The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  By contrast, Elizabeth Marsh was only twenty and, as she told her readers, still unmarried when taken at sea in 1756 (and therefore, contemporaries would have understood, a virgin), with no male relation on hand to protect her. Revealing this in print was a remarkable act, a ‘bold … attempt’ as she described it. To be sure, in British North America there was a tradition by now of women who had been captured by Native Americans subsequently writing or dictating narratives of their experiences that were then published. But it was widely known and accepted that indigenous warriors in North America rarely raped their female prisoners.19 In Morocco and the Ottoman world, the treatment of female captives was often very different, and was infinitely more so in European imaginings.

  Even men seized by Muslim corsairs, and subsequently enslaved, were believed by some European commentators to be vulnerable to rape by their male captors and owners. As far as women captives were concerned, those who were subsequently sold as slaves were by law and custom at the sexual mercy of their purchasers. And that all females brought captive to Islamic societies were automatically liable to sexual assault, and/or to absorption into harems, was the stuff of a massive and still-expanding learned and popular literature:

  All women, there, obey – because they must.

  Silent, they sit, in passive rows, all day;

  And musing, cross-legg’d, stitch strange thoughts away.

  Provoking life! – Stew’d up like ponds of fish,

  They feed, and fatten, for one glutton’s dish.20

  Elizabeth Marsh made some attempts in The Female Captive to protect her reputation and repel criticism. She was careful to stress that she had not been enslaved, and her theme throughout is resistance: how she overcame fear, hardship, physical danger, a hostile landscape, and attempted seduction by the most powerful man in Morocco. This was unlikely to compensate, however, for some of her other admissions: that she had determined to set sail, as a single woman, in a ship full of men; that she had masqueraded for months as the wife of someone she later married; that in Sidi Muhammad’s palace she had twice been exposed to what one reviewer called ‘the machinations of [this] Morisco lover’.21 Nor could she rely on readers responding favourably to the evidence she supplied at intervals of her personal toughness, her proven capacity to endure extreme heat, long journeys on a mule, inadequate food, an absence of fresh clothes and of rudimentary privacy. ‘It’s very unnatural,’ an English writer observed at this time in a magazine essay devoted to ‘Woman’,

  to love those who are neither of a tender or delicate disposition; but on the contrary are of a bold, impudent deportment. What a grovelling soul must he have who can mix his passions with any thing so odious!… Courage in that sex is to me as disgustful as effeminacy in men. I cannot bear to find even their sentiments of the male kind.

  George Marsh was so struck by this extract that he pasted it into what he appropriately regarded as his commonplace book. Even though the scope of female writing and publishing was expanding, it was still the case that ‘women of reputation almost never offered for publication accounts of their own lives except with heavy overlays of piety’.22 Elizabeth Marsh made room in The Female Captive for ‘overlays of piety’, and at this stage she may have meant them, but she also wrote about her boldness, impudence and courage, and other deviations from customary female norms. Why did she embark on such a level of exposure?

  At one level, the answer must be that she had little choice. As a now penniless woman whose husband was voyaging further away from her with every day that passed, and who was immured in Chatham with her children and under parental supervision, writing for the market on a subject likely to attract public attention was one of the very few ways available whereby she could hope to earn any money. Moreover, although she published anonymously, she had no choice but to reveal the fact of her writing to others. As a first-time, female author with no funds at her disposal, Elizabeth was in a weak negotiating position vis à vis her publisher and retailer Charles Bathurst. He was a well-established, experienced man in his fifties, who claimed to possess genteel connections, and had a reputation for publishing dead, stellar literary figures such as Jonathan Swift, and sheet music. It may have been the latter which brought him and his bookshop at 26 Fleet Street to Elizabeth’s notice.23 Or George Marsh may have known and recommended Bathurst on the strength of the printing work he sometimes carried out for Parliament. Either way, she had to offer the bookseller some economic incentive for undertaking the risk of publishing an unknown. She did so in a fashion that was traditional among writers operating under more than usual pressure: she sold her book by subscription. That is, friends, relations and anyone else she could persuade – eighty-three people in all – were got to commit to buying single or multiple copies of The Female Captive in advance of its publication, in return for their names being displayed on its opening pages. This lessened Bathurst’s risk in publishing the work, and provided Elizabeth’s acquaintances with a discreet means of extending charity to her in her emergency.24

  Publishing in this fashion meant, of course, that she wrote with the certainty that everything she was confessing to – every thought, every action, every judgement she included about others – was likely to be read and become known by virtually everyone in her own circle. Stripped of privacy by others during her Moroccan ordeal, she now discarded it herself. Although she concealed certain dates in her book and replaced letters in names with dashes, she provided ample clues to the identity of her various characters. In addition to applying to scores of potential subscribers, she also discussed her book and its background with other, more distant acquaintances. These included Sir William Musgrave, a bibliophile, a trustee of the British Museum, and a Commissioner of the Customs, whose office near the Thames was only streets away from the Crisps’ final London home in Camomile Street. As his copy of The Female Captive reveals, Musgrave found it a simple matter to fill in the names of virtually everyone referred to in it. He also jotted down on its pages personal details about Elizabeth Marsh herself, and his conviction that hers was ‘a true story’.25 So although she withheld her name from the title page, she did not strive to keep her authorship a secret, and this was not simply out of necessity. The opportunity to insert certain arguments and information in the public domain cancelled out for her the risks that she was running.

