800 Years of Women's Letters (29 page)
They were both released.
Aphra Behn was the first professional woman writer in England. When her husband died, she was asked to go to Antwerp, to obtain information for Whitehall. Not even her expenses were paid. She was forced to borrow, and sent these pleas to Whitehall.
16 Aug 1666
I protest to you, sir, I am and was as frugal as possibly I could be, and have many times refused to eat as I would, only to save charges.
WILLIAMSON'S STATE PAPERS, P.R.O., S.P. 29/167 No. 160, 16 AUGUST 1666.NS
I do therefore intreat you, Sir, to let me have some more money . . . Pray, sir, be pleased to consider me very speedily for the longer I stay without it the more time I waste in vain for want of it, and if I did not really believe I should accomplish my business, I would not stay here, it being no delight at all for me so to do, but much the contrary, pray sir, let me not want the main and only thing that is to further my design.
29/169, No. 38, 27 AUGUST
I confess I carried no more upon bill but fifty pounds, and I have not only spent all that upon mere eating and drinking, but in borrowing of money to accomplish my desires of seeing and speaking with this man. I am as much more in debt, having pawned my very rings rather than want supplies for getting him hither.
29/170, No. 75, 15 SEPTEMBER
No money was forthcoming, and by 11 March 1667, when she returned to England, she was forced to borrow £150 from Edward Butler, to help pay her debts. Compare this letter with her completely different discourse in the next, where she defends her comedies from unkind male critics, and with her epistolary poem, where she is attempting to please a potential patron.
Aphra Behn became an extremely popular playwright during the reign of Charles II. A widow, she lived on her earnings, which even helped her support her lover when necessary. She wrote witty comedies about sexual encounters which often ran foul of critics nurtured under the puritanical Commonwealth. Her third play
The Dutch Lover
, produced in 1673 was so disparaged by academics that she defended comedies in this prefatory epistle to woo potential readers.
6 February 1673
Good Sweet, Honey, Sugar-Candied Reader,
Which I think is more than anyone has called you yet, I must have a word or two with you before you do advance into the treatise; but 'tis not to beg your pardon for diverting you from your affairs by such an idle pamphlet as this is . . . for I have dealt pretty fairly in the matter, told you in the title page what you are to expect within. Indeed, had I hung a sign of the immortality of the soul, or the mystery of godliness, or of ecclesiastical policie, and then had treated you with indiscerpibility and essential spissitude (words, though I am no competent judge, for want of languages, yet I fancy strongly ought to mean just nothing) . . . or had presented you with two of three of the worst principles transcribed out of the peremptory and ill-natured, though pretty ingenious Doctor Hobbes, I were then sufficiently in fault; but having inscribed comedy on the beginning of my book, you may guess pretty near what penny-worths you are like to have, and ware your money and your time accordingly.
I would not yet be understood to lessen the dignity of plays, for surely they deserve among the middle if not the better sort of books; for I have heard the most of that which bears the name of learning, and which has abused such quantities of ink and paper, and continually employs so many ignorant, unhappy souls for ten, twenty, years in the University (who yet poor wretches think they are doing something all the while) as logick etc, & several other things that shall be nameless lest I misspell them, are much more absolutely nothing than the errantest play that was ever writ.
A. BEHN, PREFATORY LETTER TO
THE DUTCH LOVER
Letters sometimes took the form of poems. Here Aphra Behn successfully uses the verse stanza of the ode in order to praise a patron, Dr Burnet. Patrons were needed by many artists in the way subsidies, and good reviews, are today.
(1)
When Old
Rome's
Candidates aspir'd to Fame,
And did the Peoples Suffrages obtain
For some great Consul, or a
Caesar's
Name;
The Victor was not half so Pleas'd and Vain,
As I, when given the Honour of your Choice,
And Preference had in that one single Voice;
That Voice, from whence Immortal Wit still flows;
Wit that at once is Solemn all and Sweet,
Where Noblest Eloquence and Judgment shows
The Inspiring Mind Illustrious, Rich, and Great;
A Mind that can inform your wound'rous Pen
In all that's Perfect and Sublime:
And with an Art beyond the Wit of Men,
On what e're Theam, on what e're great Design,
It carries a Commanding Force, like that of Writ Divine.
(2)
With Pow'rful Reasoning drest in finest Sence,
A thousand ways my Soul you can Invade,
And spight of my Opinions weak Defence,
Against my Will, you Conquer and Perswade.
Your Language soft as Love, betrays the Heart,
And at each Period fixes a Resistless Dart,
While the fond Listner, like a Maid undone,
Inspir'd with Tenderness she fears to own;
In vain essays her Freedom to Regain:
The fine Ideas in her Soul remain,
And Please, and Charm, even while they Grieve and Pain.
