The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  As Mrs. Delany’s eyesight diminished, her work became bolder and closer to that of twentieth-century collage artists such as Henri Matisse. A close-up detail of the pea blossom has a lush abstraction to it, the type of abstraction that, like Matisse’s, comes from the experienced hand under constraint. Matisse made his cut-outs in late life, too, in his last four years in fact, sitting in his wheelchair, arthritis having crippled his hands too severely to hold his brushes.1 As the light was dimming for Mrs. Delany, the blossoms sometimes became more profuse. This is one of her most fertile collages, with nine blossoms on the main plant. Combining the pinks with startling abstract red circles of color, she gives an impression of a flower unprepossessing but full of vectors of energy, as the whole twenty-five years of her married life were. Her Great Middle Period, busy with new enterprises like gardening and oil painting as well as the role of wife of a distinguished clergyman, was not everlasting, of course, but it did exist in a kind of heaven for her. “Monday a rage of painting seized me. I took up my pencils and sat down to my picture (at 7 in the morning),”2 she exclaimed to Anne in April 1760, less than one month before her sixtieth birthday. She thought of herself as old then, though now we know she was just at the end of the second third of her life. There she was, embarked on an adventure of supported creativity she had never anticipated, and much of it was centered around Delville, the house she shared with her husband.

  It was a house her sister, her closest confidante and her best friend, never saw.

  After their marriages Mary and Anne were separated so completely that, by September 1745, Mary remarked in awe of the chasm that separated them, “Is it not strange, my dear sister, that you and I should dwell in houses that neither of us have seen – that I should be unacquainted with your home and you with mine?”3 As soon as Mary had arrived at Delville the year before, she’d created a guest room for Anne, and she called it the English Room and painted it not crimson, as she had her own room, but olive.4 The two rooms mirrored the palette of colors Mary would establish for her mosaicks: the calm olives, lodens, blue-greens, browns, and grays of her stems and leaves; and the bright reds, purples, yellows, pinks, and whites of her flowers. The English Room was a kind of room of the mind, standing in preparation for a visitor who was always about to appear. As Mary periodically described it to Anne in her heartfelt invitations over the years, it became like a picture of a room in a contemporary architecture magazine, poufed for a photograph, set, inviting, pre-inhabited. Eventually the chamber, with its Zen-like calm, was used by others, by Letitia Bushe, Ann Donnellan, and Mrs. Hamilton. Her friends slipped in and out, ghostly sister-substitutes, for the better part of two decades.

  Part of the reason for Anne’s failure to visit was that she and John Dewes had four children in four years: Court (b. 1742), Bernard (called Bunny or Banny, b. 1743), John (b. 1744), and Mary (Mrs. D.’s namesake, b. 1746). From the minute her nephews and niece were born, Anne’s childless older sister felt absolutely free to give advice on child-rearing, which (even as an increasingly experienced mother) Anne graciously received. Mary was full of remedies for childhood maladies and opinions on children’s education, and what children should be allowed to say and do and wear. Aside from frailer health and greater family commitments, Anne did not muster her energies for the sea-going trip because her intrepid older sister traveled to England every three years. Mary eventually visited Wellesbourne, Anne’s house, many times. But no matter how often she invited Anne, her sister never crossed the Irish Sea – even during Patrick Delany’s legal and professional crises. By 1752 Mary was begging her.

  Could you not, my most dear sister, come to me conveniently this year? it would lessen my difficulties greatly, but I know till you have settled your boys you would not care to undertake the journey; and if, as indeed I now hope, we can visit England this year, the next I flatter myself with the charming hope of bringing you, Mr. Dewes, and our dear girl back with me.5

  In the twenty-five years of her voluntary Irish exile, Mary saw her sister for perhaps eight or nine extended visits, one of which was when their mother died in 1747. For Mary, settled with the Dean and having long before experienced the death of her Aunt Stanley, the period of mourning for Mrs. Granville was less fraught. But Anne lost the person she had modeled her life on. The woman who had loomed over Mary as a shrieking hysteric, whom her father had had to shut up and calm down, was for Anne, the spinner and homebody, the widow who clung to her younger daughter, yet who let her go at the age of thirty-three into a married life. Motherhood was Anne’s calling, and if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t be telling this story. Anne was the mother of the woman who was the mother of the woman who collected her Great-Aunt Delany’s letters and shepherded her flower mosaicks to the British Museum. Not to mention Anne’s later direct descendant Ruth Hayden, who wrote the book that hoodwinked me into seizing this potent role model.

