800 Years of Women's Letters (7 page)

I wish there were some photographic process by which one's mind could be struck off and transferred to that of the friend we wish to know it, without the medium of this confounded letter-writing!

A poor lady of my acquaintance is in great trouble; she has just lost a daughter, of whom I was very fond, under most painful circumstances, and I must go and see her. It makes my heart sick to see her. Her husband is a great scoundrel; he left his family, after tormenting them to death, and now he increases their trouble by all sorts of vexations, and it makes me mad to hear people coolly say, ‘I understand Mrs —— has a violent temper,' as if a woman was to be steel and marble under the most unprovoked outrages! I wish I might say my say about matrimony. This is a tremendously long letter.

God bless you, dear love. Take care of yourself, and write as soon as you can.

Ever yours G.E.J.

ED. A. IRELAND,
SELECTION FROM THE LETTERS OF GERALDINE E. JEWSBURY TO JANE WELSH CARLYLE
(1892)

In 1855, Caroline Norton, granddaughter of Sheridan and a fairly successful writer, wrote a letter to Queen Victoria on the Marriage and Divorce Bill. She had married the Honourable George Norton in 1827. He proved violent and mean, to the extent of refusing her access to their three children. She played a leading role in the agitation to reform the law, which made wives suffer so greatly when their husbands were unfaithful, cruel or unbalanced. This extract is taken from a lengthy, well-argued letter to the Queen, analysing skilfully the humiliations that many wives had to undergo. At last, in 1857, Parliament passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, which set up civil divorce courts.

1855

A married women in England has
no legal existence
.

An English wife may not leave her husband's house. Not only can he sue her for ‘restitution of conjugal rights,' but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge, and who may ‘harbour her,' – as it is termed, – and carry her away by force, with or without the aid of the police.

If the wife sue for separation for cruelty, it must be ‘cruelty that endangers life or limb,' and if she has once forgiven, or, in legal phrase, ‘
condoned
' his offences, she cannot plead them; though her past forgiveness only proves that she endured as long as endurance was possible.

If her husband takes proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself. She has no means of proving the falsehood of his allegations. She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for ‘damages'. . . .

If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce
her
so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband,
a vinculo
, however profligate he may be. No law court can divorce in England. A special Act of Parliament annulling the marriage is passed for each case. The House of Lords grants this almost as a matter of course to the husband, but not to the wife. In only four instances (two of which were cases of incest) the wife obtained a divorce to marry again.

She cannot prosecute for a libel. Her husband must prosecute; and in cases of enmity and separation, of course she is without a remedy. . . .

She cannot claim support, as a matter of personal right, from her husband. The general belief and nominal rule is, that her husband is ‘bound to maintain her.' That is not the law. He is not bound to
her
. He is bound to his country, bound to see that she does not cumber the parish in which she resides. If it be proved that means sufficient are at her disposal, from relatives or friends, her husband is quit of his obligation, and need not contribute a farthing: even if he have deserted her; or be in receipt of money which is hers by inheritance. . . .

Separation from her husband by consent, or for his ill usage, does not alter their mutual relation. He retains the right to divorce her
after
separation, – as before, – though he himself be unfaithful.

Her being, on the other hand, of spotless character, and without reproach, gives her no advantage in law. She may have withdrawn from his roof knowing that he lives with ‘his faithful housekeeper': having suffered personal violence at his hands; having ‘condoned' much, and being able to prove it by unimpeachable testimony: or he may have shut the doors of her house against her: all this is quite immaterial: the law takes no cognisance of which is to blame. As
her husband
, he has a right to all that is hers: as
his wife
, she has no right to anything that is his. As her husband, he may divorce her. For his wife, the utmost ‘divorce' is permission to live alone – married to his name. [Her husband spent the money she earned from writing, even when he had left her destitute. It was not illegal for him to do so – nor to take their three children.]

C. NORTON, ‘A LETTER TO THE QUEEN ON LORD CHANCELLOR CRANWORTH'S MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE BILL' (1855)

George Eliot wrote to a close friend, Mrs Robert Lytton, attempting to comfort her after the death of her uncle, Lord Clarendon, whom she had loved as a father. The writer offers thoughts of death as a means to help women live more independently.

8 July 1870

I did not like to write to you until Mr Lytton sent word that I might do so, because I had not the intimate knowledge that would have enabled me to measure your trouble; and one dreads of all things to speak or write a wrong or unseasonable word when words are the only signs of interest and sympathy that one has to give. I know now, from what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt by you, – that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and this makes me think of you very much. For learning to love any one is like an increase of property, – it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm. I find myself often thinking of you with that sort of proprietor's anxiety, wanting you to have gentler weather all through your life, so that your face may never look worn and storm-beaten, and wanting your husband to be and do the very best, lest anything short of that should be disappointment to you. At present the thought of you is all the more with me, because you trouble has been brought by death; and for nearly a year death seems to me my most intimate daily companion. I mingle the thought of it with every other, not sadly, but as one mingles the thought of some one who is nearest in love and duty with all one's motives. I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity – possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.

I don't know why I should say this to you, except that my pen is chatting as my tongue would if you were here. We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life – some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed – because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defence against passionate affliction even more than men.

