LORNA SAGE
Good As Her Word
Selected Journalism

Edited by Sharon Sage and Victor Sage

Dedication

For Olivia

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

I PRE-WAR LIFE WRITING

Grave-side story, Observer 18 June 1978

Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley by Jane Dunn

Good as her word, Observer 14 December 1980

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters by J. A. V. Chapple

Flora by gaslight, Observer 24 January 1982

The London Journal of Flora Tristan Jean Hawkes (trans. and ed.)

Life stories, 19 February 1984

A Need to Testify: Four Portraits by Iris Origo

Strategy for survival, Observer 10 June 1984

Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett by Hilary Spurling

Honest woman, Observer 5 May 1985

Selections from George Eliot’s Letters Gordon S. Haight (ed.)

The girl from Mrs Kelly’s, Observer 28 September 1986

Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton by Flora Fraser

Half of Shandy, Observer 28 December 1986

Laurence Sterne: The Later Years by Arthur H. Cash

Nothing by halves, Observer 20 November 1988

The Letters of Edith Wharton R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (eds)

The bright, ferocious flames of his internal ether, Observer 27 June 1993

The Letters Of Charles Dickens: Volume VII, 1853–1855, The Pilgrim Edition Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (eds)

II POST-WAR LIFE WRITING

First person singular, Observer 12 August 1979

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

Client relationships, TLS 5 November 1982

An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne by Paul Bailey

Orient of the mind, Observer 23 October 1983

Profile of Lesley Blanch

Last testament, Observer 17 June 1984

Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir

What a frightful bore it is to be Gore, Observer 15 November 1987

Profile of Gore Vidal

Independent, 28 October 1989

Obituary of Mary McCarthy

The deb who caught her muse, Observer 20 January 1991

Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart

The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Death of the Author, Granta 41, 1991

Obituary essay Angela Carter

The man they mistook for Marcel Proust, Observer 18 August 1991

Obituary of Terry Kilmartin

Boy in a box springs forth, Observer 28 March 1993

Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster

The secret sharer, Independent On Sunday 25 April 1993

What Remains and Other Stories

The Writer’s Dimension: Selected Essays by Christa Wolf

In full spate, TLS 17 December 1993

Obituary of Anthony Burgess

Secret agonies and allergies, Guardian 24 April 1994

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Selected Letters Robert Giroux (ed.)

Home is where the art is, south of the psyche, Observer 15 May 1994

The Still Moment: Eudora Welty, Portrait of a Writer by Paul Binding

Surviving in the wrong, TLS 4 November 1994

The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm

Alone in the middle of it all, TLS 9 june 1995

Angus Wilson: A Biography by Margaret Drabble

Living like a poet, or, Hello to all that, Guardian 2 July 1995

Life on the Edge by Miranda Seymour

Robert Graves: His Life and Work by Martin Seymour-Smith

Collected Writings on Poetry by Robert Graves

The culture hero’s vision of sameness, Guardian 16 July 1995

F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism by Ian MacKillop

Landlocked, LRB 25 January 2001

Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green by Jeremy Treglown

III THE WOMEN’S CAMP

The old girl network, TLS 30 September 1977

Literary Women by Ellen Moers

The heroine as hero, TLS 14 April 1978

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Aurora Leigh and Other Poems introduced by Cora Kaplan

A contrary Muse, TLS 29 September 1978

Lawrence and Women Anne Smith (ed.)

Practical ecstasies, Observer 28 January 1979

St Teresa of Avila by Stephen Clissold

Hearts of stone, Observer 27 October 1985

Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form by Marina Warner

Sisters of Sisyphus, Observer 26 January 1986

Beyond Power: Women, Men and Morals by Marilyn French

Staying outside the skin, TLS 16 October 1987

Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

Women by Naim Attallah

Woman’s whole existence, Observer 28 February 1988

Women and Love: The New Hite Report by Shere Hite

Forever black suspenders, Observer 24 January 1993

Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle and the Making of Sally Bowles by Linda Mizejewski

Right but Romantic, TLS 25 June 1993

Romanticism and Gender by Anne K. Mellor

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

News from the revolution that never was, Independent On Sunday 26 September 1993

Sexing the Millennium by Linda Grant

TLS 21 December 1993

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous

Farewell Lady Nicotine, Observer 2 January 1994

Cigarettes are Sublime by Richard Klein

The women’s camp, TLS 15 July 1994

Article on critical theory

Paean to gaiety, LRB 22 September 1994

The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture by Terry Castle

A record of honourable defeat, THES 17 February 1995

No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3, Letters from the Front by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

They lived for their work, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 January 1996

Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis

The Goddess of More: Parallels between ancient novels and the new womanism, TLS 9 August 1996

The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody

Learning new titles, TLS 17 March 2000

Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century by Susan Gubar

Mother’s back, LRB 18 May 2000

What Is a Woman? and Other Essays by Toril Moi

IV CLASSICS

Daringly distasteful, TLS 26 April 1974

Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks

Gay old times in Greece, Observer 1 October 1978

Greek Homosexuality by K. J. Dover

Victorian fun and games, Observer 24 December 1978

No Name by Wilkie Collins

Observer Magazine 24 June 1979

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

When two melt into one, TLS 22 February 1980

Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley by Nathaniel Brown

A Scribbler comes of age, TLS 23 January 1981

Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works Jerome J. McGann (ed.)

Weaving, deceiving and indecision, TLS 5 March 1982

Heroines and Hysterics by Mary R. Lefkowitz

Links in a mystic chain, Observer 23 May 1982

Lull and Bruno by Frances Yates

Ravishment related, TLS 24 December 1982

The Rapes of Lucretia by Ian Donaldson

From our spot of time, TLS 9 December 1988 Review of several books on Wordsworth including

Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics by Theresa M. Kelley

Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism by Susan M. Levin

Peace with a vengeance, Observer 21 November 1993

Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E. P. Thompson

V CRITICAL TRADITION

The gay protagonist, Observer 20 Apri1 1980

The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction by Stephen Adams

Seminal semantics, Observer 10 January 1982

Dissemination by Jacques Derrida

Men against women, Observer 19 December 1982

The Rape of Clarissa by Terry Eagleton

Cavalier and roundhead, Observer 24 August 1986

Essays on Shakespeare by William Empson

Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays by F. R. Leavis

TLS 14 April 1989

Harold Bloom: Poetics of Influence John Hollander (ed.)

Oops, a lexical leak, Observer 20 March 1994

In the Reading Gaol by Valentine Cunningham

The First Bacchante, LRB 29 April 1999

The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie

A Simpler, More Physical Kind of Empathy, LRB September 1999

West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

VI ITALY

Fighting Fascists in bed, Observer Magazine 18 June 1978

Italian feminists

Displaced persons, Observer 13 July 1980

Flight From Torregreca: Strangers and Pilgrims by Anne Cornelison

Our Lady of the Accident, Observer Magazine 23 November 1980

The shrine of the Madonna of Montenero

Unholy ecstasies, Observer 9 February 1986

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith C. Brown

Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell

The vegetable paradiso, TLS 26 September 1986

Sotto il sole giaguaro by ltalo Calvino

Man who put the cult in occultism, Observer 1 October 1989

Interview with Umberto Eco

From the mind’s balcony, TLS 5 October 1990

La strada di San Giovanni by Italo Calvino

Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement by Lucia Re

Freedom fighter, Vogue November 1992

Interview with Oriana Fallaci

On the seas of story, TLS 7 October 1994

‘L’isola del giorno prima by Umberto Eco

Signs of possession, TLS 19 January 2001

Out of Florence: From the World of San Francesco di Paola by Harry Brewster

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

LIKE CERTAIN PHOTOGRAPHS, WHICH hint at the gap between themselves and their future, posthumous books often have a slightly thin, accidental irony about them. This effect depends on how much they are designed to render their author’s intentions, how narrowly those intentions are inscribed in the book’s form: the stricter the author’s plan, the more the unfinished nature of the text becomes an issue. Here, there are no ghostly plans left on the desk, nothing was left unfinished. Instead, the work itself – perhaps a million and a half words written over thirty years – is just too vivid and alive to be left merely dispersed. What strikes us now, having made our selection, is how intimate a portrait of a mind and personality it provides, and how unexpectedly fresh, how new, that portrait is. As Lorna puts it in ‘Death of the Author’, her unflinching tribute to her friend Angela Carter: ‘Nothing stays, endings are final, which is why they are also beginnings’.

We have selected Lorna’s journalism to display the sheer range and diversity of her writing. During the seventies and eighties, while making her reputation as a contemporary fiction-reviewer, Lorna was also writing in many of the other newspaper and magazine genres. From the days of The New Review in the early 1970s under Ian Hamilton, she continued this diverse practice all her working life: profiles, short notices, interviews, multiple book reviews, essayistic pieces and, more latterly, obituaries. In the late 1970s, she started writing for the TLS, a long-time ‘home’ (branching out briefly into the New Statesman), and settled at the Observer, with Terry Kilmartin, under whose subtle tutelage she learned the tricks of the trade. In the last years, she wrote for the Independent, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

In a late essay called ‘Living on Writing’ from 1998, Lorna rebels against what she calls a ‘conspiracy of reflexiveness’ in literary journalism:

Barthes’s famous saying went: ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’. But the Author’s death has led to the birth of endless lower-case authors. If you want to speak with authority as a reader, in other words, you do it first by saying that you are a writer. I have always preferred to be a hack, it seems less of a mystification.