  One of the strange advantages of Mary’s not seeing Anne, yet being so close to her and so confident of being read accurately by her, is that Mary internalized Anne’s listening ear. Her letters grew to be part diary (and part blog). But Anne took advantage of her distance as well. It allowed her the time to process all that Mary told her, and it gave her time to compose her own wise personality. Mary was looking for a friend and a sister’s good sense, but what she got, because of the physical absence, was an eighteenth-century version of a twentieth-century psychoanalytic experience. What benefited Mary Delany, artist, was a physical embodiment – in iron gall ink on paper – of episodes of her life. In a way, Mary’s letters to Anne are a paper mosaick of days and weeks, hundreds into the thousands of sentences cut in organic shapes to form the art of living.

  An actual specimen of a Lathyrus latifolius flower is shaped a bit like a paper airplane. It has aeronautical names for its different petals: under the standard petal (the one shaped like a headdress) sits the “keel” petal, and to the sides of the keel petal are two “wing” petals. John Keats (1795–1821), born fourteen years after Mrs. D. cut out her Everlasting Pea, wrote about the quality in a sweet pea that seems to be standing “on tip-toe for a flight,” like a letter about to be posted, in “I Stood Tip-Toe upon a Little Hill”:

  Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight:

  With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,

  And taper fingers catching at all things,

  To bind them all about with tiny rings.6

  For Keats, the vines were “taper fingers”; Mrs. Delany slipped her own fingers into the “tiny rings” of the vines and designed them as scissors. Even though the flowers and buds are more abstracted in her collage, Mrs. Delany probably dissected the plant to get her sense of how the flowering vine was put together. If you dissect the pea blossom, it looks like this:7

  Cross-section of a Pea Blossom (illustration credit 10.1)

  But Mrs. D.’s Everlasting Pea also focuses on the pea vine itself. There is a hinged quality to it; the vine comes in long, almost rectangular links (there are five in the main stem of the plant in the collage), and these links have joints like little elbows or wrists. A sturdy, multiple-hinged plant, it’s willing to scramble anywhere – up a hillside, down a ditch, over a lattice, around a pole. The Everlasting Pea bears four pea pods, just as there were four siblings in Mary’s family and four children born to Anne. “What a pleasure it is to see the growing friendship of your children!” Mary wrote from Mount Panther in the summer of 1752. Yet, as she thought of her niece and nephews playing together, she was struck with a bitter wistfulness. “And yet, my dear sister, it is laying in a store of woe; for if they partake of each other’s joys they must also feel each other’s sorrows, and the lot of sorrow in this world is generally a larger check than that of joy.” A streak of sadness seized her. “And yet for all my experience, which is now of a very long standing, I cannot relinquish the least part of your love, nor you of mine; – it is wove with our thread of life, and it must last as long.”8 That scrambling vine, with its determined te
ndrils, does not relinquish its intertwining.

  Both of the sisters hung on to one another. In fact they found their adult leave-takings so painful that they chose never to say an actual goodbye. Each one left the other early in the morning, before breakfast, as Mary did when she snuck away from her first visit to the newlywed Anne, who woke in shock to find her gone.

