Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  There was nothing strange, then, for Charlotte or her sisters in making sacrifices for Branwell. But there was much more to swallow than that. Patricia Beer quotes from a letter Robert Southey wrote to Charlotte in 1837, when she had ventured to ask him for advice on a literary career:

  Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.

  To this Charlotte replied:

  In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble anyone else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of preoccupation and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits. Following my father’s advice – who from my childhood has counselled me just in the wise and friendly tone of your letter – I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself; and my father’s approbation amply rewarded me for the privation.

  The sense of outrage with which one reads both these passages is increased when one recalls the fervent admiration Southey had expressed as a young man, forty years earlier, for the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But it is not really surprising that he did not send copies of the works of Mary Wollstonecraft to Haworth Parsonage. A wall had gone up, the cordon sanitaire Jane Austen’s generation set between the doubts, hopes and demands of the 1790s and the Victorian era. Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas had been almost totally rejected; and even worse than her ideas was the spontaneity of her life, which offered a model for disgrace and tragedy to all young women after her.

  Jane Austen’s remark about a Mr Pickford she met in Bath in 1801 – ‘as raffish in his appearance as I would wish every Disciple of Godwin to be’ – tells us, with her customary succinctness, what her view of Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband was. She did not make direct attacks; there were others to do that, from Hannah More to Harriet Martineau. But the general insistence throughout Jane Austen’s novels on the necessity of accommodating oneself to society as it is, whatever its defects, for fear of something worse, owes more than is usually acknowledged to the events of the 1790s. This is a period from which very few of her letters survive, but she was already adult, able to follow the political controversies of the day and certainly apprised of the case of Mrs Godwin. There was, in fact, a family link with one of Mary’s patrons, since the Reverend Austen taught his son.

  Sense and Sensibility, drafted and then revised for the first time in the 1790s, contains a portrait of a girl who allows her feelings to strip off the protection afforded by decorum. Marianne Dashwood risks seduction (her predecessor in Willoughby’s attentions actually gives birth to his child) and the pain she endures by being publicly jilted is as agonizing as any betrayal could be. Jane Austen was fascinated by the character of Marianne: she gives her more physical presence than any of her heroines, with her transparent brown skin, black curly hair and frequent blushes betokening rage or pleasure as often as modesty. (When betrayed, she covers her face with her handkerchief and ‘almost screams with agony’.) She is endowed with superabundant energy (energy was the quality Godwin considered most valuable), with honesty and with an inability to suppress her instinctual reactions to whatever she encounters. The logic of the book, and some inner determination of Jane Austen’s, demand that she be tamed. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Sense and Sensibility, Tony Tanner has said: ‘One can feel that there is something punitive in the taming of Marianne and all she embodies, indeed one might think that something is being vengefully stamped out. It is as though Jane Austen had gone out of her way to show that romantic feelings are utterly non-viable in society.’ What Marianne embodies is precisely the spontaneous side of Mary Wollstonecraft, her rejection of prudence and decorum, her scorn for the forms of society. To Jane Austen, this had come to seem exceedingly dangerous; as D. W. Harding said of her, she ‘genuinely valued the achievements of the civilization she lived within and never lost sight of the fact that there might be something vastly worse’. Might be! She knew there was something worse: the anarchy of the French Revolution, the disorder and despair of the woman who sought to make her own rules as she went along.

  Marianne is not permitted to lose her chastity; she has to remain accessible to the reader, and for most nineteenth-century writers unchastity was enough to disqualify a woman from being written about in fully human terms. Such women tended to appear as stereotypes, denied development. Mrs Gaskell, for instance, despite her courage in attempting the portraits of several fallen women, regarded them as irredeemable except through prolonged punishment ending in death. She seems to concur in society’s punishment and, in Patricia Beer’s excellent words, ‘regards sexual intercourse outside marriage as a kind of disease with after-effects. It may not have been the heroine’s fault that she caught it, or she may have been guilty of little worse than imprudence, but it cannot possibly be annulled and the results are automatic and inescapable.’ The idea that she might want sexual experience is not to be entertained.

  It is not surprising to find the following comment on Charlotte Bronte’s engagement in a letter of Mrs Gaskell’s: ‘I am sure Miss Brontë could have never borne not to be well ruled and ordered. I mean that she would never have been happy but with an exacting, rigid, law-giving, passionate man.’ We may feel that the last epithet is in contradiction to the other three, which is perhaps in itself a commentary on the erotic ideas of women in the middle of the century.

  Patricia Beer points out that Charlotte Brontë, although in Shirley she put in a strong formal plea for education and work opportunities for women, simply did not inhabit a world in which ideas of women’s rights could take root. She could not escape the emotional conviction that marriage, meaning the subjection of the wife, was the only fate to be desired. Her heroines often dream of escape from physical confinement, but they are always running in the direction of a masterful embrace.

