Sisters in the Wilderness (6 page)

Susanna was not only taking an unconventional spiritual path, she was also being politicized. Thanks to Thomas Pringle, she was increasingly involved in the abolitionist movement—as radical a political movement in the early nineteenth century as feminism would be in the mid-twentieth century. Pringle invited Susanna to transcribe the stories of two former slaves from British colonies, a twenty-four-year-old man called Ashton Warner from St. Vincent, and a forty-year-old woman, Mary Prince, from Bermuda. Mary, now working in the Pringle household, dictated “a recital of revolting cruelty” to the impressionable young Susanna, who carefully wrote down and shaped the narrative of exploitation. Susanna downplayed the project's importance in a letter to a friend: “It is a pathetic little history and is now printing in the form of a pamphlet to be laid before the Houses of Parliament. Of course my name does not appear.” But the impressionable twenty-seven-year-old was gripped by Mary's account of physical and sexual brutalities at the hands of her masters. She had seen with her own eyes the appalling crisscross of scars, evidence of repeated lashings, on the older woman's back. Mary Prince was a tough, outspoken survivor, but her experiences as a malnourished, poor, powerless woman in a distant British colony fed Susanna's fascination with the darker side of human existence. When Susanna subsequently published Ashton Warner's story, she reproached her fellow countrymen with the “gross injustice and awful criminality of a free nation suffering such an abomination as negro slavery to exist in her dominions.”

Susanna's letters reveal how much she enjoyed mingling with publishers, essayists and writers when they congregated in the Pringles' London drawing room. She was flattered when the intelligentsia made a fuss of her, assuring James Bird with blatantly false modesty, “I am almost sick of flattering encomiums on my genius. How these men in London do talk. I learn daily to laugh at their fine love speeches.” She was eager for friendship with other “bluestockings,” as women writers were often called. Most of all, the ambition to be a much-published, well-known author—a path on which her sister Agnes was already launched—began to burn in her with a frightening fierceness. Although the Strickland girls were raised to respect intellectual achievement, they were also brought up to be docile wives to whomever they might marry. Susanna was both intoxicated and embarrassed by her hunger for fame—a hunger, she worried, that was “not only a weak but a criminal passion.” Her angst cannot have been helped by the fact that she was now over twenty-five and, like all her sisters, seemed fated for spinsterhood.

Rivalry between Agnes and Susanna continued to seethe as Susanna began to catch up with her sister's success. The two women managed a temporary truce in 1830 when they co-produced a small pamphlet entitled
Patriotic Songs
, including eight poems, four by each sister, that celebrated England and the monarchy. King William
IV
was so impressed that he called its authors “an ornament to our country.” And Catharine was relieved to see Agnes and Susanna on better terms. “Could I tell you the joy that fills my heart at the reunion of two sisters, you would rejoice,” wrote the family peacemaker to “kindest and most affectionate Susy.” “May no worldly consideration, no prejudice, no contradiction of opinion on indifferent subjects ever disturb your love.”

Then, in May 1830, Lieutenant John Dunbar Moodie, an exuberant and cheerful thirty-three-year-old Scot who had just returned from South Africa to look for a wife, turned up at the home of his old friend Thomas Pringle. Soon, he and Susanna were taking walks together on Hampstead Heath, sharing their love of music and reading aloud to
each other. Within two months of John's arrival, Susanna's interest in theological debate had been overtaken by her enthusiasm for the dashing lieutenant. In the words of her sister Catharine, she had “become a convert to Lieutenant Dunbar Moodie.” And John Moodie was petitioning Mrs. Thomas Strickland for her youngest daughter's hand in marriage.