  This tension between Elizabeth Marsh’s desire to vindicate herself in the wake of yet another shameful disruption of her life, and seemingly an urge also to give herself away, shapes the book. At one level she was anxious to appear in print as a suffering innocent, and to offer up her hardships as conclusive proof of that innocence. Most members of the Marsh family read avidly, and purchased novels as well as non-fiction. A family copy of Samuel Richardson’s evocation of the perfect moral gentleman, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), still exists today in an Australian library.26 In this, as in all of his highly profitable novels, Richardson makes his heroes, but more especially his heroines, undergo pitiful ordeals and scenes of distress, in order that their virtue may be exhibited and still further refined. In these, as in other novels of sentiment, ‘sensibility, and therefore virtue, is most excited, and therefore most manifest, when threatened’. Suffering, especially on the part of women, becomes a proof of moral worth, and is expressed overwhelmingly through the body, by faintings, tears, sobs, shrieks, clutching hands and distraught facial expressions.27

  Elizabeth Marsh drew on all of these conventions from the sentimental novels that she knew well when writing The Female Captive. In 1756 her fellow captives in Morocco had commented on her physical and mental resilience, ‘beyond what may be expected from her tender sex’. But in print Elizabeth droops, melts, faints and near-faints at intervals, is ‘shocked … beyond expression’, is only able to ‘answer with my tears’, is sometimes prepared to rely ‘on Divine Providence for support in all my afflictions’, but on other occasions craves, like Richardson’s most famous female victim, Clarissa Harlowe, ‘to be t
aken from this world, as it afforded me no consolation’. She deliberately re-enacts at least part of her Mediterranean and Moroccan ordeal in the guise of a sentimental heroine, so that ‘the Generous, the Tender, and the Compassionate’ whom she appeals to in her preface, those whose minds are properly ‘endowed with sensibility’, will interpret her serial misfortunes, too, as evidence of unjustly abused virtue.28

  Her descriptions of trauma were more than literary pastiche however. In the immediate aftermath of her time in Morocco, Elizabeth Marsh seems to have tried to exorcise any remaining shock and anger through a mixture of talk, humour, creativity and vanity. Even then, she had been busy converting what had happened into stories, but at this early, verbal stage, stressing and inventing elements of the ridiculous. Shortly after her return to England in 1757, for instance, she confided to George Marsh how she and James Crisp had made a point of addressing each other very loudly as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, both in company and behind the doors of successive cells in Sla and Marrakech, in the hope that any nearby Anglophone Moroccans might overhear and believe them really married. And she told self-regarding tales of the obesity of some of Sidi Muhammad’s silk-and-muslin-clad women (‘a vast number, and so fat that they could hardly walk’), and of how the acting Sultan had remarked by contrast on her own comparative slenderness: that ‘she was very pretty, and would be remarkably so, when she grew fatter’.29 None of these early anecdotes appears in The Female Captive. Instead, Elizabeth created its mood of menace, misery and fear not just by emulating some of the novels that she knew, but also out of her own recent experiences. Some of the depression and bitter, near-suicidal despair she describes herself as feeling in Morocco in 1756 probably represents more accurately her emotions during and after James Crisp’s bankruptcy and departure: ‘tho’ I was preserved, yet it was for still greater sorrows, and in my own country, than any I ever experienced, even in Barbary’.30

  James Crisp himself appears repeatedly in the book, though never under his own name, or with any reference to his commercial exploits or misfortunes. Instead, he features as her ‘faithful friend’, her ‘worthy friend’. He did ‘all in his power to render my situation tolerable’, she writes of their time together in Morocco, and said ‘all he could to keep up my spirits’.31 ‘The most affectionate parent,’ she claimed in a draft version, ‘could not have been more tenderly careful of me.’ He had behaved towards her as if ‘to a sister’. In the aftermath of her husband’s ruin and flight, she seems, and in part genuinely was, determined to assert his integrity and decency, not least so as to rebut the criticisms that were now being levelled against him by members of her own family. ‘His behaviour would always bear the most accurate inspection,’ she insists. His conduct ‘must gain him the esteem of the honest and virtuous part of mankind’, she has another character in her book remark. He is ‘a man of honour and [her own italics] a Christian.’32

  Bombarded with these tributes, it takes time to register that Elizabeth Marsh only ever mentions James Crisp in relation to herself, and that he is an almost inaudible, often helpless actor in her story. Her frequent likening of him to a brother, a friend or a father, a strategy that is transparently designed to make her own conduct in Morocco seem more acceptable, also has the effect of making Crisp appear almost sexless. None of this remotely conveyed his real role and behaviour in 1756, or probably her own attitude to him at that time. Rather, the passages devoted to Crisp in The Female Captive can be read as suggesting how Elizabeth Marsh was coming to view her husband by 1769, though at this stage only at intervals: as congenitally unlucky, as incapable of supporting her or the children, even as no longer effectively male. In the book’s climax, it is she alone who confronts and eludes Sidi Muhammad. Just as, for all the periodic tears and faints she lays claim to, it is she who frequently takes the initiative: ‘The heat of the sun, as the day advanced, was extremely great … I purchased some water-melons; and distributed part of them among the sailors.’ Meanwhile, in the text, James Crisp struggles: ‘my friend … was always ill-treated, and never able to succeed’.33 He is a vague, emasculated creation in another sense. Other than his usefulness to her, she reveals little about his attributes, and nothing at all about his appearance.