Just under the pressure of grief, I do not believe there is any consolation. The word seems to me to be drapery for falsities. Sorrow must be sorrow, ill must be ill, till duty and love towards all who remain recover their rightful predominance. Your life is so full of those claims, that you will not have time for brooding over the unchangeable. Do not spend any of your valuable time now in writing to me, but be satisfied with sending me news of you through Mr Lytton when he has occasion to write to Mr Lewes.

I have lately finished reading aloud Mendelssohn's
Letters
, which we had often resolved and failed to read before. They have been quite cheering to us, from the sense they give of communion with an eminently pure, refined nature, with the most rigorous conscience in art. In the evening we have always a concert to listen to – a concert of modest pretensions, but well conducted enough to be agreeable.

I hope this letter of chit-chat will not reach you at a wrong moment. In any case, forgive all mistakes on the part of one who is always yours sincerely and affectionately.

ED. G. HAIGHT,
THE GEORGE ELIOT LETTERS
(1954)

Millicent Fawcett devoted her life to women's rights, for which she was often slandered publicly by men. Here she describes the tactful way she dealt with a Member of Parliament who vilified her.

Jan. 1872

A few days later a then well-known Member of Parliament, Mr C.R., referred publicly in the House of Commons to the appearance of Mrs Taylor and myself upon a platform to advocate votes for women, as ‘two ladies, wives of members of this House, who had disgraced themselves,' and added that he would not further disgrace them by mentioning their names.

It so happened that a very short time after this, my husband and I were spending the weekend in Cambridge, and that most hospitable of men, Mr James Porter, of Peterhouse, (the victim of Mr Perkins's bulldog!) asked us to dine with him. What was my amusement to see Mr C.R. among the guests: this amusement was intensified into positive glee when he was asked to take me in to dinner. I could not resist expressing condolences with him on his unfortunate position. Should I ask Mr Porter to let him exchange me for some other lady who had not disgraced herself? But after we had let off steam a little in this way, I found him quite an agreeable neighbour at the table, and so far as I know, he never again publicly held up any woman to contempt for advocating the enfranchisement of her own sex. After all, what he had said was very mild compared to Horace Walpole's abuse of Mary Wollstonecraft as ‘a hyena in petticoats'.

RAY STRACHEY,
MILLICENT FAWCETT
(1931)

Female stoicism was harrowingly expressed in the epistolary novel
So Long a Letter
by Mariama Bâ, first published in French in 1980. Mariama Bâ was Senegalese. She married the Minister of Education, who divorced her after she had given him nine children.

When I stopped yesterday, I probably left you astonished by my disclosures.

Was it madness, weakness, irresistible love? What inner confusion led Modou Fall [her husband] to marry Binetou?

To overcome my bitterness, I think of human destiny. Each life has its share of heroism, an obscure heroism, born of abdication, of renunciation and acceptance under the merciless whip of fate.

I think of all the blind people the world over, moving in darkness. I think of all the paralysed the world over, dragging themselves about. I think of all the lepers the world over, wasted by their disease.

Victims of a sad fate which you did not choose, compared with your lamentations, what is my quarrel, cruelly motivated, with a dead man who no longer has any hold over my destiny? Combining your despair, you could have been avengers and made them tremble, all those who are drunk on their wealth; tremble, those upon whom fate has bestowed favours. A horde powerful in its repugnance and revolt, you could have snatched the bread that your hunger craves.

Your stoicism has made you not violent or subversive but true heroes, unknown in the mainstream of history, never upsetting established order, despite your miserable condition.

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

Fay Weldon is one of our most controversial novelists, partly because she criticizes patriarchal attitudes vehemently, also because she attempts to make women face their weaknesses, in prose which is often as didactic as it is inventive. In 1983 she published
Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen.
Although she terms it an epistolary novel, it is rather a series of open letters on the practice of reading and writing fiction. Furthermore, it is in the tradition of women writing after reading an older, influential woman's writing. This letter offers caustic late twentieth-century comments on the role of women in the late eighteenth century.

October 1983

My dear Alice,

Jane Austen is reputed to have fainted when her father said ‘We're moving to Bath.' She was twenty-five; she had lived all her life in the Vicarage of Steventon: her father, without notifying anyone, had decided to retire, and thought that Bath was as pleasant a place as any to go. None of us fainted the day my father came home and told my mother, my sister and myself that he was leaving us that day to live for ever with his sweetheart, whose existence he'd never hinted at before. What are we to make of that? That swooning has gone out of fashion? Or that a later female generation has become inured, by reason of a literature increasingly related to the realities of life, to male surprises? Jane Austen's books are studded with fathers indifferent to their families' (in particular their daughters') welfare, male whims taking priority, then as now, over female happiness. She observes it: she does not condemn. She chides women for their raging vanity, their infinite capacity for self-deception, their idleness, their rapaciousness and folly; men, on the whole, she simply accepts. This may be another of the reasons her books are so socially acceptable in those sections of society least open to change. Women are accustomed to criticism; to being berated, in fiction, for their faults. Men are, quite simply, not. They like to be heroes.

That is quite enough of this letter. If I write too much at any one time the personal keeps intruding, and I am writing a letter of literary advice to a young lady, albeit a niece, on first reading Jane Austen, not a diatribe on the world's insensitivity to her aunt's various misfortunes, or the hard time women have at the hands of men: a fact liberally attested to up and down the streets of the City of Invention.