1741 to 1770’, London 1809 (pub. n.k.)

  FURTHER READING

  Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1989.

  Women’s Letters : The Feminist Approach

  Recent criticism offers varied and skilful ways to analyse these letters: post-modernism, post-colonialism, deconstruction, Black feminist criticism, French literary criticism and New Historicism.

  Post-modernism uncovers the non-masterful voice of much recent writing – and of many of these letters. Since the Middle Ages women have disclaimed the master narrative of history, the imposition of over-arching theory to explain multifarious ‘reality’. Women generally refuse to be an ‘authority’ on topics such as moral wisdom, unlike Lord Chesterfield in his letters to his son. They show there is another cognitive space, a less arrogant, less definitive way of inscribing the ‘I’ of the defining self.

  Women who enjoyed power, such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Catherine the Great and La Pasionaria, demonstrate the ability to deploy many discourses. These can be read as constant difference and plurality, because they considered themselves the equals of male leaders when angered, but knew when to exploit female wiles to persuade. When discussing topics they had considered in depth, such as politics or religion, they wrote with clarity of argument and moral perspective. Many less powerful women also possess rich diversity of register, including Mrs Gaskell, Madame de Staël and Rosalía de Castro (in nineteenth-century Spain). This diversity undermines the concept of the unified self. It supports the deconstructive view of identity as a cultural construct, never finalized, constantly shifting.

  Jacques Derrida has pointed out the inadequacy of Western construction of the ‘Other’. How far has the hegemonic conceptual framework prevented culture from discovering the genuine ‘otherness’ of women’s letters? Derrida claims the other cannot be invented; it must ‘come upon us’ (in-venire) after we have deconstructed our habitual categories for apprehending the world (Psyche, ‘Inventions de l’autre,’ Galilée, Paris, 1987, pp. 11–16). Even when patriarchal artists consider they ‘invent’, they are merely re-inscribing their own concepts. These letter-writers display the diversity of possible definitions of the other. Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Sand, Fanny Burney, George Eliot, offer a wide range of discourses in their letters, from dominating to passionate, from meditative to reasoning on public issues. They can be read as disruptive texts, blurring binary definitions of gender attributes, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ registers, between culture and subcultures.

  Another way of approaching these letters is to analyse them according to Julia Kristéva’s three categories in her 1969 study of the ‘subject-in-process’ in Women’s Time. She outlined three generations of women: the first she defined as those who work within the symbolic, male order; the second counter-identify, while the third undo fixed notions of gender identity. This third category is seen by some critics, even Terry Eagleton, as disturbing. I would argue, like Kristéva, that it allows us to envisage a new space for women.

  Women’s letters show evidence of all three categories since the twelfth century. And close reading of some of these letters reveals Kristéva’s third category of the undoing of fixed notions of gender. That is implicit in some of the wording of women in power, such as Queens and Abbesses.

  Study of letters is in the forefront of comparative literature studies, which have developed beyond the comparing of literature in two distinct languages. Now differing cultural conceptions, approaches and impositions are analysed. The novelist Angela Carter and Professor Susan Basnett look at ways in which hegemonic languages have ‘colonized’ minds. They are de-colonizing in showing up male attempts to ‘feminize’ the unknown. In an era of post-colonialism, it is not farfetched to see parallels between the physical liberating of countries and the metaphorical freeing of women’s minds from at least some areas of patriarchal power, when they take up their pens to inscribe their ideas.

  Letters are written in the first person, which can resemble the first person of narrative fiction, and also include ‘realistic’ and idealizing modes. As in autobiography, the ‘I’ ranges from the singular to the third person plural. We all possess multiplicity, frequently stifled by patriarchy. Many unknown young letter-writers, such as Stéphanie Jullien, resemble novelists like Marguerite Duras, who, in semi-autobiographical novellas, cannot fix ‘self’, finds no centre. This ‘deconstruction’ of her situation is addressed to a male reader, like many female narratives. Duras often apostrophizes a ‘you’ who is implicitly male. Jullien’s male is explicit, the bourgeois patriarch who has obviously criticized her dilemma as ‘indecision’, the social refusal of meaningful work as ‘leisure’. She demonstrates that it is in and by language that we define identity. This young female’s identity is fractured, exceedingly fragile, imposed by males; her use of different discourses strives to free her ‘I’ from the ‘I’ of classifying patriarchy.

  Jullien’s questioning, and some of her vocabulary, may be called ‘feminine’. This word is problematic, though frequently used in the sense of ‘different from the masculine’ and/or ‘culturally constructed’. In literary criticism it often incorporates Cixous’ definition of ‘écriture féminine’ as being less fixed than male, with more fluid sentences, linked with bodily rhythms, our sexuality. Thus the long parentheses of a Dorothy Richardson are ‘feminine’ but so are many sentences of avant-garde male writers such as James Joyce and Proust. We still need a satisfactory definition of ‘feminine’ writing which struggles to enunciate identity while UNdoing categories. I tentatively propose ‘uncovering new levels of meaning’ and/or ‘linking conscious and unconscious elements’.

  Letters such as George Eliot’s, can be analysed as ‘écriture féminine’, as they are an outpouring on many levels. Cixous maintains that women include the semiotic and the symbolic, the freedom of early childhood expression and the greater rigidity of the ‘law of the father’, of culturally determined norms. ‘Semiotic’ can be defined as the pre-oedipal, pre-imaginary rupturing of meaning, while the ‘symbolic’ represents the order of patriarchal language and culture.

  CONCLUSION

  We read past texts from the perspective of present-day knowledge and concerns, yet there is a significant difference between those who attempt to read them in their historical difference from the present, and those who merely seek to con
vert them into current categories. Both attitudes are valid, ever since Barthes pronounced that ‘the author is dead’. However, contemporary re-readings may lead us to judge limitations of past women, rather than place them in the context of their restricting cultures. Where possible, it is more productive to read for historical meanings rather than relevance to our expectations. Studying these past letters for their difference from the present, both historical and sexual, underlines both historical relativity and cultural construction. Such a process should help toward our understanding of the past and of gender formation.

  A further fruitful way to analyse women’s letters is the New Historicist approach. New Historicism, inspired by Professor Greenblatt in America, stresses that the artist functions within many processes, representing society to itself. The literary and the non-literary cannot be divided – as we notice in these letters. This new school of criticism asks us to grasp the social presence of the text in the world more sensitively, as Black feminist literary critics do also. They both point out that history is not purely descriptive, nor static; historical documents can be considered for their discourses, symbolism, etc., like literature. New Historicists maintain that ‘Literature is a primary document’ and I maintain that these letters form a vital primary source, certainly for historical and women’s studies. The relationship between literature and history is notoriously problematic, so a study of the synchronic text, as part of a whole culture, is to be welcomed. I have tried to show, as Professor Greenblatt proposed, that there are no hierarchies, and ‘to make the past live’.