(3)
But yet how well this Praise can Recompense
For all the welcome Wounds (before) you'd given!
Scarce any thing but You and Heaven
Such Grateful Bounties can dispense,
As that Eternity of Life can give;
So fam'd by you my Verse Eternally shall live:
Till now, my careless Muse no higher strove
T'inlarge her Glory, and extend her Wings;
Than underneath
Parnassus
Grove,
To Sing of Shepherds, and their humble, Love;
But never durst, like
Cowly
, tune her Strings,
To sing of Heroes and of Kings.
EDS. D. SPENDER AND J. TODD,
ANTHOLOGY OF BRITISH WOMEN WRTIERS
(1989)
For two years George Eliot worked virtually unpaid, as assistant editor of the
Westminster Review
, helping her friend J. Chapman. This letter to him shows how conscientiously she tried to keep the standards of J.S. Mill.
24 July 1852
Dear Friend,
Don't suggest âFashion' as a subject to any one else â I should like to keep it.
I have noticed the advertisement of the British Q[uarterly] this morning. Its list of subjects is excellent. I wish you could contrive to let me see the number when it comes out. They have one subject of which I am jealous â âPre-Raphaelism in Painting and Literaure.' We have no good writer on such subjects on our staff. Ought we not, too, to try and enlist David Masson, who is one of the Br[itish] Q[uarterly] set? He wrote that article in the Leader on the Patagonian Missionaries, which I thought very beautiful. Seeing âMargaret Fuller' among their subjects makes me rather regret having missing the first moment for writing an article on her life myself, but I think she still may come in as one of a triad or quaternion.
I feel that I am a wretched helpmate to you, almost out of the world and incog. so far as I am in it. When you can afford to pay an Editor, if that time will ever come, you must get one. If you believe in Free Will, in the Theism that looks on manhood as a type of the godhead and on Jesus as the ideal Man, get one belonging to the Martineau âSchool of thought,' and he will drill you a regiment of writers who will produce a Prospective on a large scale, and so the Westminster may come to have âdignity' in the eyes of Liverpool.
If not â if you believe, as I do, that the thought which is to mould the future has for its root a belief in necessity, that a nobler presentation of humanity has yet to be given in resignation to individual nothingness, than could ever be shewn of a being who believes in the phantasmagoria of hope unsustained by reason â why then get a man of another calibre and let him write a fresh Prospectus, and if Liverpool theology and ethics are to be admitted, let them be put in the âdangerous ward,'
alias
the Independent Section.
The only third course is the present one, that of Editorial compromise.
J.S. Mill and so on can write more openly in the Westminster than anywhere else â It is good for the world that they should have every facility for speaking out. Each can't have a periodical to himself. The grand mistake is to make the Editors responsible for everything. . . .
I congratulate you on your ability to keep cheerful.
Yours etc
Marian Evans
ED. G. HAIGHT,
THE GEORGE ELIOT LETTERS
(1954)
Edith Wharton (1862â1937), the American novelist, enjoyed living in France, like her friend Henry James. Here she writes to comfort art historian Bernard Berenson when he complained of writer's block. (âla source a tari' means âthe spring has dried up'.)
Sainte-Claire
January 12, 1937
Dearest B.B.,
This is just a flying line, first to thank you for your good letter, & secondly to tell you that Gillet proposes to come here for a brief holiday (three or four days) on Feb. 17 or 18, & that it wd be delightful if you & Nick could coincide with him â that is to say, if his visit cd fall somehwere, it doesn't matter where, within the circle of yours â
I'm very sorry que la source a tari (the Book-source) for the moment, but I'm so used to this break of continuity in my work that I can't take it very tragically in your case. It is probably just the tank filling up. A propos of which, in looking this morning through an old diary-journal I have a dozen times began & abandoned, I found this: (Dec. 10. 1934.)
âWhat is writing a novel like?
The beginning: A ride through a spring wood.
The middle: The Gobi desert.
The end: Going down the Cresta run.'
The diary adds: âI am now' (p. 166 of âThe Buccaneers') in the middle of this Gobi desert.' â
Since then I've been slowly struggling toward the Cresta run, & don't yet despair of sliding down. â Meanwhile, Robert is reading us (in the intervals of political news on the wireless) Granville-Barker's âHamlet.' But last night we made him break away & read us the 3 great â greatest â scenes in Esmond. And great they are.
EDS. R.W.B. AND NANCY LEWIS,
THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON
(1988)
These letters are from Dorothy Richardson, the novelist. Despite poverty, the hostility of the literary establishment, low sales figures and relative obscurity, Dorothy remained undaunted, pursuing her massive, self-appointed task of presenting female realism throughout the latter half of her long life. Nor was she ambivalent about the central social cause of her embattlement.
