The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  William Elstob died prematurely. Whereupon Elizabeth had at once to leave the university town. For many years subsequently she struggled in poverty. When she was trying to found a dame’s school at Evesham the distinguished scholar was obliged to issue a nervous apology concerning her lack of certain skills: ‘There are some things to be taught in such a school which I cannot pretend to; I mean the two accomplishments of spinning and knitting. Not that I would be thought to be above doing any commendable work proper to my sex’, she added hastily. ‘And as an instance of the truth of this, the gown I had on when you gave the favour of a visit was part of it my own spinning, and I wear no other stockings but what I knit myself.’58

  At one point Elizabeth Elstob was to be found ‘in her sleeping room, surrounded by books and dirtiness’; one who had ‘pursued too much the drug called learning’. This brilliant woman would in the opinion of her contemporaries have enjoyed a happier life if she had pursued instead the two accomplishments of spinning and knitting. As it was she became dependent on the patronage of the (female) great: Queen Caroline, wife of George II, was persuaded to make her a small allowance. After the Queen’s death, it was arranged that Elizabeth Elstob should enter the household of the Duchess of Portland – as governess to her children. And here in 1756, after eighteen years as a governess, the ‘Saxon nymph’ ended her days.59

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Petticoat-Authors

  ‘I hate these Petticoat-Authors; ’tis false Grammar, there’s no Feminine for the Latin word, ’tis entirely of the Masculine Gender, and the Language won’t bear such a thing as a She-author.’

  CHAGRIN THE CRITICK, IN A Comparison Between the Two Stages, 1702

  If a woman did by any chance seek to educate herself, wrote Damaris Lady Masham, she was liable to be treated as ‘a Scarecrow’ by the Wits in London: Lady Masham (John Locke’s ‘Philoclea’) added that in the country she would probably fare even worse. Scorn for the learned lady, generally expressed in cheerful ridicule rather than outright hostility but no less inhibiting for that, was one aspect of post-Restoration society with which every woman who pretended to achievements beyond the purely house-wifely – ‘the dull manage of a servile house’ in Anne Winchilsea’s phrase1 – had to cope.

  Numerous English playwrights found in the idea of the pretentiously learned female an enjoyable inspiration for the stage. They included, it should be said, her whom Evelyn termed ‘our Sappho … the Famous Heroina Boadicia’, Aphra Behn. In 1678 the character of Lady Knowall in Aphra Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy was founded on that of Mary Astell. ‘Oh, the delight of Books!’ exclaims Lady Knowall. She goes on to describe her serious reading as Tacitus, Seneca and Plutarch or ‘if in a Humour gay’ Virgil, Homer or Tasso, all studied ‘in the Excellence of their Original Language’. When the young Leander Fancy suggests that these authors can as well be read ‘in our Mother Tongue, Madam’, Lady Knowall turns on him: ‘Faugh, Mr Fancy, what have you said, Mother Tongue! Can anything that’s great or moving be express’d in Filthy English …?’2 So much for Mary Astell and her plans, so much for Basua Makin and her desperate plea that ‘tongues are learnt in order to [learn] things’.

  The success of Molière’s plays, crossing the Channel in English versions (Aphra Behn for example in Sir Patient Fancy drew upon Le Malade Imaginaire), added to the fun. Shadwell’s The Virtuoso of 1676, an adaptation of Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes, was itself pillaged by Thomas Wright in 1693 for The Female Vertuosos: Philaminte, Armande and Bélise emerging as Lady Meanwell, Mrs Lovewit and Catchat, three women of appropriately nonsensical achievements. Lady Meanwell has invented an engine to keep the streets of London dry and clean (‘’Tis only Setting up Timber Posts round about the City and then fixing a pair of Bellows on every one of ’em to blow the Clouds away!’). Catchat is teaching a flea to sing opera. Mrs Lovewit has made an exact collection of all the plays that ever came out, and has devised an alembic by means of which the quintessence of wit in them is to be extracted and sold to poets by drops. Congreve’s The Double Dealer of 1694 included the character of Lady Froth: ‘a great Coquet Pretender to Poetry, Wit and Learning’, prone to apostrophize her servant in banal verse:

  For as the Sun shines every day

  So, of our Coach-man I may say

  He shows his drunken fiery Face

  Just as the Sun does more or less.3

  At least Catchat in The Female Vertuosos was allowed to retort on the subject of female learning: ‘’Tis the partial, and foolish Opinion of Men, Brother, and not our Fault hath made it ridiculous nowadays …’ The trouble was that this ‘foolish Opinion’ grew rather than diminished in strength towards the end of the century. By 1702 the prevailing attitude of contempt for feminine achievement was summed up by the playwright and essayist Charles Gildon in A Comparison Between the Two Stages, through the mouthpiece of Chagrin the Critick: ‘I hate these Petticoat-Authors; ’tis false Grammar, there’s no Feminine for the Latin word, ’tis entirely of the Masculine Gender, and the Language won’t bear such a thing as a She-author.’ Although another character, Sullen, is more reasonable (a woman has recently won a prize for poetry in France, and even in England ‘some of that Sex … have done admirably’), to Chagrin it is all rubbish: ‘Let ’em scribble on, till they can serve all the Pastry-cooks in Town, the Tobacconists and Grocers with Waste-paper.’4

  There is indeed a newly sour note about the mockery poured upon the generation of female playwrights following Aphra Behn (who died in 1689 in her fiftieth year). The Female Wits, a play of 1696, said to be by ‘W.M.’, took as its target a trio of women, Catherine Trotter, Mary Manley and Mary Pix, all of whom made their debut as petticoat-dramatic-authors about this time, and castigated them; although the author has not been identified, the piece was sufficiently appealing to the public taste to be published in 1704.5

  In the following reign, all three of these women – Catherine Trotter (later Cockburn) at eighteen was the youngest, the others in their early thirties – would have to survive scathing male satire in pursuit of their profession; a fate predicted by Mary Manley in her Prologue to her first play:

  The Curtain’s drawn now by a Lady’s hand,

  The very Name you’ll cry bodes Impotence,

  To Fringe and Tea they should confine their sense.

  One traditional way of dealing with petticoat-prejudice was for a female author to issue her works anonymously. Conversely, if a play under a woman’s name was successful, it would be suggested, in the words of Mary Manley’s Prologue once more, that ‘Some private Lover helped her on her way.’ Aphra Behn, a woman of extraordinary enterprise who after her father’s death supported herself by journalism and even more daring forays into the world of espionage, before turning to plays and poetry, had to suffer the indignity of this suspicion: ‘the plays she vends she never made’.6

  What Aphra Behn eloquently asked for was ‘the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me’ to be heard; for assuming that females were so endowed, she saw ‘no reason why women should not write as well as men’. In a sense Aphra was right, for in so far as her plays triumphed over the contemporary denigration it was because they were witty, full of good characters and thus loved by audiences. However not even Aphra’s spirit and talents were totally proof against the handicap of an inadequate female education: that ignorance of Latin which she herself mourned meant that her poems lost their appeal as classically-based poetry became popular.7

  Most women who felt in themselves the creative lust were not as bold as Aphra.1 Theodosia Alleine, wife of Joseph Alleine, a minister living in Taunton who died in 1668, was more typical in her bashfulness. After her husband’s death, Mrs Alleine wrote an account of his life and sent it to one of his colleagues, ‘she not imagining it should be put forth in her own words’, as the printer subsequently explained. ‘But that worthy Person, and divers others, upon perusal, saw no reason to alter it [the manuscript], but caused it to be printed as it is.’8 In general, petticoat-
authors, far from stepping forward in challenge, were inclined to retreat still further within the veilings of conventional female modesty, as though hoping to atone for the sheer flagrancy of their endeavours.

  Dorothy Lady Pakington, who died in 1679, had once presided over a kind of Anglican salon at her house Westwood in Worcestershire. She was sometimes thought to be the author of The Whole Duty of Man (in fact the work of the Anglican divine Richard Allestree), because the book arose out of discussions held at her house; although she may have assisted him with parts of The Ladies Calling. Here was one who basked posthumously in the approval of society, since it was said by Anne Winchilsea that Lady Pakington

  Of each Sex the two best Gifts enjoy’d

  The skill to write, the Modesty to hide.