  You was so cruel, my dear Penny, as not to let me hear one of your dear steps this morning, for which I listened most attentively, but since you denied me that pleasing pain I composed my spirits, went to sleep and took a nap, rose with heavy steps, and came to the deserted parlour and solitary breakfast, which I swallowed like a pill, as fast as I could, then took up a Guardian, then the Bible, then rummaged upstairs, opened and shut your drawers a hundred times, because they had been yours.9

  Fifteen years later Anne snuck quietly away from Mary’s house in London in the early morning to go home. That day Mary wrote, “I knew you meant to steal kindly away.… I arose at half an hour after seven and prepared my colours [pigment for painting] – they all looked dull. It was well my business was only to dead colour; it suited my somber thoughts.” But when she received a note from Anne later that day, she was full of energy to paint. “I ran up to my picture at ten, D.D. followed me and read a manuscript.”10

  The sisters shared every aspect of their everyday lives, from cooking to servants to home medicine. They suffered each other’s reversals of fortunes, too. When Mary and Patrick went to England during their legal crisis, Anne and John Dewes came to London and stayed three months. When John Dewes lost a great deal of money, the Delanys did what they could to help. By the time the sisters reached their fifties, it is hard to say who was the lattice and who the vine. By March 1756, Mary’s niece Mary Dewes, age nine, was old enough to come for an extended stay with the Delanys in London. Mrs. D. easily took on this child, knowing also that she was taking on an expense for her sister when the Dewes household was in financial straits, and knowing something else, too: Anne’s health had begun to fail. “The girl is neither trouble nor confinement to me, but a great delight to D.D. and me.”11

  That month, while her daughter was attending what her Aunt Delany called her “school in Spring Gardens,”12 Anne quietly wrote a will. Until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, the only way a woman could keep her fortune was to be widowed (or, if single, as Ann Donnellan was, to have a dowry assigned to her by her father).13 Anne’s will involved only personal objects of property.

  Anne Granville Dewes (illustration credit 10.2)

  Welsbourn, 23rd March, 1756.

  I desire my daughter, Mary Dewes, may have all that is in this drawer, and in the middle part of the escrutoire that is over it, and the little cabinet that is there, and all that is in it; and besides, my watch, chain, and seals that Mr. Dewes gave me, and all my rings, earrings, necklaces, boxes, little pictures that are in my Japan cabinet, and shells that are there, and all my clothes, linen, and work, &c. that are not otherwise disposed of; only if she should have another picture or more of her Aunt Delany besides that of mine enamelled by Zincke and that in water-colours, she will give them her brothers – first Court, then Bunny and Jackey, that they may each of them have a picture of their dear and good Aunt Delany.

  The ruby ring she must have, as mentioned in a paper by itself. What of my French books she chooses, and my English books with “Anne Granville’s ” name in them divided between her and her brothers as they shall agree, and I hope they will never disagree about things of more consequence.

  The old china cup with the gilt cover and saucer, that has a setting in gold belonging to it, Mary must have, and give it to her daughter if she has one, if not to one of her brother’s daughters, as it has gone from daughter to daughter these three hundred years.14

  As she composed this moving document, her sister was writing to supply information about that very daughter who was to inherit the old china cup. “Mary is now practicing the clavichord, which I have got in the dining-room that I may hear her practise at my leisure moments. She reads an hour every evening to the Dean, and then they play two games at cribbage.”15 As an aunt and uncle, Mary and Patrick were warm and generous, but Aunt Delany had a bit of Aunt Stanley in her when it came to compliments. “The Duchess of Portland has just drank tea with Mary and me,” she told her sister; “the girl looked in great beauty, and the Duchess thinks her very pretty; but this you may be sure she did not say before her face.”

  When Anne felt better, she put away her will. She read her books, kept the china cup on its shelf, and proceeded to eat four more years of meals with her husband, daughter, and sons at Wellesbourne – and to write four more years of letters to her best friend and big sister, who dispensed advice about her niece, right down to her cough remedy. “Does Mary cough in the night? two or three snails boiled in her barley-water, or tea-water, or whatever she drinks, might be of great service to her; taken in time they have done wonderful cures.”16 As soon as Mary Dewes was old enough, she, too, started corresponding with her Aunt Delany – who corrected her niece’s handwriting and tried to improve her study skills. “I think your last [letter] was tolerably written considering you have not practiced much without lines; your f’s do not stick out their elbows quite so much, and in time will have a free and easy air! … I wish you good success with your spinning; you have undertaken a large work. I shall be very glad to receive any of your French performances; and if you write or translate but six lines every day it will improve you very much.”17 Handwriting represented a person; it was tantamount to clothing. One sharpened one’s quills, dipped them in iron gall ink, and set forth as if stepping out of the house onto the street, or even only into the garden, where in the summer of 1760 Mary saw two albino robins and told her sister a prophetic story.