‘Hack’ is a theatrical double-take: Lorna dressed up in her hack persona to create an outside position for herself, from which she was able to concentrate on the work of other people. She thought of herself as a correspondent, sending in urgent bulletins from the front line of reading, not a ‘lower-case writer’.

The urgency of her dialogue with books is one of the distinctive aspects of her voice as a reviewer. She liked the commitment deadlines forced. She also increasingly wrote for money, needed to work, and was proud of the way her pen could supplement her income. Lorna began as an instinctive reader (voracious, indiscriminate) and this trait never left her throughout her life: during the fine contempt of adolescence, the prentice years of scholarship in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, the later years of teaching and constant reviewing, and even finally the last, hand-over-fist period in which she started to edit and write books herself, the curiosity, the primary thrill of the reader, never left her – that what she had in her hand was new; even Don Quixote felt to her passionately curious eyes like a tract of snow that no one else had walked upon. She was able rapidly to read one book after another, without pauses for assimilation, ritual movements or changes of place. Her attention was absolute. She did not appear to digest books at all. She read like this late into the night and began again early in the morning: she simply picked up the next volume, whether it was the Corpus Hermeticum or Tarzan of the Apes, propped it in front of her, her thin, long-nailed thumb creasing down the top three inches as she turned the page, and sped away in a trance of rapid eye-movement, dog-earing the leaves as she went whenever something was memorable. When laid aside, paperbacks, in particular, always had a subtly pot-bellied aspect, as if somehow they had more in them: the persistent creasing at the top caused their pages to bell out slightly. They looked as if they had been filled with reading.

To write your reading was equally direct. Lorna’s habit of accuracy was like a religious devotion and her unusual memory, into which books sank, apparently whole, not a feather of their print disturbed, combined with a jesuitical kind of mischievousness, meant that she was a formidable opponent indeed in a literary discussion. She positively wielded quotation and was very canny about lines of argument. So: this very ‘directness’ is a paradox. When she was young, one of Lorna’s favourite quotations was Polonius’s ‘by indirections find directions out’. To represent your reading so directly is certainly a craft and a pleasure, to say nothing of the service it performs for your authors and readers. But that directness is the product of much meditation, a labour of indirection. When reviewing a book, Lorna would usually read the rest of the author’s works and whatever she could find (often whatever there was) of biography and criticism. Marina Warner has spoken of what it felt like as a writer to receive a Lorna Sage review. Before starting to stab, hunched and one-fingered, at the old Olivetti, or later, the little Toshiba, whose keyboard was transformed into rows of letterless cups by the furious battering it had taken, she liked to make sure she had an intimate grasp of the text. This meant picking out the one-liners she made emblematic of the whole. She often did this by ear, not eye; reading out loud with the special emphasis she put into even the smallest of phrases. The quality of her attention, witnessed by the letters and cards she used to receive from writers, came from the detailed work she put in, to represent not only that intimate grasp but also its logic, where it was heading, its implications in a wider context. Many reviewers, of course, work in this way, but what is different about Lorna’s writing is precisely what was different about her reading: a rare combination of warmth and sophistication, in which she mimes with strange fidelity the act of reading a text, while tactically holding it at arm’s length at the same time. The details eventually click to make an unexpected drift of argument that was, if you look back, there all along. There is always a lot more going on in a Lorna Sage review than the ostensible, but she is always uncannily faithful to the ostensible.

The fact that her directness is also a rhetorical performance is what makes a lot of this writing so eerily coherent and readable. The articles and essays we’ve chosen seem not to develop, but to spring into print, fully fledged from the beginning. Lorna was a seasoned teacher and scholar by the time she started seriously writing for the papers in her late twenties. The development of her voice does not really take place in these pieces – it takes place offstage, earlier. It was curiously literal: a struggle against the lapidary written style of male academics – a kind of Attic dialect – which all students, regardless of gender, still had to acquire by the early sixties. You can see faint signs of that rebellion in the earlier pieces from the late seventies; the need to put the limp mandarin gesture in brackets as she speaks. When she began, Lorna would write out scripts for her voice. It was not long, however, before that’s how she spoke. The brackets were in her speech, often indicated by a switch of the gaze or a fleeting rise in pitch, to throw away the important point. This voice was the one she wanted, the one that did for all purposes, including public speaking, and writing became a staging of her own mercurial speech. When that happened, she rapidly developed the capacity to make a discussion out of an account.