Art demands what, to women, current civilization won't give. There is for a Dostoyevsky writing against time on the corner of a crowded kitchen table a greater possibility of detachment than for a woman artist no matter how placed. Neither motherhood nor the more continuously exacting and indefinitely expansive responsibilities of even the simplest housekeeping can so effectively hamper her as the human demand, besieging her wherever she is, for an inclusive awareness, from which men, for good or ill, are exempt.
EDS. G. HANSCOMBE, AND V.L. SMYERS,
WRITING FOR THEIR LIVES
(1987)
More than twenty years later, she held to the same view, explaining to her sister-in-law Rose Odle:
27 Nov 1949
most Englishmen dislike women . . . The English pub is alone in being, primarily, a row of boys of all ages at a bar, showing off. That of course is a bit harsh & insufficient. Volumes would be required to investigate & reveal the underlying factors. Vast numbers of Englishmen are so to say spiritually homosexual. Our history, our time of being innocently piratical, then enormously, at the cost of the natives in our vast possessions, wealthy & âprosperous' so that our culture died, giving place to civilization (!), is partly responsible. For it made millions of women unemployed, vacuous, buyers of commercialised commodities, philistine utterly . . . [men's] picture of âthe Absolute' is male entirely, as is that of the Churches, who all moan & groan & obsequiously supplicate an incense-loving divinity. Mary Baker Eddy's picture is essentially feminine. Is that not why the Christian Science churches grow & spread & are hated, unexamined, by all clerics?
EDS. G. HANSCOMBE AND V.L. SMYERS (1987)
Nor, in her old age, did she change her mind, writing to the poet Henry Savage:
11 Mar 1950
I am not âliterary' Henry. Never was. Never shall be. The books that for you, perhaps for most men, come first, are for me secondary. Partly perhaps because they are the work of men, have the limitations, as well as the qualities of the masculine outlook. Men are practitioners, dealing with things (including âideas') rather than with people . . . knowing almost nothing of women save in relation to themselves.
EDS. G. HANSCOMBE AND V.L. SMYERS (1987)
War and Alleviating Suffering
Women have taken a greater part in war than historians have acknowledged until recently. Some dressed as soldiers to be near their husbands, some followed in the baggage train like Brecht's
Mother Courage
, some actually took part in fighting, as this letter from Petrarch to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna proves.
23 November 1343
Of all the wonders of God, âwho alone doeth great wonders,' he has made nothing on earth more marvellous than man. Of all we saw that day, of all this letter will report, the most remarkable was a mighty woman of Pozzuoli, sturdy in body and soul. Her name is Maria, and to suit her name she has the merit of virginity. Though she is constantly among men, usually soldiers, the general opinion holds that she has never suffered any attaint to her chastity, whether in jest or earnest. Men are put off, they say, more by fear than respect. Her body is military rather than maidenly, her strength is such as any hardened soldier might wish for, her skill and deftness unusual, her age at its prime, her appearance and endeavour that of a strong man. She cares not for charms but for arms; not for arts and crafts but for darts and shafts; her face bears no trace of kisses and lascivious caresses, but is ennobled by wounds and scars. Her first love is for weapons, her soul defies death and the sword. She helps wage an inherited local war, in which many have perished on both sides. Sometimes alone, often with a few companions, she has raided the enemy, always, up to the present, victoriously. First into battle, slow to withdraw, she attacks aggressively, practises skilful feints. She bears with incredible patience hunger, thirst, cold, heat, lack of sleep, weariness; she passes nights in the open, under arms; she sleeps on the ground, counting herself lucky to have a turf or a shield for pillow.
She has changed much in a short time, thanks to her constant hardships. I saw her a few years ago, when my youthful longing for glory brought me to Rome and Naples and the king of Sicily. She was then weaponless; but I was amazed when she came to greet me today heavily armed, in a group of soldiers. I returned her greeting as to a man I didn't know. Then she laughed, and at the nudging of my companions I looked at her more closely; and I barely recognized the wild, primitive face of the maiden under her helmet.
They tell many fabulous stories about her; I shall relate what I saw. A number of stout fellows with military training happen to have come here from various quarters. (They were diverted from another expedition.) When they heard about this woman they were anxious to test her powers. So a great crowd of us went up to the castle of Pozzuoli. She was alone, walking up and down in front of the church, apparently just thinking. She was not at all disturbed by our arrival. We begged her to give us some example of her strength. After making many excuses on account of an injury to her arm, she finally sent for a heavy stone and an iron bar. She then threw them before us, and challenged anyone to pick them up and try a cast. To cut the story short, there was a long, well-fought competition, while she stood aside and silently judged the contestants. Finally, making an easy cast, she so far outdistanced the others that everyone was amazed, and I was really ashamed. So we left, hardly believing our eyes, thinking we must have been victims of an illusion.
ED. C. MORIARTY,
THE VOICE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
(1989)