Chapter 3

Sweet Dreams

J
ohn Dunbar Moodie marched into Susanna Strickland's life with the verve of a fife-and-drum band. He appeared to offer everything Susanna wanted in a lover. He could match her emotional intensity, and (like her sister Catharine) he could lift her spirits with his infectious optimism and zest for life. Short and stocky, with unruly dark hair, John was just too damn cheerful and healthy to fit the languid ideal of the era, but there was an attractive gallantry to him. He had a score of thrilling anecdotes about his military experiences in the Napoleonic wars and his adventures on the South African veldt, where he had settled after he left the army. As Susanna's mother noted approvingly, he was a “gentleman of family and high moral character.” And the Scotsman, who was six years older than Susanna, played the flute, composed poetry and wrote the most beautiful love letters. “I feel we cannot live but in each other's arms,” he told his “beloved Susie” within weeks of meeting
her. “My whole soul is absorbed in one sweet dream of you—you must and shall be mine …I care for no luxuries, dearest, let me but press you to my heart and I will live upon those dear lips, and these worldly cares would be forgotten …”

His passion was enough to persuade Susanna, her mother and her older sisters to overlook what Mrs. Strickland politely referred to as an “income too confined to support a wife.” The wolf was not far from the door for John Dunbar Moodie. He belonged to a class disastrously familiar to mothers of eligible daughters in early-nineteenth-century England: officers who had defended King and country during the Napoleonic wars and had now been pensioned off on half-pay; at any time, they could be recalled for active service. Britain's wars with France in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries had been a boon for younger sons of impoverished gentry. Fighting “Boney” had given them an income and a way of life otherwise unavailable.

The youngest of five sons of an ancient but obscure Scottish family, John Moodie was born in 1797 on his family's estate on the bleak and craggy Isle of Hoy in the Orkneys. Melsetter, the family seat, was a large, ugly brick manor house, built about forty years earlier and already heavily mortgaged. John's eldest brother, Benjamin, sold it at the first opportunity. John joined the army as soon as he was old enough: at sixteen, he became a second-lieutenant in the 21st Royal (Northern) Fusiliers. But within two years he had been wounded in the left wrist during an engagement on Dutch soil and retired on half-pay, with few prospects and little education. His income would barely cover the needs of a bachelor of modest tastes—and though John wasn't extravagant, throughout his life he was immoderately generous to those he loved.

In 1817, John's brother Benjamin Moodie had emigrated to the Cape Colony, at the southern tip of Africa. The British government was offering free passage and a hundred acres of land to anyone who would settle the land and quell the Bantus, or “Kaffirs,” as the settlers contemptuously called them (
kaffir
means “infidel” in Arabic). So in 1819 John decided to join Ben. The following year, a third brother, Donald, sailed
off to the Cape as well. John Dunbar Moodie spent eleven years farming the red soil of southern Africa, and there were aspects of life in the colony that he loved. Rising at dawn and shouldering his rifle, he would ride out across the open grasslands to hunt elephants and “sea-cows,” as the Boers called hippopotamus. But it was a miserable and lonely existence for a sociable man in his twenties: speaking broken Dutch to his Boer neighbours in the Groote Valley, scratching a subsistence living from the dry and stony terrain and repelling Bantu raids on his livestock. “I lived for years without companionship, for my nearest English neighbour was twenty-five miles off….My very ideas became confused and limited, for want of intellectual companions to strike out new lights.” John dreaded the idea that he might turn into another crusty, sunburnt old misanthrope, grumbling to newcomers about the way that West-minster ignored South Africa's potential. So in 1830, he returned to England, “with the resolution of placing my domestic matters on a more comfortable footing.”

Within weeks of his return, John Moodie had secured Susanna's heart. Within months, he had her mother's permission to marry his beloved. But he faced a monumental challenge: how could he afford a wife? There were so few avenues open to a young man who was neither rich nor landed, and who had neither the skill nor the inclination to set himself up as a merchant of some sort. John resorted to a tactic popular amongst penniless young men of his day, as well as several heroes of novels by Jane Austen, William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. He turned to his rich relatives, in hopes of a settlement or promise of future legacy. He rushed up to Scotland to visit a smattering of elderly and, he hoped, benevolent uncles, but kept in touch with his beloved Susie in daily letters.

