800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  Please forgive this short biography of my Ruben, as brief as his life; he was 22 years old. But I wanted to write, so that the friends and comrades who named their Brigade after him should know that Ruben wasn’t a rich man’s son, but a worker like you and a young communist who fought in Spain and sacrificed his life in defence of the Soviet Union.

  Dolores

  TRANS. O. KENYON, PRIVATE COLLECTION

  Appendix One The Epistolary Novel

  The epistolary novel is composed entirely of letters. It grew out of women’s need for creativity, out of their shaping of their experience in correspondence. Letters deal with significant incidents, with problems and possible resolutions, with responses and conflicts between personalities in ways that link them with the pattern-making and character analysis of fiction. Epistolary novels are among the first examples of the novel, the ‘new’ form.

  Histories of literature generally state that Defoe and Richardson were the creators of the English novel, but over a century before them, two women, Aphra Behn and the Duchess of Newcastle, first realized the potential of unifying epistles with a semblance of narrative. In Sociable Letters (1664) Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, offered a moral guide, often sought in letters by daughters ‘who are but branches which by marriage are broken off from the root’. Behn, the first professional woman playwright, was also a skilful poet. Her Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister was probably published as early as 1683. Based on a real scandal, the novel reflects a desire for news reports and contemporary sexual scandal in the traditional discourse of woman as victim of passion.

  To Philander.

  After I had dismissed my page this morning with my letter, I walked (filled with sad soft thoughts of my brother Philander) into the grove, and commanding Melinda to retire, who only attended me, I threw myself down on that bank of grass where we last disputed the dear, but fatal business of our souls: where our prints (that invited me) still remain on the pressed greens: there with ten thousand sighs, with remembrance of the tender minutes we passed then, I drew your last letter from my bosom, and often kissed, and often read it over; but oh! who can conceive my torment when I come to that fatal part of it, where you say you gave your hand to my sister? I found my soul agitated with a thousand different passions, but all insupportable, all mad and raving; sometimes I threw myself with fury on the ground, and pressed my panting heart to the earth; then rise in rage, and tear my heart, and hardly spare that face that taught you first to love; then fold my wretched arms to keep down rising sighs that almost rend my breast, I traverse swiftly the conscious grove; with my distracted show’ring eyes directed in vain to pitiless heaven, the lovely silent shade favouring my complaints, I cry aloud, Oh God! Philander’s married, the lovely charming thing for whom I languish is married! – That fatal word’s enough, I need not add to whom. Married is enough to make me curse my birth, my youth, my beauty, and my eyes that first betrayed me to the undoing object: curse on the charms you have flattered, for every fancied grace has helped my ruin on; now, like flowers that wither unseen and unpossessed in shades, they must die and be no more, they were to no end created, since Philander is married: married! Oh fate, oh hell, oh torture and confusion! Tell me not it is to my sister, that addition is needless and vain: to make me eternally wretched, there needs no more than that Philander is married! Than that the priest gave your hand away from me; to another, and not to me; tired out with life, I need no other pass-port than this repetition, Philander is married! ’Tis that alone is sufficient to lay in her cold tomb.

  The wretched and despairing

  Sylvia

  Wednesday night,

  Bellfont.

  To Sylvia

  Twice last night, oh unfaithful and unloving Sylvia! I sent the page to the old place for letters, but he returned the object of my rage, because without the least remembrance from my fickle maid: in this torment, unable to hide my disorder, I suffered myself to be laid in bed; where the restless torments of the night exceeded those of the day, and are not even by the languisher himself to be expressed; but the returning light brought a short slumber on its wings; which was interrupted by my atoning boy, who brought two letters from my adorable Sylvia: he waked me from dreams more agreeable than all my watchful hours could bring; for they are all tortured. —— And even the softest mixed with a thousand despairs, difficulties and disappointments, but these were all love, which gave a loose to joys undenied by honour! And this way, my charming Sylvia, you shall be mine, in spite of all the tyrannies of that cruel hinderer; honour appears not, my Sylvia, within the close-drawn curtains; in shades and gloomy light the phantom frights not, but when one beholds its blushes, when it is attended and adorned, and the sun sees its false beauties; in silent groves and grottoes, dark alcoves, and lonely recesses, all its formalities are laid aside; it was then and there methought my Sylvia yielded with a faint struggle and a soft resistance; I heard her broken sighs, her tender whispering voice, that trembling cried, – Oh! Can you be so cruel? – Have you the heart – will you undo a maid because she loves you? Oh!

  Letters had the advantage of male acceptance, flexibility, and popularity. They could also incorporate travel reports, enabling the heroine to widen her narrative with tales of adventure in distant countries.

  As Dale Spender has shown, in Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen, there were a fair number of women publishing successfully in the eighteenth century. It was Eliza Haywood who established the popularity of the epistolary novel, writing seventeen. She extended the structure while putting the heroine through a moral test. Her works can be seen as a document of the development of the genre, from Love in Excess to The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). This latter novel was much admired by Fanny Burney, who said it inspired her delightful Evelina (1776). Evelina, still an under-rated work, exploits the supposed veracity of letters, with a girl’s fresh reactions to London society, while exploring women’s position in that culture.

  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 o
f 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.

  Appendix Two Select Biographies

  KATE AMBERLEY (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.

  EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN (1851–1923) was a Spanish novelist of outstanding ‘realist’ works and feminist sympathies, a friend of Galdós.

  ISABELLA BIRD (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.

  ROSALÍA DE CASTRO (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.

  ALEXANDRA DAVID-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.

  LUCIE DUFF GORDON (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.

  ELIZABETH ELSTOB (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.

  MARY HAYS (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.

  HILDEGARD OF BINGEN (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.

  LA PASIONARIA (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.

  LADY HONOR LISLE (?–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.

  CAROLINE NORTON (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.

  MARGARET PASTON (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.

  CHRISTINE DE PISAN (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.

  MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ (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.

  CHARLOTTE SMITH (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).

  FLORA TRISTAN (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.

  NELLIE WEETON (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.

  Sources

  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.