  Elizabeth Hardwick has something particularly fine to say about Charlotte’s struggles:

  How to live without love, without security? Hardly any other Victorian woman had thought as much about this as Charlotte Brontë. The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories – mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium – are representations of the life she could not face; these Gothic subterfuges represent the mind at breaking point, frantic to find a way out. If the flaws are only to be attributed to the practice of popular fiction of the time, we cannot then explain the large amount of genuine feeling that goes into them. They stand for the hidden wishes of an intolerable life.

  ‘The hidden wishes of an intolerable life’: it is a memorable phrase, and can stand for a good deal that puzzles us in nineteenth-century fiction. Men were not unaware of these hidden, gothic horrors. Thackeray could not let Becky Sharp be simply on the make; she had to be turned into an evil, snake-like presence. Dickens’s women (as John Carey has recently pointed out) wield their needles and scissors, those very tokens of subjection to domesticity, with murderous darts and jabs when they are roused. And even George Eliot, who took upon herself the mantle of male wisdom, and seems almost to have enjoyed frustrating her heroines’ aspirations, shows others than Gwendolen with murderous impulses. Lydgate’s remark in Middlemarch about his lovely Rosamond seems to fit in here: ‘He once called her his basil-plant, and when asked for an explanation said that the basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.’

  George Eliot’s approach to the ‘woman question’ is the more surprising when one reflects on her friendship with women who were actively engaged in the struggle for education, employment and the vote. Patricia Beer praises her for having a mind ‘too subtle an
d reflective to take the plain straightforward view’, and quotes her remark on the unlikelihood of finding a perfect plan for educating women, since none had yet been found for men. But this is, of course, the sort of argument that blocks all political action, and does her little credit.

  I would like to end on quite a different note, with a story of my own. The year before George Eliot’s death, a Manchester girl of twenty-one, named Emmeline Goulden, proposed to her much older fiancé – he had been a friend of John Stuart Mill – that they should enter into a free union rather than going through a marriage ceremony. He pointed out that the precedents were unfortunate -citing Mary Wollstonecraft – and she agreed reluctantly to a church wedding. Thereby, she became Mrs Pankhurst. But the whirligigs of time acted strangely for her. In 1927, long after the vote had been won, at the cost of much anger, her daughter Sylvia gave birth to a child conceived outside wedlock. Mrs Pankhurst’s horror was so great that she refused ever to see Sylvia again, and died soon after. Now Sylvia had been neither seduced nor betrayed; she had planned her action cheerfully and deliberately; yet her mother felt that she had exposed the family to unendurable mockery and condemnation. Anger remains a complicated emotion.

  Radio 3 review, printed in the Listener, 1974

  Criminal Conversation

  The Letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne edited by James O. Hoge and Clarke Olney

  Honour is due to Caroline Norton for her considerable part in changing the English law relating to the custody of infants (until 1839 the mother had no claim at all) and matrimonial status (until 1857 a married woman could not inherit or bequeath property, nor could a deserted wife protect her own earnings from her husband). She was active in these matters because they affected her personally; she disclaimed any interest in ‘equal rights’ and, characteristically looking back into the eighteenth century, said she had no wish to be taken for ‘something between a barn-actress and a Mary Wollstonecraft. Some may think she has deserved her fate, which has been to be remembered as a society beauty who became involved in scandals and raised a clamorous voice against her sufferings: and it is this Caroline who appears in these hitherto unpublished letters. They remained in the possession of the Lamb family until 1953, when they were deposited in the Hertford County Record Office; the late Clarke Olney and James Hoge worked from microfilm – the English have not been quick to explore their own treasure-trove.

  The granddaughter of Sheridan, Caroline was black-eyed, high-spirited and witty. Sydney Smith called her a ‘superb lump of flesh’ with just that note of equivocation she has so often drawn. Her grandfather’s remark on seeing her led in, a tiny girl, was that she was not a child he would care to meet in a dark wood. George Norton, who became her husband, fell determinedly in love with her when she was still of school age but, growing maddened by her indifference and independence once they were married, turned to blows and then legal bullying. Mary Shelley, becoming her friend, wrote to Trelawny in 1835:

  Had I been a man I should certainly have fallen in love with her; as a woman, ten years ago, I should have been spellbound, and had she taken the trouble, she might have wound me round her finger… Now do not, in your usual silly way, show her what I say. She is, despite all her talent and sweetness, a London lady. She would guy me – not, perhaps, to you (well do I know the London ton!) but to everyone else – in her prettiest way.