  This may have been decorum on her part, a disinclination to publish personal details about the man who had become her husband. Yet in regard to some of the other men she encountered in the Mediterranean world in 1756, she was not reticent. In some ways, indeed, The Female Captive is a book about Elizabeth Marsh and a quartet of males, of whom James Crisp is only one. She describes at the outset how, when driven out of Menorca, she had entertained ‘pleasing hopes’ of being reunited in Gibraltar with her then fiancé, the future Captain Henry Towry, and how ‘greatly disappointed’ she was on finding that he had already sailed for Britain. When discussing her time at Marrakech and Asfi, she refers to her pleasure in the ‘agreeable company’ of John Court, the Barbary merchant and traveller, with his ‘amiable’ manner and fine singing voice.34 She describes in far more detail Court’s delight in herself. At one level, the role she assigns him is to perceive and testify to her quality and purity, something that a sympathetic male character frequently does in regard to the heroines of sentimental novels. Thus she prints a letter that (she claims) Court sent her while she was still in Morocco, urging that:

  While you are obliged to remain in Barbary, endeavour to reconcile yourself to it; reflect, that it is a misfortune you have no way brought upon yourself, nor have it in your power to remedy; have a firm trust in Providence, and be assured Virtue and Innocence will ever be the peculiar care of that supreme Disposer of all Events, who is capable of extricating you from your present distresses.35

  The inclusion of letters within her story was another device that Elizabeth Marsh borrowed from sentimental novels. But, as she quotes them, John Court’s letters convey more than reassurance. ‘You engross much of my thoughts,’ he tells her. She has made a ‘lasting impression’ on him ‘that I am not capable of shaking off’, and their time together has been ‘as a dream’. ‘Those you were most intimate with in Europe,’ he assures Elizabeth before she escapes, ‘cannot be under greater anxiety for your deliverance than I am.’36 Even when she is safely back in Gibraltar, he begs to be allowed to continue their correspondence, ‘which I fear I am totally deprived of’, assuring her that this request ‘is no way contrary to the severest rules’; and he (or she) goes on to misquote from a poem by Alexander Pope: ‘Though seas come ’tween us, and whole Oceans roll’. As educated readers at the time would have recognized, the line is adapted from ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717), a lament on a great passion cruelly sundered:

  Rise Alps between us! And whole oceans roll!

  Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me,

  Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.37

  Some of this may have been self-regarding fantasy on Elizabeth’s part, or her publisher’s, but it is likely that John Court was a lonely man when she met him in Morocco, ‘banished for some years, from every thing that is polite’, as he told her, and that he did respond warmly to the unexpected company of a very young, attractive, intelligent and extremely vulnerable woman.38 By 1769 Court was safely married, but he still subscribed that year to four copies of Elizabeth’s book.39 Recalling his attachment, and publishing or refurbishing extracts from his letters (which she must have kept), may have salved her pride at a time when, for all she or anyone else knew, James Crisp was gone forever.

  Describing how the acting Sultan of Morocco had sought her out and sought her favours was obviously a far more dramatic assertion of her singularity and capacity to fascinate. Sidi Muhammad emerges from The Female Captive more vividly than any other character except Elizabeth herself. She describes his face and physique, the different clothes and jewels he wore, his voice, the objects that he touched, how he moved and sat, and the interiors surrounding him. And far more than in regard to James Crisp, or John Court, or her lost fiancé, she conf
esses to her own excitement in the acting Sultan’s presence, though in so contorted a manner that the admission is easily missed. ‘I was ever in dread,’ she writes of her time in Asfi, ‘that His Imperial Highness would again send for me, having heard from undoubted authority, that I was not indifferent to him.’40 She was afraid of going back, not just because of his desires, but also because of her own.

  This is such an extraordinary admission in an avowedly autobiographical book by a woman at this time that it is tempting to dismiss it as someone else’s titillating insert. Charles Bathurst certainly did make some alterations to the text of The Female Captive. In manuscript, for instance, Elizabeth Marsh seems to have written straightforwardly of how she was allowed to kiss the hands of ‘a young Prince and Princess’, two of Sidi Muhammad’s children, during her second visit to his Marrakech palace. In print, these young royal hands became ‘tawny’, an adjective that she herself never employed. In the case of her statement that she was ‘not indifferent’ to Morocco’s acting Sultan, however, there was no editorial interference. These are her own words, printed unaltered from an original draft copy.41