The ardour in those letters burns as brightly today as it did when he sharpened his goose quill and dipped it into the ink: “Believe me you are indeed with me when I lie down and when I rise my thoughts are still with you—you still are present in my dreams with your smiles and the looks you wore when first I loved you.” In page after page, John described to
his fiancée the tortuous process of chasing family money from elderly relatives. They all seemed to be ensnared by debts, complicated entails on their properties and lawsuits. But John was never one to let setbacks lower his spirits; he quickly moved on to exuberant, thigh-slapping descriptions of various adventures. “My old craze for boat sailing seized me one day,” began a five-page account of a terrifying sail, in which John was nearly shipwrecked in the Pentland Firth. Despite a savage storm, and the inexperience of his young companion, John managed to haul his dinghy off the rocks. He then took refuge in the harbour at Hoy, his birthplace. The locals greeted him rapturously, to his delight. “A poor old woman near a hundred years of age, who had been a servant of my grandfather's, sent her grand-daughter to me with a pair of worsted stockings….Ah! my Susie had you been with me this would indeed have been one of the happiest moments of my life.”

John's inclination to revel in danger and regale listeners with his adventures was a mixed blessing. His intention had been to sweep his bride off her feet. He wanted to take her back to his property in South Africa immediately after they were married and he had wangled some capital out of his family. At first, Susanna fell in with these plans and worked harder than ever to churn out stories for the annuals. “I must depend on my wits to buy my wedding clothes,” she explained to friends. But although John's braggadocio about shooting elephants and leopards at the Cape, not to mention his spine-tingling descriptions of snakes, amused the habitués of London drawing rooms, they started to unnerve Susanna. While John was scouring Scotland for rich relatives, she got cold feet. She began to wonder whether the literary lions of London weren't more her style than the tawny-maned lions of South Africa. She asked herself why she would move to a colony in which slavery was still permitted, when the Mary Prince story had made her a fervent abolitionist. In January 1831, while John was still in Scotland, she abruptly broke off the engagement: “I have changed my mind. You may call me a jilt or a flirt or what you please.…I will neither marry a soldier nor leave my country for ever …”

What happened to the great love affair? Susanna, it seems, had found herself in a very modern dilemma. She had recognized that if she followed her heart, she would probably be abandoning her ambitions. “[I] feel happy that I am once more my own mistress,” she admitted to a confidant. Her writing career had taken off: that year she had managed to place stories in several publications, including Harral's monthly,
La Belle Assemblée
, the weekly
Athenaeum
and the annuals
The Amulet, Friendship's Offering
and
Juvenile Forget-Me-Not
. She was meeting or corresponding with kindred spirits such as Mary Russell Mitford, a single woman sixteen years her senior who was supporting herself as a professional writer. And the more Susanna heard about the empty, arid grasslands of the Cape, the less attractive they sounded—especially when she compared them to the streets of London.

It is not difficult to imagine the appeal to Susanna Strickland of the London of the early nineteenth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the capital had been transformed from a conglomeration of villages, such as Westminster and Chelsea, linked by muddy lanes and narrow streets, into a magnificent city traversed by paved roads. Six new bridges across the Thames River, built between 1750 and 1827, had supplemented London Bridge, and by unclogging the city's arteries had enormously increased commerce. The population had doubled in the previous fifty years: with two million citizens, it was now not only the largest city in the world but also its principal financial exchange, the “Rialto of the age” in James Morris's phrase. Private developers had built grandiose terraces of large houses, like the Nash Terraces on the south side of Regent's Park, and elegant rows of shops along Oxford Street and Bond Street. Men of business and letters congregated in the coffee houses, book shops and clubs of Piccadilly. Susanna could wander down busy thoroughfares, listening to the noisy cries of vendors selling lavender, cherries, hot loaves or gingerbread, as she admired shop windows full of the latest furniture designs or Paris fashions.

Moreover, the world was opening up for talented young women like the Strickland sisters. The capital was exploding with the kind of cultural
activities in which, following the example set by Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Mary Russell Mitford, Susanna could envisage a future. Elizabeth was already editing her periodical; Agnes was frequently mentioned as a “poetess” in society columns; Catharine was a popular writer of children's books. The booksellers, engravers and publishers who had offices in St. Paul's Churchyard, Paternoster Row, Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street were eager for material. The introduction of steam printing after 1814 had lowered costs and multiplied the number of copies of a publication that could be printed in a short time. There were close to three hundred newspapers circulating through the United Kingdom. Did Susanna really want to exchange this buzz of literary activity for the isolation of a South African farm, surrounded by hostile “Kaffirs” and truculent Boers? Did she really want to leave a city in which women were playing an increasingly important public role to live in a country that still endorsed the inhumane practices that Mary Prince had described?