  A London lady she was, with her small blue drawing-room in Westminster, her late arrivals at dinners, her quarrels with George and her radical enthusiasms. Needing money to live as she chose, she wrote poetry, plays and novels and edited ladies’ magazines, undeterred by pregnancies; and spiritedly she sent off a letter to the Whig Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, soliciting a place for her husband, though he was a Tory. Lord Melbourne arrived in the blue drawing-room in person in 1830, and for the next six years (during which he became Prime Minister) he saw her almost daily.

  He was nearly thirty years her senior; his wife (Caroline Lamb) had lately died; and he was a man peculiarly susceptible to the delights of a quasi-paternal relationship. Caroline Norton offered him beauty, charm, a sharp interest in everything that interested him and something like an eighteenth-century sense of fun; more, she idealized him for his urbanity, his power, wealth and well-preserved good looks. ‘Dearest Lord,’ she wrote when they were apart; or ‘Will of the Wisp’, when his expected letter failed; ‘Pet Lamb’, she told him, was her sister’s name for him. And he wrote to her, ‘I have been in despair today at not seeing you…

  Crisis came in 1836 when the petty but violent quarrels between Mr and Mrs Norton – unconnected with Lord M – became too much for either of them to bear, and she left home. George removed her three sons and, probably egged on by Tory advisers, brought a suit against the Prime Minister for criminal conversation (i.e., adultery) with Caroline. She found herself deprived of her children, whom she loved passionately, and equally deprived of Lord M, who, from the moment scandal threatened, withdrew, advising her (by post for the most part) to return to her husband, terrified lest she should try to compromise him.

  The most interesting of these letters relate to this period. It is clear from them that she was as deeply wounded by Melbourne’s pusillanimous withdrawal as by the loss of her children. ‘Well! I beg pardon. I don’t want to torment you – all I say is, worse women have been better stood by,’ is followed up by:

  I have your note. You need not fear my writing to you if you think it commits you. I struggle to think over all the fortuitous circumstances which make your position seem of more consequence than mine. I will not deny that among all the bitterness of this hour, what sinks me most is the thought of you – of the expression of your eye the day I told it you at Dng St – the shrinking from me & my burdensome & embarassing [sic] distress.

  God forgive you, for I do believe no one, young or old, ever loved another better than I have loved you… I will do nothing foolish or indiscreet – depend on it – either way it is all a blank to me. I dont much care how it ends… I have always the memory of how you received me that day, and I have the conviction that I have no further power than he allows me, over my boys. You & they were my interests in life. No future can ever wipe out the past-nor renew it.

  Later, pathetically, she says, ‘The fault is in me – I do not attach people’; still later there are very bitter outbursts against his behaviour, against the past, against other women friends of his; and she has a ‘paid-ojf, cast-off feeling’.

  The court found Caroline and Melbourne innocent; George himself later admitted he had not really suspected them, and Melbourne left a note at his death reiterating innocence. In her novels Caroline persistently condemns adultery, and in real life she cooled an eager peer who burst into her bedroom with the words ‘adultery is a crime, not a recreation’. The present editors are nevertheless inclined to think these letters change the picture. I cannot agree with them. It seems more likely that she was so disappointed and disgusted with her experience of sex within marriage as to lack any wish at all to embark on extra-marital ventures of that kind. In a sense she and Lord M were the perfect couple; her tragedy was that she could not quite cope with George, and that later Lord M found himself a far more fascinating and safer ‘daughter’ to dote upon, in the shape of Queen Victoria.

  He told his royal mistress that all the Sheridans were a little vulgar. Even after her death in 1877 Caroline has kept that taint of vulgarity about her. Lord David Cecil, understandably taking Lord M’s position more seriously than hers in his urbane biography (Lord M, 1954), presents her as a liability, stresses his kindness and says nothing of her pain at the severance of the relationship. Caroline’s biographers, Jane Perkins (1909) and Alice Acland (1948), although more sympathetic, still underplay what it must have meant to her. No doubt Philip Ziegler, who is working on a new life of Melbourne, will set the record straight. Meredith, in his deplorable Diana of the Crossways (1885), made a fictional version of Caroline which attributes immoral behaviour of another
kind to her – she sells political information to a journalist to spite a lover – but leaves out most of the real miseries of her story.

  People have not liked her clamorousness. She knew this, and made one of her fictional heroines complain that she is always accused of behaving like an actress. But she had serious wrongs to clamour against, not only the defection of her beloved but the loss of her children (the youngest was dying before she was sent for, dead when she arrived) and many years of persecution by her husband. These letters, on the whole scrupulously and informatively edited, should raise her stock a little by filling in the portrait. There is no faked emotion in this, written in June 1837:

  I hear nothing of you as I used to do, and feel much the same dreariness of heart that one does when watching by a sick bed: -every thing very cold, very dim, 8c very silent, 8c the clock ticking very loud.