800 Years of Women's Letters (31 page)

It is monstrous that two of the Ladies chosen for your Commission are known to be in favour of the policy of the concentration camps.

My opinions were discounted and barely tolerated, because I was known to feel sorry for the sickly children, and to have shown
PERSONAL
sympathy to broken, destitute Boer women in their
PERSONAL
troubles. Sympathy shown to any of Dutch blood is the one unpardonable sin in South Africa.

RAY STRACHEY,
MILLICENT FAWCETT
(1931)

Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) was the beloved daughter of Sir Hugh Bell, son of a wealthy colliery owner. After an excellent education she went in 1892, when she was twenty-four, to visit her many relations in the Middle East. She fell in love with it, and learned Arabic, becoming a powerful Arabist. In 1914 she set out for Ha'il, a desert city, 800 kilometres south of Damascus, now in Saudi Arabia. Bell underestimated the possibility of local political conflict, because she had long dreamed of this journey.

January 1914

Dearest beloved father, my plans are developing and luck seems to be on my side. An almost incredible tranquillity reigns in the desert – the oldest enemies are at peace and there have been excellent autumn rains, so I shall find both grass and surface water. Bassan found me some riding camels going cheap in Damascus, a stroke of luck as I thought I should have to transport myself into the wilds and haggle for camels there. I now have 20 camels of my own, and feel like an Arab sheikh.

G. BELL,
THE LETTERS OF GERTRUDE BELL
(1930)

However, instead of being greeted by the Amir when she finally arrived, his uncle (who feared he might be murdered) put her under house arrest.

So I sat in honourable captivity and the days were weary and long. Tales round the fire were all of murder, and the air whispered of murder. In Ha'il murder is like the spilling of milk and not one of the sheikhs but feels his head sitting unsteadily on his shoulders. It gets on your nerves when you sit day after day between high mud walls and I thank heaven that my nerves are not very responsive. They kept me awake only one night out of ten but I will not conceal from you that there were hours of considerable anxiety.

G. BELL (1930)

She let it be known that she had distinguished powerful Arab friends.

Next day came word from the Amir's mother inviting me to visit her. I went, riding solemnly through the moonlit streets of this strange place, and passed two hours, taken straight from
Arabian Nights
, with the women of the palace. There are few places left where you can see the unadulterated East as it has lived for centuries, but Ha'il is one. Those women were wrapped in Indian brocades, hung with jewels, served by slaves, not one thing about them which betrayed the existence of Europe – except me. I was the blot.

G. BELL (1930)

After this visit she was suddenly freed in March 1914.

American novelist Edith Wharton drove to the Front in 1915. She wrote twice to Henry James to describe what she saw at Verdun.

February 28

From a garden we looked across the valley to a height about 5 miles away, where white puffs & scarlet flashes kept springing up all over the dark hillside. It was the hill above Vauquois, where there has been desperate fighting for two days. The Germans were firing from the top at the French trenches below (hidden from us by an intervening rise of the ground); & the French were assaulting, &
their
puffs & flashes were halfway up the hill. And so we saw the reason why there are to be so many wounded at Clermont tonight!

EDS. R.W.B. AND NANCY LEWIS,
THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON
(1989)

After a second little tour eleven days later, Edith sketched a scene on the Meuse River, west of Verdun.

Picture this all under a white winter sky, driving great flurries of snow across the mud-and-cinder-coloured landscape, with the steel-cold Meuse winding between beaten poplars – Cook standing with Her [the Mercedes] in a knot of mud-coated military motors & artillery horses, soldiers coming & going, cavalrymen riding up with messages, poor bandaged creatures in rag-bag clothes leaning in doorways, & always, over & above us, the boom, boom, boom of the guns on the grey heights to the east.

EDS. R.W.B. AND NANCY LEWIS (1989)

Henry James responded with enthusiasm.

Your whole record is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all have again and again called me back to it. . . .