This work when put together has all the pleasure and risk of her bracing talk. Dialogue (between pieces, texts, authors, readers, different parts of herself) is everywhere like good sea air. Lorna pioneered for herself an informality of style that she used to translate into clear and accessible terms any form of perversity, jargon, or learned obscurity. She learned this defence of the common space of culture early on from Plato and it continually informs the ‘attack’ of these pieces. For all her tactical agility, that knack she has of seizing the acute angle, she is not to be deflected, always on a search for what is really there in front of her, its particularity.

Our title comes from Lorna’s 1980 review of J. A. V. Chapple’s Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters. ‘Goodness’ was part of the politics of intimacy, a special preoccupation in Lorna’s writing about the lives of women, who can so easily become lost in what she calls, ironically, after George Eliot, ‘the womanly duty to mediate’. Lorna was acutely aware of the mystification of the personal life, something which was for her a spurious self-confirming logic, by which women cast themselves as appendages. She is suspicious in this piece. Gaskell is almost too normal. She must have a hidden, inner life. You can hear Lorna probing for this telltale flaw of self, calling her, cajolingly, ‘an almost infinitely divisible woman’. But in the end Gaskell’s fund of empathy seems to have matched her own, for she concedes: ‘Most good women turn out on closer inspection to be hypocritical, envious or dim (or of course bad), while she genuinely delights in living in and with others.’

As with books, so with people. Intimacy was another paradoxical aspect of Lorna’s character. She disliked formal lecturing, but was a riveting public speaker, converting even her own shortness of breath to an intimate style. She read, wrote and received visitors at the kitchen table, her ear almost imperceptibly turned towards the door. She had a gift for intimacy, a trick of ‘seeing the point’ of people (a favourite phrase of hers in later years), especially outsiders. This was compounded of a genuine curiosity about the lives of others and a talent for benignly picking them up. She liked to keep open-house, sixties-style, often passing the latest apparition at the door a draft of what she had just finished. You were expected to read it on the spot, while she watched your face keenly for reactions. A conspiratorial need for close contact ran through all her relationships – intimacy was her style, but it was a public style, an argumentative style, a performative component of the writing life.

We have split the pieces into six sections, each arranged according to an internal, chronological order of publication: ‘Pre-War Life Writing’; ‘Post-War Life Writing’; ‘The Women’s Camp’; ‘Classics’; ‘Critical Tradition’; and ‘Italy’. These divisions are essentially a shaping device – loose, but inclusive – intended to allow the reader to follow chronological development on one front, or on several at once. In the first two sections we have given prominence to biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters and sketches. From the mid-nineties on, while issuing bulletins from Bad Blood and then editing The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English, Lorna had been reflecting on the whole question of ‘Life-Writing’. The project she had begun to work on after Moments of Truth was a book entitled Writing Lives. She was fascinated by the links between lives and work; in much of what she writes she traces the cuspid points between inner and outer lives: in Dickens, for example, whose manic ‘busyness’ with people kept them away so that he could work, and Angus Wilson, whose ‘inner life was lived on the outside’. Even in the other central sections, which contain a more familiar range of materials, this theme can often be found surfacing too. Finally, ‘Italy’ collects a number of different pieces Lorna wrote over the years about the culture in which she spent so many springs and summers from the seventies on. A good Latinist from childhood, her familiarity with Italian was another means of subverting binary imprisonment. It gave zest to her Renaissance interests, and with the help of the language she also kept the texts and authors of the modern tradition in view, outside the canonical effect of their English packaging. You can feel this direct contact with the language in her pieces on Calvino, and in the punning connection (‘sapere’/‘sapore’) she spots in the Italian between knowledge and appetite. She’s amused, here, to be outside and inside at once.

The readerly pleasures of these pieces are many and they are tied to Lorna’s personality. Her hawk’s eye for detail and her almost Dickensian penchant for the grotesque turn up some wonderful things. On St Theresa: ‘her ecstasy was contagious. And not only to artists … General Franco carried her left hand around with him for 40 years.’ Or take this brisk paraphrase of Lawrence’s disgust at the thought of Shelley: ‘A fairy slug is at once unmanly, irrational and grossly slimy: or, in short, a bit of a woman.’ Byron’s attempts to slim: ‘I wear seven Waistcoats, & a Great Coat, run & play at cricket’, which becomes a metaphor for the mawkish ghastliness of his juvenilia. Giantess Emma Hamilton who could ‘impersonate Goddesses because she was nobody, or worse’ declined, apparently, into ‘a Juno lumbering among sceptics’. And of Flora Tristan, she writes: ‘Who else (except a Sterne) would have a chapter on pockets? Or report on a mud-splashing service for huntsmen too poor to hunt? Now there’s an idea for a small business.’

