800 Years of Women's Letters (10 page)

By now you must be thinking me too confused and illiterate for anything, so I'll just slip in that the book (in texture) seems to me to have in it all the best of Sir Thomas Browne and Swift, – the richness of the one, and the directness of the other.

There are a dozen details I should like to go into, – Queen Elizabeth's visit, Green'e visit, phrases scattered about, (particularly one on p. 160 beginning ‘High battlements of thought, etc.' which is just what you did for
me
,) Johnson on the blind, and so on and so on, – but it is too late today; I have been reading steadily all day, and it is now 5 o'clock, and I must catch the post, but I will try and write more sensibly tomorrow. It is your fault, for having moved me so and dazzled me completely, so that all my faculties have dropped from me and left me stark.

EDS. L. DESAHO AND M. LEASKA,
THE LETTERS OF VITA SACKVILLE-WEST TO VIRGINIA WOOLF
(1984)

Marina Tsvetayeva admired and liked the poet Anna Akhmatova. She met her when they were young, during the Russian Revolution. Anna's early poems had excited her so much that Marina began a cycle of poems for her in 1916. Sadly, by 1921 most writers were having to learn to be less outspoken, even in Writers House and House of the Arts in Petrograd, as Marina described in this letter to her friend:

Everywhere there was silence, waiting and uncertainty. The 24 August arrived. Early in the morning, when I was still in bed, Ida Nappelbaum came over. She came to tell me that on the street corners were posted the announcements: all had been shot . . . sixty-two persons in all. . . .

ELAINE FEINSTEIN,
MARINA TSVETAYEVA
(1989)

The passion that went into Marina's letter to Akhmatova of 31 August, offering her loyalty, was characteristically reckless
:

31 August 1921

Dear Anna Andreyevna,

Of late, gloomy rumours have been circulating about you, becoming more persistent and unequivocal with every hour that passes. I write to you about this because you will hear in any case. I want you to be correctly informed, at least. I can tell you that, to my knowledge, your only friend among poets (a friend indeed!) turned out to be Mayakovsky, as he wandered among the billboards of the ‘Poets' Café' looking like a slaughtered bull.

I have, in the hope of finding out about you, spent these last few days in the Poets' Café. What monsters! What squalid creatures! What curs they are! Everything is here: homunculi, automatons, braying stallions and lip-sticked sleeping-car attendants from Yalta . . .

ELAINE FEINSTEIN (1989)

A few days later, after a meeting at Writers Union, she wrote again.

Dear Anna Andreyevna,

To understand what yesterday evening was for me, to understand Aksyonov's nod to me, one would have to know how I lived the previous three
unspeakable
days. A horrible dream. I want to wake up, but I cannot. I confronted everybody, beseeching your life. A little longer and I would have actually
said
‘Gentlemen! See to it that Akhmatova be alive!' . . . Alya comforted me: ‘Marina! She has a son!'

At the end of yesterday's proceedings, I asked Bobrov's permission to make an official journey – to Akhmatova. Laughter all round.

ELAINE FEINSTEIN (1989)

The literary friendship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf was disturbed by rivalry and disease. After Mansfield's early death from tuberculosis, Woolf tried to analyse what she had felt for this woman friend. She wrote to Vita Sackville-West:

1922

Katherine has been dead a week, & how far am I obeying her ‘do not quite forget Katherine' which I read in one of her old letters? Am I already forgetting her? It is strange to trace the progress of one's feelings. Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday ‘Mrs Murry's dead! It says so in the paper!' At that one feels – what? A shock of relief – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it. Katherine's my rival no longer. More generously I felt: But though I can do this better than she could, where is she, who could do what I can't! Then, as usual with me, visual impressions kept coming & coming before me – always of Katherine putting on a white wreath, & leaving us, called away; made dignified, chosen. And then one pitied her. And one felt her reluctant to wear that wreath, which was an ice cold one. And she was only 33. And I could see her before me so exactly, & the room at Portland Villas. I go up. She gets up, very slowly, from her writing table. A glass of milk & a medicine bottle stood there. There were also piles of novels. Everything was very tidy, bright, & somehow like a doll's house. At once, or almost, we got out of shyness. She (it was summer) half lay on the sofa by the window. She had her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead. Sometimes we looked very steadfastly at each other, as though we had reached some durable relationship, independent of the changes of the body, through the eyes. Hers were beautiful eyes – rather doglike, brown, very wide apart, with a steady slow rather faithful & sad expression. Her nose was sharp, & a little vulgar. Her lips thin & hard. She wore short skirts and liked ‘to have a line round her' she said. She looked very ill – very drawn, & moved languidly, drawing herself across the room, like some suffering animal. I suppose I have written down some of the things we said. Most days I think we reached that kind of certainty, in talk about books, or rather about our writings, which I thought had something durable about it. And then she was inscrutable. Did she care for me? Sometimes she would say so – would kiss me – would look at me as if (is this sentiment?) her eyes would like always to be faithful. She would promise never never to forget. That was what we said at the end of our talk. She said she would send me her diary to read, & would write always. For our friendship was a real thing we said, looking at each other quite straight. It would always go on whatever happened. What happened was, I suppose, faultfinding & perhaps gossip. She never answered my letter. Yet I still feel, somehow that friendship persists. Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine. If I had been in Paris & gone to her, she would have got up & in three minutes, we should have been talking again. Only I could not take the step. The surroundings – Murry & so on – and the small lies and treacheries, the perpetual playing & teasing, or whatever it was, cut away so much of the substance of friendship. One was too uncertain. And so one let it all go. Yet I certainly expected that we should meet again next summer, & start afresh. And I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of. This made it harder to write to her; & I saw in it, perhaps from jealousy, all the qualities I disliked in her . . . I have the feeling that I shall think of her at intervals all through life. Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else . . .

CLAIRE TOMALIN,
KATHERINE MANSFIELD: A SECRET LIFE
(1987)

A Senegalese divorced woman comforts her great friend Aissatou, who has been abandoned by her husband. This modern epistolary novel
So Long A Letter
, written in 1982 by Mariama Bâ displays the same caring and wisdom that Geraldine Jewsbury showed to Jane Carlyle.

Leave! Draw a clean line through the past. Turn over a page on which not everything was bright, certainly, but at least all was clear. What would now be recorded there would hold no love, confidence, grandeur or hope. I had never known the sordid side of marriage. Don't get to know it! Run from it! When one begins to forgive, there is an avalanche of faults that comes crashing down, and the only thing that remains is to forgive again, so keep on forgiving. Leave, escape from betrayal! Sleep without asking myself any questions, without straining my ear at the slightest noise, waiting for a husband I share.

I counted the abandoned or divorced women of my generation whom I knew.

I knew a few whose remaining beauty had been able to capture a worthy man, a man who added fine bearing to a good situation and who was considered ‘better, a hundred times better than his predecessor'. The misery that was the lot of these women was rolled back with the invasion of the new happiness that changed their lives, filled out their cheeks, brightened their eyes. I knew others who had lost all hope of renewal and whom loneliness had very quickly laid underground.

The play of destiny remains impenetrable. The cowries that a female neighbour throws on a fan in front of me do not fill me with optimism, neither when they remain face upwards, showing the black hollow that signifies laughter, nor when the grouping of their white backs seems to say that ‘the man in the double trousers' is coming towards me, the promise of wealth. ‘The only thing that separates you from the man and wealth, is the alms of two white and red cola nuts,' adds Farmata, my neighbour.

She insists: ‘There is a saying that discord here may be luck elsewhere. Why are you afraid to make the break? A woman is like a ball; once a ball is thrown, no one can predict where it will bounce. You have no control over where it rolls, and even less over who gets it. Often it is grabbed by an unexpected hand . . .' I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes took in the mirror's eloquence. I had lost my slim figure, as well as ease and quickness of movement. My stomach protruded from beneath the wrapper that hid the calves developed by the impressive number of kilometers walked since the beginning of my existence. Suckling had robbed my breasts of their round firmness. I could not delude myself: youth was deserting my body.

