3. Women’s literary traditions and the individual talent
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from her predecessors, especially her immediate predecessors: we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of her work may be those in which the dead poets, her ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
—T. S. Eliot
I
To be a woman writer long meant, may still mean, belonging to a literary movement apart from but hardly subordinate to the mainstream: an undercurrent, rapid and powerful. The word “movement” gives an inaccurate idea of an association often remote and indirect. To use the word George Sand imposed, and speak of a “solidarity” of women, would also be misleading, for writing women have never felt much of a sentimental loyalty to their own kind — quite the contrary. The harshest criticism of trashy books by lady writers came from women writers themselves; sometimes, as in the case of Elizabeth Rigby’s famous review of Jane Eyre, they denounced books that were not trashy at all. George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” of 1856 is the classic of the genre, as well as one of the funniest pieces of serious criticism ever written; but long before, in 1789, there was Mary Wollstonecraft’s swift dispatch of one of the worst specimens of female pap that she encountered as a reviewer with the line, “Pray Miss, write no more!”
Not loyalty but confidence was the resource that women writers drew from the possession of their own tradition. And it was a confidence that until very recently could come from no other source. Male writers have always been able to study their craft in university or coffeehouse, group themselves into movements or coteries, search out predecessors for guidance or patronage, collaborate or fight with their contemporaries. But women through most of the nineteenth century were barred from the universities, isolated in their own homes, chaperoned in travel, painfully restricted in friendship. The personal give-and-take of the literary life was closed to them. Without it, they studied with a special closeness the works written by their own sex, and developed a sense of easy, almost rude familiarity with the women who wrote them.
When fame at last propelled Charlotte Bronté to London and gave her the opportunity to meet her greatest male contemporaries, she exhibited an awkwardness and timidity in literary society that have become legendary except in one encounter, that with Harriet Martineau, to whom she sent a brusquely confident note soliciting a meeting. “I could not help feeling a strong wish to see you,” she wrote; “. . . It would grieve me to lose this chance of seeing one whose works have so often made her the subject of my thoughts.” And George Eliot could write in her first letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, though they had not and would not ever meet, that she knew her as a woman as well as a writer, for she had years before taken the liberty, rude but comprehensible, of reading Mrs. Stowe’s intimate correspondence with another woman. Later Stowe and George Eliot would correspond about the source of Casaubon in Middlemarch; their letters provide a tragicomedy of mutual misunderstanding about each other’s married life, but they also reveal that there is a human component to literature which a woman writer can more easily discuss with another woman writer, even across an ocean, than she can with the literary man next door.
Emily Dickinson's literary solitude was breached by the incorporeal presence of women writers she knew exclusively but intimately from reading their works and everything she could find about their lives, Jack Capps calls it an “intimate kinship,” and the phrase is excellent, because it suggests a family relationship which can be either hostile or loving, competitive or supportive, but is always available. Through the closed doors and narrow windows that so often shut on the literary woman’s life seeped a whole family of literary relationships for her to exploit: patterns to be followed, deficiencies to be made up, abuses to correct, achievements in works by other women to surpass. What was supplied for the nourishment of male literary production by simple acquaintance was replaced for women writers by the reading of each other’s work, reading for intimate reverberation, for what Gertrude Stein called “a sounding board.”
Take Jane Austen on the one hand, and her contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey on the other. Wordsworth went to Bristol to meet Coleridge; both were Cambridge men, and they had university friends in common. At Bristol, Wordsworth found Coleridge rooming with an Oxford undergraduate named Southey: they were planning to emigrate to America. Instead, Wordsworth and Coleridge drew close together, settled near each other in the Lake District, and collaborated on a volume which made history, called Lyrical Ballads. Meanwhile Jane Austen, almost exactly the same age and from a similar social milieu (had she been a man, she would probably have gone to university), stayed home with her mother at Steventon, Bath, and Chawton. She visited a brother's family now and then, wrote letters to sister and nieces, and read Sarah Harriet Burney, Mrs. Jane West, Anna Maria Porter, Mrs. Anne Grant, Elisabeth Hamilton, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Helen Maria Williams, and the rest of the women writers of her day.