The world of these writings is a generous, but not a frictionless one. Lorna is sceptical of both puritanism and realism in just about equal measures. Both overlap with the claustrophilia of women’s personal lives. The point of writing is not to reproduce the world, but to change it. Women, she argues, have enough problems with reproduction without being locked into it as an aesthetic mode as well. And she is also suspicious of the exclusionary mechanisms of canon-making. She champions outsiders, writers who (as she used to put it) ‘have no reason to exist’, who invent themselves. The most important task of criticism for her is the act of finding a vocabulary for the value of those who are awkward and hard to define, like Elizabeth Smart, for example, whose writerly career, says Lorna, safety-pinning two reproductive functions in one phrase, ‘came to a sticky end in low mimetic prose, and babies’. Yet she still feels, despite the slenderness of her œuvre, that Smart’s prodigal, high lyricism, her offence to the quotidian, has a chance of being read when other, more plausible writers are not. Outsiders count.

Lorna’s critical prejudices embrace anything writerly that she feels gets women out of the jails of biology, sex and gender. She’s on the watch for ‘stickiness’, reproduction, fake authenticity, false being, instrumentality, and bad faith. The positive values that support this running critique come in various forms, but are usually performative, theatrical versions of ‘inauthenticity’: camp, pastiche, carnivalesque, perverse, decadent, even self-destructive or contradictory gestures. She was attracted by the idea, long before Queer Theory, that all women ‘are’ female impersonators.

Agency in the world, above all, is what she is committed to in these writings, and a resistance to myths of propriety and self-absorption. All writing for her was a form of ‘doing’, not talking about it. Or talking about the possibility of talking about it. The postponement of the object of knowledge, she observes in her pieces on Shere Hite and Linda Grant, has infected the space of mediatised culture: ‘privatised emotions [lead] further into therapy-speak, and oral and masturbatory culture, of which the Hite reports are themselves a part’. Before all, she abhors ‘loss of nerve’. The test of theory is the production of real (i.e. particular, different) things – they always bite back the theoretical hand.

The consistent feature of Lorna’s proliferation of roles between Grub Street and Academe is her knowingness about her own potentially divided position. She writes for what’s left of the common reader in us. She mimes, performs, re-presents the manoeuvres of her authors, not to ‘reproduce’ them, but to expose them for contemplation. Her convictions cross the line between authors and readers, and all theory to her, even the most shrinkingly narcissistic, is a form of (political) practice, which conforms to the same rules as any other species of persuasive writing, including fiction, where much of the thinking gets done. Cultural space is not like physical space: in writing you can (and need to) be in more than one place at once. There’s always more room than you think. She’s instinctively against identity politics from the start, because it literalises cultural space. Her appreciative piece on Susan Gubar’s 1999 Critical Condition demonstrates the nature of this retreat: ‘Has “What is to be done?” been replaced by “Who am I?” she asks, and the answer must be partly yes.’ Her response to Gubar’s remarks about the factionalising of women in the academy is characteristic of what Lorna stands for: ‘There is room to live intellectually, in other words, without having to compete over who’s more marginal than whom.’

Like many another thought in this heartening body of work, it’s a good place to start.

Sharon & Victor Sage, 2003

I Pre-War Life Writing

Grave-side story
Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley JANE DUNN

JANE DUNN’S TITLE SETS out the glaring problem for Mary Shelley’s biographers: that she exists more as the child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as Shelley’s satellite, than as her own focus of interest. For much of her life she was, even to herself, a lesser light, so that although we know a lot about her, the information hasn’t ever quite added up.

Her other relationships, too, were oblique, filtered through Shelley: (Byron, Hogg, Claire Clairmont, Jane Williams); and after his death the pattern if anything intensified: with her fantasy-relation to Washington Irving and her indiscreet letters to the blackmailing Gatteschi look very like sad attempts to re-create scenes from the drama of her marriage. She was, as Jane Dunn says, intensely lonely for most of her 53 years, precisely because of her talent for intimacy.

She had of course, other talents: ‘my dreams,’ she wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein, ‘were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.’ For once (or almost twice, if you count The Last Man, the only other of her novels with something of this force) she contrived to build the contradictions of her experience – her agonies about parenthood as child and mother (or indeed, both simultaneously), the depressing human debris that surrounded her passionate marriage – into a fantasy that would dominate other people’s imaginations.