  Lathyrus latifolius, detail (illustration credit 10.3)

  “I must tell you of an extraordinary curiosity at Delville; two young robins as white as snow were taken in the garden.” The Delanys, or members of their household, captured and caged the white birds and must have hung the cage outdoors in proximity to the mother robin, “a common robin red-breast, [who] fed them in the cage every day!” Of the two robin siblings, one became weak and began to fail. The other one thrived. “One is dead, the other alive and well …”18

  By October of 1760, the Delanys, with goddaughter Sally Chapone and their servant Smith, had arrived at Bath for the healing waters. The Dean, by now about seventy-five years old and palsied, might have been picked up by a sedan chair from their lodgings and carried by two men to the baths, which were (and are) located adjacent to the Abbey Church. The waters were taken from pumps in buildings erected over the ruins of Roman baths that had been constructed directly over the healing hot springs.

  On the Sunday morning after King George II died, at whose coronation years ago Mrs. D. had had her cape torn off in the crush, she woke in her bed at Bath “with the news of the King’s death!” That day they “attempted the pump room – so crowded no admittance.”19 Had she and presumably the Dean been admitted, they would have stood by an urn, filled their cups with water from the springs, and imbibed. They might have had a meal there. With her husband’s health, the old King’s death, and a new King’s reign on her mind, a few days later she knelt in a pew at the Abbey Church near the baths, where she found herself praying “most fervently for the recovery of my dearest sister’s health.”20 By now she was compelled to transfer some of her trust to her niece, because it was Mary Dewes who wrote to her about her mother’s condition and to whom Mrs. D. confessed her anxiety over Anne’s “several attacks of … giddiness.”21

  Leaving her husband to continue “his course of drinking the waters” under the watchful Smith, Mrs. Delany took Sally and left Bath to visit her cousin Thomas at Longleat, where a famous landscaper had tackled the grounds, now “all modernized by the ingenious and much sought after Mr. Brown [Lancelot “Capability” Brown].”22 It may have been during this time that Mrs. Del
any, full of energy herself, cut the silhouettes of her cousin’s children. Yet in days she was back at Bath, writing an anxious letter. She had consulted Mr. Henshaw, an expert, about Anne’s condition. He was “convinced your giddiness was a bilious disorder; that he was confirmed in that opinion by the bark and the valerian not agreeing with you.”23 Bark tea and valerian must have made Anne vomit. Not only was she throwing up these strong, assaultive homemade potions, but the doctor was holding a scalpel, much like the scalpel Mrs. Delany might have used for her collage of the Everlasting Pea, to the inside of Anne’s pale, fifty-three-year-old arm. She was bled but “had a giddy fit or two after it.”24

  Mrs. Delany and the Dean meanwhile traveled from Bath to Bulstrode, still accompanied by Sally Chapone and Smith. They must have visited Wellesbourne on the way, because Mary reported that D.D. was “better than he was” there,25 though now he had contracted a cold and a sore throat. In counterpoint to her husband’s illness and Anne’s wretched state, Bulstrode spun with scientific and artistic activity. At this time Mary and her friend the Duchess embarked on a design for a shell grotto there. “The great cave is begun, and will be, I hope, when finished, very handsome.… I am making some shell-work … visiting the cave every day.”26 As they sorted shells for their grand design, Mrs. D. learned that Ann Donnellan was ill as well, and she was full of practical advice for her sister, recommending Henshaw, and Dr. Oliver, a famous physician at Bath. She volunteered to meet her sister at Bristol should she be sent there for the waters, “provided D.D. is well enough for me to leave him!”27 The more intense her concern for her sister became, the more energy she poured into her shells, and the Duchess began to substitute for Anne’s listening ear. “Our works go on here very well; I am glad to be so much employed, as it hides a little what my heart is so full of; … [the Duchess] indulges me every day by talking of you … but what you suffer at present, that dwells on my mind.”28 After Mary, with a helpless fervor, wished Anne a happy new year on January 2, 1761, the letters broke off.