“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity,” she once said, “the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” Scholars have industriously scraped together evidence that softens if it does not essentially alter this self-portrait; for Austen of course knew something of the major English writers from Shakespeare to Johnson and read the best poetry of her day. But scholarship has averted its refined and weary eyes from the female fiction that Austen’s letters inform us was her daily sustenance in the years that she became one of the greatest writers in the language. Who wants to associate the great Jane Austen, companion of Shakespeare, with someone named Mary Brunton? Who wants to read or indeed can find a copy of Self-Control (1810) by that lady, which Austen was nervous about reading while revising Sense and Sensibility for publication and starting Mansfield Park, nervous because she was “always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever – and of finding my own story and my own people all forestalled.” She did, however, read and reread the Brunton book, and said (jokingly), “I will redeem my credit . . . by writing a close imitation of ‘Self-Control’ . . . I will improve upon it.”
It can be argued that Jane Austen achieved the classical perfection of her fiction because there was a mass of women’s novels, excellent, fair, and wretched, for her to study and improve upon. Mary Brunton and the rest of the ladies were her own kind; she was at ease with them. They were her undergraduate fellows in the novel, her literary roommates and incorporeal collaborators, as someone like Walter Scott could never be. Austen’s comment on Scott, when she learned he had turned to the then woman-dominated field of fiction, was wickedly female but also half-serious. “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. —It is not fair. —He has Fame and Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. —I do not like him, & do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it—but fear I must.” The fact is that Austen studied Maria Edgeworth more attentively than Scott, and Fanny Burney more than Richardson; and she came closer to meeting Mme de Staël than she did to meeting any of the literary men of her age.
In the case of some women writers, Austen preeminent among them, women’s literature has been their major tradition; in the case of others and I think quality has nothing to do with the difference—it has mattered hardly at all: here Emily Brontë’s name comes to mind. In the case of most women writers, women’s traditions have been fringe benefits superadded upon the literary associations of period, nation, and class that they shared with their male contemporaries.
In spite of the advent of coeducation, which by rights should have ended this phenomenon, twentieth-century women appear to benefit still from their membership in the wide-spreading family of women writers. Willa Cather, exceptionally well trained to literature in the educational and journalistic institutions of a man’s world, found her literary mentor in Sarah Orne Jewett; in that relationship sex easily canceled out the distance between Nebraska and Maine. Even wider incongruities appear in the productive pairings of Jean Rhys and Charlotte Brontë, Carson McCullers and Isak Dinesen, Nathalie Sarraute and Ivy Compton-Burnett. And the last provided, in her first novel, Dolores, the oddest exhibit that women’s literature has to offer: a groping retrieval of what could be made modern in Austen and Gaskell, necessary to Compton-Burnett’s development of her own apparently idiosyncratic fictional manner.
* * *
The case history of the birth of the novelist named George Eliot is particularly interesting, because there was a specialist in attendance, George Henry Lewes. Lewes believed in women’s literature, and he had a method, thoroughly justified by results we know, for its perpetuation. “The appearance of Woman in the field of literature is a significant fact,” he wrote. “... The advent of female literature promises woman’s view of life, woman’s experience: in other words, a new element.” So Lewes wrote in 1852, before there was an author named George Eliot, and by that time he had already played an important role as critic, advisor, and friend, in encouraging the development of Charlotte Brontë, Geraldine Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several other women writers. He was the principal interpreter of George Sand in England, and his knowledge of her work was astounding, especially to Mme Sand, for she did not take herself so seriously as Lewes did. “Distinguished” and “likable” were the words Sand applied to Lewes, “and more French than English in character. He knows my works by heart, and knows the Lettres d'un voyageur much better than I do.”
The best way to discover what is both distinguished and likable in George Henry Lewes is to read the theater criticism he wrote in the mid-century over the pen name of “Vivian”; the next best way (as these columns are hard to find) is to approach him by reference to “Corno Di Bassetto,” the persona George Bernard Shaw adopted for his own brilliant music criticism in 1888. “These articles of Lewes’s are miles beyond the crudities of Di Bassetto,” Shaw wrote,
though the combination of a laborious criticism with a recklessly flippant manner is the same in both. Lewes, by the way, like Bassetto, was a musical critic. He was an adventurous person as critics go; for he not only wrote philosophical treatises and feuilletons, but went on the stage. . . He also wrote plays of the kind which, as a critic, he particularly disliked. And he was given to singing—nothing will ever persuade me that a certain passage in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such about an amateur vocalist who would persist in wrecking himself on O Ruddier than the Cherry does not refer to Lewes. Finally he was rash enough to contract a morganatic union with the most famous woman writer of the day, a novelist, thereby allowing his miserable affections to triumph over his critical instincts…; and so, having devoted some years to remonstrating with people who persisted in addressing the famous novelist by her maiden name instead of as “Mrs. Lewes,” he perished after proving conclusively in his own person that “womanly self-sacrifice” is an essentially manly weakness.