  Sufficient modesty – and a sufficiently early death – could even gain undeserved reward: as Grace Lady Gethin, who died in 1696 at the age of twenty, was gravely admired for the essays Reliquiae Gethinae she left behind – in fact merely a number of Bacon’s essays copied out.9

  The most favourable kind of judgement was that accorded to Damaris Lady Masham, who herself gracefully eluded the hovering accusation of ‘Scarecrow’; the existence of her books being somehow expiated by the parallel creation of a comfortable country house and the dispensation of hospitality not only to Locke but also to a wide circle of powerful connections. Aphra Behn’s marble slab in Westminster Abbey was inscribed with the two lines:

  Here lies a proof that wit can never be

  Defence enough against mortality.

  Damaris Lady Masham on the other hand was, on her tomb in the Abbey Church at Bath, described as one ‘Who to the Softness and Elegance of her own Sex added several of the Noblest Accomplishments and Qualities of the Other.’ Most petticoat-authors found it safer to be commemorated along the lines of Lady Masham rather than those of Aphra Behn.

  Katherine Philips, an early example of the species, was known to her circle, according to the fashion of the time for slightly arch sobriquets, as the Matchless Orinda.10 She was the author of one small volume of poems, one volume of letters and two translations from Corneille: Pompey and Horace. (Her version of Horace was the first woman’s play to be professionally produced on the English stage, although it appeared after her death.) When Pompey was performed in Dublin – where Katherine Philips was then living – in 1663, the fact was celebrated in a cautious couplet:

  Yes, that bold work a Woman dares Translate,

  Not to provoke, nor yet to fear Mens hate.11

  Throughout her life – she died in 1668 at the age of thirty-six – Katherine Philips showed indeed much care ‘not to provoke’ – as a result of which she was able successfully to avoid ‘Mens hate’.

  Katherine Fowler was born into the prosperous middle class, and educated at Mrs Salmon’s school in Hackney, where she learnt both French and Italian. Her father had left her a respectable portion of £1,000 and in 1648 Katherine Fowler married James Philips of Cardigan. She was sixteen and he was fifty-four. Despite the disparity in their ages, it appears to have been a stable, happy marriage.

  Katherine, being intelligent, was able to help her husband in business; thus the learning which enabled the wife to read Tasso, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Castiglione in the original (Florio’s textbooks in the British Library have her name in them) caused no offence to the husband, himself benefiting from his wife’s unusual qualities. Katherine Philips’s French was even better than her Italian, John Davies dedicating his translation of Cléopâtre to her, ‘a person so much above your Sex, in the command of those languages’. Nor did Katherine Philips’s appearance present any kind of moral threat – ‘very good natured …pretty fat; not tall; red pumpled [sic] face’, wrote John Aubrey.12

  Conventional in her happiness, Katherine Philips was also conventional in her griefs, the reiterated tragedies of the time; the death of her only child, that little boy Hector of whom she wrote in 1655 ‘I did but pluck the Rose-bud and it fell’; followed by the death of her step-son Francis who died in 1660 at the age of twelve: ‘Ah, beauteous Blossom, too untimely dead!’13

  The personality of ‘Orinda’ was born during the Commonwealth, when Katherine Philips formed a circle in London, at the centre of which was a coterie of devoted female friends, men being permitted to enter, but on slightly less hectically intimate terms. (James Philips featured as ‘Antenor’.) In these friendships, as in her poetry itself, Orinda was carrying on that Platonic tradition which had flowered at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria before the wars: the poets she admired and followed being Cartwright, Suckling and Waller, luminaries of that earlier age. It is in this context of strictly non-carnal love that Orinda’s eloquent addresses to her female friends, ‘Lucasia’ (Anne Owen), ‘Rosania’ (Mary Aubrey) and later in Dublin ‘adored Valerie’ (Lady Anne Boyle), should be seen.14

  Orinda was capable of showing possessive disgust towards her friends’ attachments. When Lucasia married the widower Lord Dungannon, Orinda saluted the occasion in verse:

  You are so happy in each other’s love

  And in assur’d perfection from above

  That we no wish can add unto your bliss

  But that it should continue as it is.