Whereas a woman draws from the passing years the force of her devotion, despite the ageing of her companion, a man, on the other hand, restricts his field of tenderness. His egoistic eye looks over his partner's shoulder. He compares what he had with what he no longer has, what he has with what he could have.

I had heard of too many misfortunes not to understand my own. There was your own case, Aissatou, the cases of many other women, despised, relegated or exchanged, who were abandoned, worn-out.

To overcome distress when it sits upon you demands strong will. When one thinks that with each passing second one's life is shortened, one must profit intensely from this second; it is the sum of all the lost or harvested seconds that makes for a wasted or a successful life. Brace oneself to check despair and get it into proportion! A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness. Little by little, it takes over your whole being.

Oh, nervous breakdown! Doctors speak of it in a detached, ironical way, emphasizing that the vital organs are in no way disturbed. You are lucky if they don't tell you that you are wasting their time with the evergrowing list of your illnesses – your head, throat, chest, heart, liver – that no X-ray can confirm. And yet what atrocious suffering is caused by nervous breakdowns!

TRANS. M. BODÉ-THOMAS, MARIAMA BÂ,
SO LONG A LETTER
(1982)

Women in patriarchal cultures have seldom expressed public understanding of the intense love of Sappho for other women.

In 1790 Mrs Piozzi (formerly Mrs Thrale, whom Dr Johnson loved) wrote that the ‘Queen of France is at the Head of a Set of Monsters called by each other
Sapphists
, who boast her example; and deserve to be thrown with the He Demons that haunt each other likewise, into Mount Vesuvius'.
(Thraliana 1776–1809
, ed. K. Balderston, 1951, p. 740). In 1795 she returned to this topic, still upholding views preached by the church and the majority of men: ‘'Tis now grown common to suspect impossibilities (for such I think 'em) whenever two Ladies live too much together' (op. cit. p. 949). English social history had scarcely mentioned this topic. It was alluded to as ‘romantic friendship', a far wider, less scornful term. Fanny Hill, forty years before, had mentioned ‘secret bias', but there are few allusions to lesbianism. Havelock Ellis wrote in
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, Vol. 2, p. 261) that a Miss Hobart was mentioned in the court of Charles II, which shows us ‘how rare was the exception'. A century later, however, homosexuality among English women seems to have been regarded by the French as common, and Bacchaumont, on 1 January 1773, recording that Mlle Heinel of the Opera was settling in England, added, ‘Her taste for women will there find attractive satisfaction, for it is said that London is herein superior to Paris'.

In the eighteenth century, middle-class daughters, sisters, aunts and some wives were gaining a little leisure to read and study. The notable correspondents reveal that terms often associated today with sexual relationships were mostly confined to literary friendships between women: tenderness, sensibility, shared tastes, even coquetry. For example, a clergyman's daughter, Miss Carter, who corresponded with Mrs Montagu and Dr Johnson, wrote of a clever girl at Oxford: ‘Miss Talbot is absolutely my passion; I think of her all day, dream of her all night and one way or other introduce her into every subject I talk of' (
Mrs Carter's Letters
Vol. 1 p. 2). Like the Ladies of Llangollen, these women agreed to strict planning of their time, and shunning of town life. They all rose early, to pursue a rigourous course of reading and study of foreign languages, alleviated by long walks or rides, gardening and preserving or embroidery.

‘Romantic friendship' is a term now lost, yet less marginalizing than ‘lesbian' to describe a relationship which includes tenderness, lifelong devotion, shared tastes, probably passion and shared beds. One of the best known, at the end of the eighteenth century is that of the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who ran away to set up house together in 1778. They first had to fight their families, then public opinion, but succeeded in leading the intellectual life they sought together. Their friends and admirers included Wellington and Wordsworth. Wedgwood, Darwin and Sheridan, among many others, visited their ‘gothick' cottage in Llangollen.