EDS. R.W.B. AND NANCY LEWIS (1989)

During the Second World War Marina Tsvetayeva wrote to her daughter who had been imprisoned by Stalin.

Moscow, 12 April 1941
Saturday

Dear Alya,

At last, your first letter – in a blue envelope, dated the 4th. I stared at it from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. when Moor [her brother] came home from school. It lay on his dinner-plate, and he saw it as soon as he opened the door: and with a contented and even self-satisfied ‘A-ah!' – pounced on it. He would not let me read it. Both his own letter and mine he read aloud. But even before the reading, I sent you a postcard. I couldn't wait. That was yesterday, the 11th. And on the 10th I took in a parcel and they accepted it.

I have been industriously at work finding provisions for you. Alya, I already have sugar and cocoa; I am about to have a shot at lard and cheese – the most solid I can find. I shall send you a bag of dried carrots; I dried them in the autumn on all the radiators. You can boil them. At least they are still vegetables. It is a pity, though not unnatural, that you do not eat garlic. I have a whole kilo stored up just in case. But bear in mind that raw potato is a reliable and less unpleasant method. It is effective as lemon – that I know for certain [against diseases of vitamin deficiency].

I have already told you that your belongings are free. I myself was given the job of unlocking them – so we shall rescue everything. Incidentally, the moths have eaten nothing. All your things are intact – books, toys and a lot of photographs. I write nothing of my own. No time. A lot of housework. The cleaning lady comes once a week.

I also re-read Leskov – last winter in Golitzino. And I read Benvenuto in Goethe's translation when I was seventeen. I particularly remember the salamander and the slap.

I visited Nina a few times over the winter. She is constantly unwell, but she works, whenever she is able, and is happy in it. I gave her a short artificial fur jacket – she really had frozen to death – and, for her birthday, one of my metal cups, from which nobody drinks, except her and me.

I want to send this off now, so I shall finish. Keep strong and alert. I hope that Mulia's trip is only a matter of time. I have recently been admitted to the Grupkom of Goslitizdat – unanimous. So you see, I am trying.

Keep well. Kisses . . .

Moor is writing to you himself.

Mama

ELAINE FEINSTEIN,
MARINA TSVETAYEVA
(1989)

Women have always worked to alleviate suffering, as individuals and in communities such as nunneries. Witness to female philanthropy comes from the earliest medieval letters. By the nineteenth century there is more public proof, though the scale of female philanthropic enterprise is impossible to quantify; official reports obviously ignore unofficial individual activities. We know that women such as Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) dedicated their lives to the helping of other women in prison – or imprisoned by poverty.

In France also there is a tradition of social work, spearheaded by feminists like Flora Tristan (1803–44). In a brief unhappy life, deprived of her children by a murderous husband, she campaigned for emancipation of working-class men as well as women. When she visited London, she succeeded in gaining entry to the notorious Newgate Prison, and gave evidence of conditions. A few of the well-to-do English such as Emily Eden, sister of India's Governor-General, refused to blind themselves to the suffering caused by famine in poorer districts, and gave help to children.

Josephine Butler devoted herself to women less fortunate than herself and campaigned bravely for working-class women shut in prison hospitals under the Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869. These Acts, intended to check the spread of venereal disease among the armed forces, left men free, but harassed many working-class women suspected of prostitution. Some were dragged by non-uniformed ‘police' before medical inspectors and found still to be virgins! Butler toured British cities, explaining the cruelty of governmental persecution of suspected women. She enlisted the signature of Florence Nightingale, and I include here a hitherto unpublished letter in answer to Butler's petition against these Acts.

Millicent Fawcett also used her name, her pen and her energy to reform the laws which humiliated prostitutes – while allowing their clients to remain ‘uninspected' for disease.

Butler was much criticized for employing as a maid a girl who had been seduced, dishonoured and then dismissed by the Master of an Oxford College. A few men supported these campaigns, as shown by the letters from Fawcett, working for the release of humanitarian Mr Stead.