Frankenstein toiling away in his charnel-house laboratory (‘my workshop of filthy creation’) grew out of what was for her a natural association of creativity with destruction. There were the circumstances of her own birth, which killed her mother; then her father’s chilly and increasingly groundless and absurd performance of the role of ‘great man’ (‘You have it in your power,’ he wrote once to a prospective second wife, ‘to give me new life … to raise me from the grave in which my heart is buried. You are invited to form the sole happiness of one of the best-known men of the age’). Her first assignations with Shelley took place round her mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard; and the way he seems to have talked of rejecting his first wife, Harriet – ‘I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion’ – reveals a truly Frankensteinish capacity to switch from enthusiastic consciousness-raising to revulsion.

By the time Mary finished the first draft of the book, Harriet’s suicide had lent a more literal horror to Shelley’s cruel metaphor (‘Poor Harriet,’ she wrote years later in her journal, ‘to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows, as the atonement claimed by fate for her death’). Her half-sister Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstone-craft’s illegitimate daughter, put an apologetic end to her drab, unwanted existence with an overdose of laudanum, leaving nothing to identify her body but her mother’s initials on her stays. Further shades of the charnel-house were supplied by the death (the year before) of Mary’s first child: the way she talks about the book (‘my hideous progeny’ and so on) shows that she made that connection too.

Her own life, for the moment, was going well (was, in other words, only routinely precarious, dogged with money worries, begging letters from Godwin, and Shelley’s relation to Claire) and that seems to have enabled her to create the elaborate mythic mix of loneliness, guilt and innocent outrage that makes the novel such a splendid focus for everyone’s nightmares.

Usually, though, and almost always in the long years of her widowhood (she was 24 when Shelley died), her complex inner life was consigned to the amorphous, unhappy pages of her journal, where it came to nothing: ‘It has struck me what a very imperfect picture these querulous pages afford of me. This arises from their being a record of my feelings, and not of my imagination … my Kubla Khan, my pleasure grounds.’ She seems to have played her part courageously, but (as though the playing of it exhausted her, as well it might) she became more and more unable to imagine. Her losses and her memories isolated, as she said ‘islanded’, her, ‘sunk me in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before, I believe, endured except Robinson Crusoe.’

There were compensations – her surviving son Percy Florence (reassuringly ordinary), her socialising: she was abused by Shelley’s friends for her lack of radical fire, but she could reassure herself that while she couldn’t deal with abstractions (except in symbols), she practised liberation (‘I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed’).

A very clever, perceptive woman. And yet still in eclipse. Jane Dunn retells the story fairly straightforwardly, but that’s not enough to rescue Mary Shelley from unreality. It was a mistake, too, to underplay the fiction and the intellectual issues (references to ‘Shelley and his philosophising, and his ideas’ just won’t do) as if they weren’t part of the life. All too often Jane Dunn gets stuck on the conventional surface of her narrative (Byron was ‘worldly, red-blooded and extravagant’, Paolo ‘a hard-working but amoral Italian’) when what’s needed is precisely the boldness and inventiveness to delve underneath and challenge that ready-made perspective; and I suspect that her assumptions are too common-sensical and un-literary for such a venture.

Good as her word
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters J. A. V. CHAPPLE ASSISTED BY L. G. SHARPS

MRS GASKELL’S VICTORIAN REPUTATION for goodness has survived modern scholarship. Most of her writer-contemporaries have long been satisfactorily shown up as selfish, obsessive, perverse, quirky or inadequate: her all-round human decency seems simply confirmed by what we learn about her. She disapproved of introspection (it was ‘morbid’ and narcissistic, a form of hypochondria) but no commentator since has seriously claimed she had an ‘other’ secret self. She remains bewilderingly nice.

The result is that a book like Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters is bound to seem at first insipid. Her ‘Cranford’ (Knutsford) childhood may have had its sadnesses – she was after all motherless, and in effect fatherless, living with her aunt – but no letters survive to say so, and there is much fictional evidence to the contrary. Her marriage to Unitarian minister William Gaskell at 21 sounds happy enough, even if it didn’t sustain the first honeymoon rapture; she worked with him; she loved her four daughters dearly; and though the death of her baby son in 1846 was a dreadful sorrow, she turned from personal grief to chronicle the sufferings of the Manchester working classes in her first novel Mary Barton.