  Unfortunately this perfect bliss seemed to preclude a relationship with Orinda on the old terms; ‘I find there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-Proof’, she wrote crossly, ‘especially when the Person our Friend married has not a Soul particularly capable of the Tenderness of that Endearment … we may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship.’ So ‘lovely Celimina’ (the Countess of Thanet) replaced the renegade Lucasia.

  It would however be wrong to read anything covertly sensual into these relationships, however overtly passionate. That would have been quite outside the Platonic tradition. As Orinda herself wrote on the nature of friendship, such ‘flames’ were free from ‘grossness or mortality’.15

  Orinda’s personality was sufficiently distinguished for Jeremy Taylor to ruminate on the whole nature of friendship in a work entitled: In a Letter to the most Ingenious and Excellent Mrs Katherine Phillips. Dr Taylor explained in advance how much he differed from ‘the morosity of those Cynics – who would not admit your sex in to the communities of friendship’. Nevertheless in the body of the work, he himself differentiated carefully between the two sexes: ‘a man is the best friend in trouble, but a woman may be equal to him in the days of joy: a woman can as well increase our comforts, but cannot so well lessen our sorrows: and therefore we do not carry women with us when we go to fight, but in peaceful Cities and times vertuous women are the beauties of society and the prettiness of friendship’.16

  Where the merits of Orinda’s poetry are concerned, it is unfortunately impossible to dissent from the view of her biographer: ‘little enthusiasm is possible, even to one who has come to know her well’.17 Although Keats was taken by her lines to Rosania:

  To part with thee I needs must die

  Could parting sep’rate thee and I –

  the superbly banal wedding address to Lucasia and Lord Dungannon is quite as characteristic of Orinda’s style: the touching simplicity of her grief for her dead son became her poetry best.

  Her character is another matter. Katherine Philips, by dint of a personality which impressed but did not challenge, supported by a happily respectable private life, managed both to be known and to be respected as a she-author. She did so, unlike previous she-authors, without the benefit of aristocratic birth. This, in an age when it was the notion of the lady, with her carefully-nurtured, economically-protected languor, which captured the popular imagination, rather than that of her learned sister, was in itself a considerable achievement.

  A gentle virtuous disposition in life, a life led none the less close to the highest in the land, an early much-lamented death leaving behind a deposit of poems to be printed thereafter in an atmosphere of mourning, these elements made of Anne Killigrew one she-author of whom it w
as not only safe but sentimentally delightful to approve. The fact that this Maid of Honour at court died in 1685 at the age of twenty-five unmarried contributed further to the sentimental picture: here was one who ‘despised the Myrtle’ (symbol of marriage) for the ‘nobler Bay’ (garland of the poet) in the words of Dryden. In an admonition to the reader the publisher of Anne Killigrew’s work (to which Dryden wrote an introduction) drew attention to the same phenomenon, in slightly less graceful language:

  Know, that a Virgin bright this Poem writ,

  A Grace for Beauty, and a Muse for Wit!

  But on the evidence of her secret poems, Anne Killigrew was a more complicated character than this salutation of ‘a Virgin Bright’ or Dryden’s verdict – ‘Wit more than Man, her innocence a Child’ – would indicate.18 An obsessional fragment called ‘Cloris’ Charms’ described a journey to be taken by the love-lorn:

  First take thy Hapless Way

  Along the Rocky Northern Shore

  Infamous for the Matchless store

  Of Wracks within that Bay

  None o’er the Cursed Beach e’er crossed

  Unless the Robb’d, the Wrack’d or Lost

  Where on the strand lie spread,

  The sculls of many Dead

  Their mingl’d Bones

  Among the Stones,

  Thy Wretched Feet must tread …

  For there’s no Light