Shaw’s account of the Lewes/George Eliot relationship is so true to its spirit that one regrets having to point out where it is false to fact, but when this most important of all irregular unions began, the woman in the case was not a famous writer, was not even a novelist.
Before she met Lewes, before she took the pen name of George Eliot, the woman whose rea] name was Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans had lived over thirty years of a wider and more intellectual life than any Englishwoman before her, but, except for a schoolgirl exercise, she had never written a line of fiction, never seriously considered becoming a novelist. “September 1856 made a new era in my life,” she recorded, “for it was then J began to write Fiction.”
The “new era” actually dawned during the winter of 1854-55, when she read aloud to Lewes in Berlin—they had gone off together to Germany —a few pages she had written “describing a Staffordshire village and the life of the neighboring farmhouses.” Staffordshire was her father’s home county, where from the age of six Mary Ann Evans had been taken often to visit his relatives; her early perceptions of the differences between the Evanses of Staffordshire and her mother’s people, the Pearsons of Warwickshire, would eventually inspire the chapters about “the life of the neighbouring farmhouses” that are the best things in her early novels. These reminiscent pages gave Lewes for the first time the idea that she might become a novelist, and with his encouragement she began to think of a subject, a title, for her first tale.
But there were two article assignments to be written first for the Westminster Review, and they required Marian Evans to ponder the highest and the lowest reaches of female ambition in the field of fiction. In “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” which appeared in October 1856, she lambasted the kind of fiction that a highly intelligent woman would not become a novelist to write: novels pompous, pedantic, snobbish, sentimental, and pious. Her sharpest scorn was reserved for the Evangelical species, for her own religious experience as a young woman had taught her that Evangelicalism made its greatest appeal to people of simple and provincial situation, not to the improbably elegant societies that Evangelical lady novelists liked to invent. “Why can we not have,” she asked, in a sudden lapse from mockery to seriousness, “pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe’s pictures of religious life among the negroes?” In embryo, the subject of Adam Bede was here suggested: George Eliot’s first novel would provide original and serious pictures of religious life among the working classes, not of industrial, but of rural England.
The model she had in mind was Dred, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second slavery novel, which Marian Evans reviewed in the Belles Lettres section of the same October 1856 issue of the Westminster Review. She found Dred a work of “uncontrollable power . . . inspired by a rare genius,” not so much for its antislavery sentiments (even stronger than in Uncle Tom's Cabin) as for its religious matter:
the exhibition of a people to whom what we may call Hebraic Christianity is still a reality, still an animating belief, and by whom the theocratic conceptions of the Old Testament are literally applied to their daily life.
She remarked upon the “wild enthusiasm” of Dred, the rebel slave leader, and such fine scenes in Mrs. Stowe’s novel as the outdoor camp meeting of Presbyterians and Methodists. Religious revivalism in the woods of the Deep South would eventually be transformed into the village-green Methodism of Chapter 1 of Adam Bede. But something was to intervene to fuse George Eliot’s childhood reminiscences (those pages on “the like of the neighbouring farmhouses”) with her ambition to record the religious impulses of simple country people—and that was her reading of Jane Austen. Studying Austen’s fiction was George Henry Lewes’s program to turn Marian Evans into a great woman novelist—for “of all departments of literature,” he believed, “Fiction is the one to which, by nature and experience, women are best adapted”; and of all novelists Jane Austen was “the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.”
That Marian Evans was an accomplished writer of remarkable attainments Lewes knew well. When he met her in 1854 she was the anonymous and unpaid but highly competent editor of the Westminster Review, and with her excellent command of languages she had read widely (and reviewed and translated) the works of the best minds of her day, especially the philosophers and the theologians, on the Continent as well as in England, Clearly she could instruct and improve the public, but could she hold its attention with living characters, believable settings, interesting events? Could she tell a story? “All the literary and philosophic culture which an author can bring to bear upon his work will tend to give that work a higher value,” Lewes pointed out, “but it will not really make it a better novel.”