Her writing thus came to seem an extension of her indefatigable social and charitable work in her husband’s parish and beyond – exactly what, in contemporary terms, it should have been. And she has of course (true to her anti-self-consciousness line) little to say about the processes of imagination, or the art of writing: ‘a good writer of fiction,’ she says to an aspiring authoress, ‘must have lived an active and sympathetic life if she wishes her books to have strength and vitality in them. When you are forty.…’

The Portrait in Letters, in short, is hardly a self-portrait. But from another angle, this very omission is fascinating. What we get is a picture of a ‘self’ diffused, a ‘self’ distributed and absorbed in the family, and in society at large – an unperson surprisingly like Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or even Mrs Dalloway. Mrs Gaskell is sturdier and much more worthy, but there is something of a stream of consciousness in her letters, especially those to her eldest daughter. This one starts off on a charitable project:

We have got up to £2,236, and have more in hand. And I have had a letter from Mr Walpole (brother to the Home Secy) saying his brother will help on the Government pension, and the Hornbys (cousins of Lord Derby) are stirring him up; so we are in good hopes. I should think any air of Mendelssohn’s must be beautiful. Don’t call Shifts chemises. Take the pretty English word whenever you can … independently of the word we shall be most glad of the thing. Flossie is at her last shifts in two senses.…

‘Shifts’ indeed. She’s a brilliant lateral thinker, an almost infinitely divisible woman: ‘One of my me’s is, I do believe, a true Christian (only other people call her socialist and communist), another of my me’s is a wife and mother … that’s my “social” self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty …’ One is not, however, to imagine these selves squabbling or repressing one another (this is not introspection); they are all equally present, equally vocal.

Her reaction to literary fame was not to concentrate herself, but to spread her energies yet further. She travelled to Paris, to Italy, to Germany (as well as to the Lake District and Oxford), acquiring more and more connections, without shedding those in Manchester or London or Knutsford. Henry James, a friend of friends, recognised in her the social spirit that held fictions – and people – together: ‘Clear echoes of a “good time” (as we have lived on to call it) break out in her full, close page.…’ She saw what she was not – she admired George Eliot from a distance, and paid tribute in her Life of Charlotte Brontë to the woman writer who most questioned her values. She believed implicitly in the importance of the individual, though in certain senses she wasn’t one.

She was, perhaps, something more rare. Most good women turn out on closer inspection to be hypocritical, envious or dim (or of course bad), while she genuinely delights in living in and with others. Professor Chapple and Mr Sharps, in assembling the book (and doing an admirable job in making material from the 1966 Manchester University Press Collected Letters practically available) make no great claims. Professor Chapple ends indeed by quoting Charlotte Brontë on Mrs Gaskell: ‘Do you who have so many friends – so large a circle of acquaintance – find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman … ?’ The answer was no. You couldn’t and be good.

Flora by gaslight
The London Journal of Flora Tristan TRANSLATED, ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY JEAN HAWKES

FLORA TRISTAN’S INTEREST AS an investigator of nineteenth-century London starts with the fact that she is so un-English – so utterly immune, that is, to the atmosphere of decorum and common sense that covered the English public women of her time like a veil.

It’s not just that she is French, or at least it’s more complicated than that: her parents were a French émigrée and a Peruvian grandee; she was dubiously legitimate and certainly disinherited; her own marriage failed, and when, after a battle for the children, she won a court separation, her husband shot her in the back and got 20 years – all of which she rushed into print, along with an account of her voyage to Peru to claim kin. Unsuccessfully – hence her hand-to-mouth career as a wandering socialist prophet, and hence the London Journal, based on her visits in the 1820s and 1830s. She was also Gauguin’s grandmother, as the most recent biography (C. N. Gattey’s Gauguin’s Astonishing Grandmother) chauvinistically announces.

However, here she is in her own right, in a new translation by Jean Hawkes, who admits to removing some exclamation marks and dashes, but has otherwise splendidly preserved an original collage of romance, realism, high feeling and visionary prejudice.

We start from the Port of London, bamboozled by sheer size – the world’s biggest city – and mesmerized by the glamour of gaslight; but within a couple of pages we adjust to the English pace: it’s nearly impossible to get from A to B, which is why people are so churlish and weary, not to mention the climate, which is what drives them to drink … In short, Londoners are glum, snobbish, sycophantic, inhospitable, punctual (very sinister this, since journeys take hours) and appallingly conventional:

If a daguerreotype were made of the public in Regent Street or Hyde Park it would be remarkable for the same artificial expressions and submissive demeanour that characterise the crude figures in Chinese painting.