Emily Eden went to India in 1835 when her brother was made Governor-General. She kept house for him, surrounded by luxury. She felt little sympathy with the behaviour of most Englishmen she met and kept a sense of balance by sketching and writing letters home. Her care for Indians is shown by her reaction to the famine in Cawnpore in this letter of 1838 to the rest of her family in England.

It is here that we came into the starving districts. They have had no rain for a year and a half, the cattle have all died and the people are all dying or gone away. The distress is perfectly dreadful, you cannot conceive the horrible sights we see, particularly children; perfect skeletons in many cases, their bones through the skin, without a rag of clothing and utterly unlike human beings. The sight is too shocking; the women look as if they had been buried, their skulls look so dreadful. I am sure there is no sort of violent atrocity I should not commit for food, with a starving baby. I should not stop to think about the rights or wrongs of the case.

E. EDEN,
UP THE COUNTRY: LETTERS FROM INDIA
(1872)

When I went round to the stables yesterday before breakfast I found such a miserable little baby, something like an old monkey, but with glazed stupid eyes. I am sure you would have sobbed to see the way in which the little atom flew at a cup of milk. We have discovered the mother since, but she is a skeleton too and says that she has had no food to give it for a month. Dr Drummond says it cannot live it is so diseased with starvation but I mean to try what can be done with it.

E. EDEN (1872)

Flora Tristan describes her visit to Newgate in this letter.

1841

I confess I felt very ill at ease in this lodge. There is no fresh air or daylight; the prisoner can still hear the noise of the street outside, and beneath the door he can still see the sunlight shining in the square. What a dreadful contrast, and how he regrets the loss of his liberty! But once past the lodge he hears nothing more; the atmosphere is as cold, damp and heavy as in a cellar; most of the passages are narrow, and so are the stairs leading to the upper wards.

First I was taken to see the women's wing. Over the past few years several changes have been made at Newgate and now it houses only prisoners awaiting trial, not convicted prisoners; in this respect it corresponds to the Conciergerie in Paris. It is here too that most executions take place.

The governor was kind enough to accompany me over the prison; he told me that thanks to the writings of philanthropists and the constant complaints of humanitarians, Newgate had undergone all the improvements of which it was capable. Mr Cox was particularly happy that prisoners were now divided into different classes, whereas formerly they had all been confined together.

The internal arrangement of the prison is not very satisfactory and there is not enough space for individual cells. In each ward the beds, wooden constructions six feet long and two feet wide, are arranged in two or three tiers like berths on board a ship. There is a large table in the middle with wooden benches all round it; this is where the prisoners eat, work, read and write. On close examination I found the wards very clean and well-kept, but as they are dark and poorly ventilated and the floors are very uneven, their general appearance is unpleasing.

Nearly all the women I saw there were of the lowest class; prostitutes, servants or country girls accused of theft. Four were on charges carrying the death penalty for crimes classified as felonies under English law. Most of them seemed to be of low intelligence, but I noticed several whose tight thin lips, pointed nose, sharp chin, deep-set eyes and sly look I took as signs of exceptional depravity. I saw only one woman there who aroused my interest. She was confined with six others in a dark, damp low-ceilinged cell; when we entered they all rose and made us the customary servile curtsey which had embarrassed and irritated me from the moment I set foot in the prison. One alone refrained and it was this sign of independence which attracted my attention. Picture a young woman of twenty-four, small, well-made and tastefully dressed, standing with head held high to reveal a perfect profile, graceful neck. My eyes filled with tears and only the presence of the governor prevented me from going up to her and taking her hand so that she might understand my interest in her fate and so that my sympathy might calm for a few minutes the sufferings of her heart.

Beauty can only be supreme when it reflects the noblest qualities of the soul. Without that inner radiance even the most beautiful woman in that sad place would have left me unmoved; but there was such dignity in this beauty which bore the depths of misfortune with pride and courage.