He made this comment in his article on Jane Austen in the July 1859 Blackwood's Magazine, an article devoted almost entirely to a celebration of Austen’s genius, but which also included a few paragraphs of comparison favorable and unfavorable to Scenes of Clerical Life, apprentice tales by a new author Lewes referred to as “Mr. George Eliot.” In all of English fiction, Lewes said, Jane Austen was the master of the art of ‘‘dramatic presentation,” the only—but the essential—quality of the novelist that George Eliot lacked. That was why, between February and September of 1857, Lewes had put George Eliot through a course of reading all of Jane Austen’s novels—reading them with him, slowly and aloud, one after the other. As he said,
. . . when it is considered what a severe test that is, how the reading aloud permits no skipping, no evasion of weariness, but brings both merits and defects into stronger relief by forcing the mind to dwell on them, there is surely something significant of genuine excellence when both reader and listener finish their fourth reading [of Austen’s novels] with increase of admiration.
A few respectful mentions of Jane Austen can be found in George Eliot’s correspondence (after she met Lewes), but nothing like the panegyrics she gave to Stowe, Scott, Rousseau, Brontë, and George Sand, novelists of romantic fervor and depths of soul with whom she felt spiritual kinship. But Jane Austen? In temperament, social class, and literary program—in everything but sex—she and George Eliot were a world and several generations apart. Miss Austen (whose name George Eliot long persisted in misspelling) was a product of the genteel classes, as Marian Evans was not. As a writer, Austen was conservative, elegant, restrained, unintellectual, impersonal—alt that George Eliot the novelist was not and did not want to be. I suspect her initial reaction to Jane Austen was much like that of Charlotte Brontë when the same George Henry Lewes, a decade earlier, as critic of and correspondent with the author of Jane Eyre, had urged her too to read Jane Austen. “And what did I find?” Brontë wrote Lewes. “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but ... no open country, no fresh air. … I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses!”
Charlotte Brontë put her Austen reading to use, however, and so did George Eliot. Of all the Austen novels that George Eliot read in 1857, the one that made her a major novelist was, I am convinced, Emma, which she read aloud to Lewes out of doors one May afternoon when they were on holiday in Jersey, and finished the following evening. Published in 1816, the last year of Austen’s life, Emma was the peak of Jane Austen’s achievement and the most highly cultivated of her English gardens: “an idyllic world,” in Lionel Trilling’s phrase for the novel.
To read Emma and Adam Bede together is to sense a close, an almost uncanny association between the two novels; as if either could be pressed, a kind of thick transparency, upon the other, revealing below the traceries of dissimilar surfaces a single underlying structure. It is not “literary influence” of the standard sort, but the family relationship that women writers made work for themselves; here a relationship not of affection but of sibling rivalry. Adam Bede appears to be the novel that Austen rejected; it seems to hover below the surface of Emma, waiting to be born in the hands of another woman novelist, forty years later.
Thus, if Harriet Beecher Stowe offered a goal, Jane Austen indirectly provided a method of “dramatic presentation’; for what George Eliot seems to have done to become a novelist was turn her childhood memories into fiction by turning Emma inside out. She put at the center of her novel all that Jane Austen had relegated to the boundaries of her own, while moving all that was central to Austen to the outer fringes—to the place where the public sits, reading a novel. George Eliot broke through Austen’s “highly cultivated garden”? and found beyond its fences the open country that was her own proper material: “the life of the neighbouring farmhouses.”
Emma is the story of the education, through love, of a snob, a spoiled young heiress who is the wealthiest of Austen’s heroines and the most reprehensible. As the novel begins, Emma is shown wasting her time on matchmaking, an occupation which satisfies her lively imagination, encourages her idleness, and flatters her arrogant presumption to be the arbiter of her genteel and restricted world. Out on the farther edges of the novel, a subplot has to do with the nearly fatal effects of Emma’s attempt to unmatch Harriet Smith and Robert Martin: the girl is a pretty nobody of uncertain parentage, taken up by Emma as plaything and protégée, and the man is a tenant farmer. The two lovers are united only at the end of the novel, in spite of Emma, through the agency of the all-wise Mr. Knightley of the vast and ancient estate of Donwell Abbey. He is the man Austen gives Emma to marry; he is also her final ideal of the English landlord, and stands at the center of Austen’s idyllic vision of a fruitful land inhabited by a moral people.
The principal lesson Mr. Knightley teaches Emma is that she must not snub but respect and indeed sit down to table with the likes of estate managers and tenant farmers who are the landlord’s most precious resource, for they are devoted to the proper management of the land. Emma, because she sees Robert Martin as a mere “clownish” rustic who moves clumsily, dresses unfashionably, and has not read the latest sentimental novel; because she hears in his talk not what he says but “the uncouthness of a voice, . . . wholly unmodulated,” thwarts his love for Harriet Smith, forbids the girl any intimacy with his family, rations her visits to their home at Abbey-Mill Farm, and forces her to reject his honorable proposal of marriage—indeed dictates the letter of rejection herself. “The yeomanry,” Emma says, “are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do.”
Nor does Jane Austen herself have much to do with this class in the novel. She never lets us penetrate the interior of Abbey-Mill Farm, never introduces us to the Martin family. Robert Martin himself is so shadowy a figure that few readers of Emma notice the character or remember his name. To such a reader as George Eliot, however, no character in Emma (no character in all Austen’s fiction, where he has no parallel) can have been so fascinating to speculate upon, so stimulating to the imagination. For Robert Martin is in character, class, and social utility the very model of the man who dominated her childhood reminiscences: the real man who was Marian Evans’s father.
Son of a carpenter and apprenticed to that trade, Robert Evans was a countryman of little schooling who spoke in the broad dialect of north Staffordshire (or, as Emma would put it, in an uncouth voice, wholly unmodulated). Because he grew remarkably wise in all to do with the land, its farms, its timber, its mines, he was raised to managership of a great estate. When his master inherited the even greater property of Arbury Hall (which stood, like Mr. Knightley’s Donwell Abbey, on the site of an ancient monastery), he took Evans with him into Warwickshire to manage the estate and be tenant of South Farm, where Marian Evans was born. This was the man, shown as a young and handsome lover, whom George Eliot called Adam Bede and made the hero of her first novel—but not until she had read the praise that Austen’s Mr. Knightley bestowed on; Robert Martin. “I have a thorough regard for him and all his family,” says that gentleman to Emma.
“... I never hear better sense from any one than Robert Martin. He always speaks to the purpose; open, straight forward, and very well judging. ... He is an excellent young man, both as son and brother.”
And as surely as one can know anything about the mysteries of literary creation, there was Adam Bede born: the excellent son and brother, the dialect-speaking carpenter turned estate manager, the sensible and stalwart English yeoman hero of George Eliot's first novel.
It is as if George Eliot drew resolution from Jane Austen to write of the people she remembered best from childhood, and, in a new departure for English fiction, to make central to her novel agents and carpenters, dairymaids and farmers, “precisely the order of people,” as Emma says, “with whom I feel I can have nothing to do.” The people central to Jane Austen—landlords and vicars, dowagers and rakes—also appear in Adam Bede, but at its outer edges. Indeed, it is as if George Eliot addressed her new artistic program to Emma (and to that part of herself, which is in every woman, that was Emma-like) when she wrote, in the famous credo of realism in Adam Bede, “It is these people—among whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love. . . who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice.”
There is one page in Emma which, when I read it, makes me picture George Eliot bending over Austen’s novel and planning her own. That is the page on which Emma makes her single near-approach to the Martin home at Abbey-Mill Farm, otherwise seen in the novel only as a distant, generalized vista “with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending.” Too prosperous to invite condescension or require charity, such farmhouses are not for Emma to visit. She drives only so far as the gate, where she drops Harriet and returns to retrieve her a quarter of an hour later: to the gate “at the end of the broad, neat gravel-walk, which led between espalier apple-trees to the front door.”
If Jane Austen let the reader go up that gravel path, and threw open the farmhouse door, we would find within, I imagine, the wonderful interior of Hall Farm, where Adam Bede goes to court Hetty Sorrel. If we met Mrs. Martin, she might turn out to be a sharp-tongued farm matron like Hetty’s Aunt Poyser. The Hetty Sorrel we do meet has the same delectable rosiness as Harriet Smith—the same dreams of fashion, the same capacity for letting her head be turned. George Eliot, too, pauses by the gate in her narration, but her intention is to invite, not to forbid the reader to enter;
Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser. ... Put your face to one of the glass panes in the right-hand window: what do you see? A large open fireplace, with rusty dogs in it, and a bare-boarded floor
—and a spinning wheel, an eight-day clock, brass candlesticks, pewter dishes, and oak tables polished to such a smooth perfection that Hetty can use them as mirrors to refiect her beauty. The Hall Farm scenes, and their remarkable evocation of life on an English farm at the pitch of order and respectability, are today still the principal reason why we return to Adam Bede. And they seem to have been written not because of what Jane Austen wrote, but because of what she chose not to write. What George Eliot found in Jane Austen was a garden to break out of, a gate to push open, a doorway to enter.
* * *
George Eliot’s first novel is not the only one to show the impress of women’s literature in this rough, intimate way; The Mill on the Floss, her second, is an even more complex example. Mme de Staël’s Corinne, the book which George Eliot places in its heroine’s hands, deserves a chapter to itself in any study of the traditions of women’s literature. And what George Sand meant to George Eliot as chronicler of English rural life is a large and fascinating subject that scholars are beginning to explore. It seems to me impossible for anyone who knows The Mill on the Floss to read the opening chapters of La Petite Fadette without seeing the relationship between Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom take shape in the abnormally tense relationship between the siblings in Fadette: abnormal, because Sand’s children are what the berrichon peasants called des bessons—identical twins, both males, one weak and querulously demanding, the other strong, stolid, and winning in temperament. That both George Sand and George Eliot enriched the novel by extending its terrain into the mind of the girl-child is beyond question; that the bessons of La Petite Fadette emboldened George Eliot to make as much of the sister-brother relationship as personal experience taught her that the novelist of girlhood should do seems more than probable.
From letters and other sources it is possible to establish the half-dozen or so Sand works that George Eliot definitely read (including Fadette) and to guess at the rest. From a dozen or so of his critical articles, we know that George Henry Lewes considered George Sand not only the greatest woman writer but the greatest writer of the age, an opinion seconded by George Eliot in her own criticism. We know George Eliot heard from all sides, especially from friends like Sara Hennell, Turgenev, and Frederic Myers, comparisons between her own work and George Sand’s which were meant to flatter. But we do not have specific evidence of a debt owed by any one of George Eliot’s novels to any one of Sand’s. Instead we have a vague but nonetheless convincing statement of her gratitude, from the days when she was merely a reader of George Sand named Mary Ann Evans, not yet a novelist in her own right named George Eliot. “I don’t care whether I agree with her about marriage or not,” she wrote of Sand in 1849,
—whether I think the design of her plot correct or that she had no Precise design at all... – it is sufficient for me as a reason for bowing before her in eternal gratitude to that “great power of God” manifested in her—that I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results— ... some of the moral instincts and their tendencies—with such truthfulness such nicety of discrimination such tragic power and withal such loving gentle humour that one might live a century with nothing but one’s own dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages will suggest.
All that is missing from this panegyric (otherwise something of a commonplace of the age) is the whoop of female exultation supplied by Elizabeth Barrett. In one of her sonnets to George Sand, Miss Barrett openly rejoiced that Sand was not only “True genius, but true woman!”
…and while before
‘The world thou burnest in a poet fire,
We see thy woman heart beat evermore
Through the large flame.
* * *
The most convenient and most delightful way to recover a sense of the way literary women read other woman writers is to go through Elizabeth Barrett’s letters to Miss Mitford. They are wonderful letters and have been wonderfully edited by Betty Miller—so that, if one wants to know who was “poor Mrs. Sullivan” whose “tale of the wife with two husbands affected me very much’’; or what were the dangerous attractions of Theodosia Garrow to a literary widower; or which Irish writer appeared in translation in Mme Amable Tastu’s miscellany ‘“‘which contains not a bit of naughtiness’—necessary information of the obscurest but hardly the dullest variety is at hand. (The first, Betty Miller tells us, was Arabella, daughter of Lady Dacre, who wrote Tales of the Peerage and Peasantry; the second was ‘‘a precocious musician and poetess”’; the third was Mrs. Ss. C. Hall: “‘Dublin-born ... she published more than fifty books, entertained spiritualists and street musicians, and helped to found both the Hospital for Consumptives at Brompton and the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen.”) If one allows for the energetic nuttiness of the Victorians, which stamped the women as well as the men, the literary chitchat in these letters, full of enthusiasm and discrimination and gossip, is much the way literary women have always talked to each other about female colleagues.
Miss Barrett and Miss Mitford were both highly intelligent women of breeding and wit, both busy writers with much besides women on their minds. Mary Russell Mitford was much the older, a grand old lady of letters (exploited by her equally grand old father, a thorough reprobate she adored). She had won fame in the 1820s with her magazine sketches collected under the title Our Village, and she also did very well with the verse tragedies she wrote for the stage, and for which she was always requesting grand historical subjects from her young but learned friend, Miss Barrett. Elizabeth Barrett’s many interests are reflected in her equally numerous epistolary friendships. She was an indefatigable letter writer, and the letters she wrote to different correspondents on different themes have been published as separate series. Thus, if one wants the scholarly Miss Barrett, there are her letters, mostly on Greek poetry, to Hugh Boyd; for the amorous Miss Barrett, there are her letters to Robert Browning; and there are her family letters, her professional literary letters, her social thought letters. . . . But for her literary women letters, there are the letters to Miss Mitford.
Part of the fun of these letters is the drama that bubbles excitingly under their surface decorum. One act centers on Flush, the purebred spaniel Miss Mitford gave Miss Barrett; and one act on Robert Browning, whose victorious courtship burst upon Miss Mitford with all the astonishment of melodrama, for Miss Barrett had made no place for love in their literary-ladies correspondence. These two acts are celebrated: Virginia Woolf made a whole book out of Flush, and The Barretts of Wimpole Street made a perennial theater favorite and a permanent sentimental distortion out of the Browning courtship. But there is another act, centering on George Sand, which though less well-known would add at least comic interest to the Barrett-Mitford drama.
Miss Barrett tried to persuade Miss Mitford that they should send their latest books, tied together in a parcel for courage, to the great Mme Sand. They both enormously admired her, but, as respectable English literary spinsters, they were nervous about approaching her. For George Sand not only had lovers (which was known to happen, even in England, in the high social circles with which Sand, by family background, was associated); but she wore pants when it suited her convenience as a young woman, and she always smoked—depths of depravity which only twentieth-century women can appreciate at their true value. “Suppose you send her ‘Belford Regis’ or another work,” Miss Barrett suggested to Miss Mitford,
and let me slip mine into the shade of it? Suppose we join so in expressing, as two English female writers, our sense of the genius of that distinguished woman?—if it did not strike you as presumption in me to put my name to yours as a writer, saying ‘we.’ We are equally bold at any rate. Mr Kenyon told me I was ‘a daring person’ for the introduction of those sonnets ... [the two she wrote to George Sand, and published in her Poems of 1844]. Well!—are you inclined to do it? Will you? Write and tell me. I would give anything to have a letter from her, though it smelt of cigar. And it would, of course!
For once, Miss Barrett’s wish was not immediately gratified; there was to be no tobacco-scented letter. But there were at last to be, though Robert Browning protested, two visits to Mme Sand.
Years later George Sand tried to recall their meeting for the benefit of Hippolyte Taine, the austere critic and literary historian, who sent her a copy of Aurora Leigh after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death. Sand could remember only Mrs. Browning’s long hair, and an air of illness and modesty and charm, which was a shame, for Taine wrote her that Aurora Leigh was a heroine related to Sand’s Edmée (in Mauprat) and to Spiridion. “As for me,” he wrote, “I love her too much, and just as Flaubert regrets never having seen Balzac, I have one desideratum in my life: never having listened to or looked at Elizabeth Browning for one hour.”
As a poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a post-Keatsian and can best be placed, as Jerome Buckley places her, among the early-Victorian “Spasmodics,” with their virtues and their faults. Although she read with interest the women poets of the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s (who were numerous), they seem to have contributed very little to her manner as a poet, which was in some ways so like Robert Browning’s that one can only say how lovely it was that they married.
Among her. contemporaries, the great women writers were (except for herself) novelists rather than poets; she shared important concerns with the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Sand, and drew upon their fiction for plot ideas for her narrative poetry. But where poetic tradition is concerned, those professional matters on which poets are particularly dependent, there Elizabeth Barrett Browning was more a founder than a follower. All the way to Anna Akhmatova and beyond, the tradition of women’s love poetry appears dominated by the creative presence of Mrs. Browning. The story of her role in the formation of the greatest woman poet of the nineteenth century provides a case history of particular fascination, for between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson there was no affinity whatever but their sex.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. The Great Writers. Oxford University Press, 1977.