Flora, on the other hand, is a woman of spirit, labouring under the burden of reporting British Podsnappery for the sake of posterity (England is the shape of things to come, if we’re not careful). She is also very French, and blissfully unaware of it – ‘Thank God I long ago renounced any notion of nationality, a mean and narrow concept.’ She also doesn’t exactly believe in God (a mean and narrow concept).

‘Beer and gas are the two main products consumed in London.’ Can it have been true? Could it be still? The link between debauchery and drunkenness is obvious: ‘The sober Englishman is chaste to the point of prudery.’ But other equally incautious remarks give one pause – on the connection between Protestantism, free enterprise and insanity, for instance, or on religious education (‘in the Bible criminals can find good reason for persisting in their life of crime’). And if she’s altogether of her time when she visits prisons looking out for criminal physiognomy and ‘bumps,’ she soars into wilder regions when she confesses: ‘I see prostitution as either an appalling madness or an act so sublime that my mortal understanding cannot comprehend it.’ Her section on the need for infant schools from the age of two, on the other hand, is so prosaic, sane and obvious, it quite takes one’s breath away in our neo-Victorian age.

Volatile as she is, however (she is inconsistent on principle), it’s not hard to see how she reads England. Its commercial supremacy is founded on India (sharp of her in the 1830s?). It abolished the Slave Trade to prevent other countries founding colonies, and has proletarianised the West Indian Negroes, who are now almost as wretched as the English working class. London itself – the final exposure of British ‘humanitarianism’ – is a slave market, where young children (of both sexes, she observed coolly) are sold for prostitution. England is imperialist, materialist, masculine. Hope lies with the Chartists and the women, then, logically enough.

Her account of a Chartist meeting is in deliberate contrast with her visit to Parliament (squalid boredom, quite apart from the fact that she had to disguise herself as a Turk to get in). The Chartist delegates are alive, eager, visionary, and hopeful – ‘You can see that the poor boy believes in God, in Woman, in self-sacrifice’ – as are the women writers, though perhaps they write because their lives are so socially null:

In France, and any country which prides itself on being civilised, the most honoured of living creatures is woman. In England it is the horse …

Her profundities and inanities alike spring from the weird acuteness of the angle at which she approaches England. Who (except a Sterne) would have a chapter on pockets? Or report on a mud-splashing service for huntsmen too poor to hunt? Now there’s an idea for a small business. You never know, though, with this wild lady, when she’ll turn out to be timely. A final thought for the day:

Oh! The railways, the railways! In them I see the means whereby every base attempt to prevent the growth of union and brotherhood will be utterly confounded.

Life stories
A Need to Testify: Four Portraits IRIS ORIGO

THIS BOOK IS A SET of variations on the theme of biography: its dubious credentials, its delights and pieties, and – Iris Origo would argue, hence her title – its necessity. The four portraits here, all of people involved in resisting Italian fascism, make space for the quiddities and peculiarities of their subjects (whom she knew), but serve at the same time as statements of faith in ‘character’. Her people may be merely particular, but they are also stubborn and courageous; they are loners who none the less feel for and with one another, and many others.

The first of her subjects, Lauro de Bosis, is the hardest for her to make real, partly because he seems to have lived out his brief life as mythology. He was aristocratic, half-American, brought up on Shelley and Whitman, a bard and a chemist who advocated a conservative (King and Church) take-over from Mussolini. At 26 he wrote a verse drama about Icarus, and at 30, in 1931, he flew over Rome in a small plane, scattering anti-fascist leaflets, and vanished west to crash into the sea.

His style, in every sense, was excessive – though he did, in one letter, locate the twist in history that would lend him substance. ‘If the American Revolution had failed, Washington and Jefferson would be considered as seditious Bolsheviks,’ he reflected. When, 12 years later, Mussolini fell in (roughly) the way he had planned, de Bosis’s story returned to earth.

It was never, anyway, as Marchesa Origo points out, just his story: three years before his terminal gesture he had fallen in love with a celebrated American actress, Ruth Draper, whose long life comes next, linked with his. Here the biographer’s brief is different, for Ruth Draper not only came from a densely sociable background (‘old New York,’ very Edith Wharton), but had monologued her way through a multitude of characters, and round the world, before she met de Bosis, in middle age. She was all life-wish and, though savaged by his death, went on adding to her repertoire and her friends for a quarter of a century.

Her practical belief in his cause outlived him too: among other things, she endowed a chair in Italian history at Harvard, which was occupied by a man unlike de Bosis in every way but one, Gaetano Salvemini, socialist, republican, sceptic – and anti-fascist. Salvemini is the anchor man of the book, ‘the man who would not conform’ though events battered him grotesquely. In 1908 his wife and their five children died in the Messina earthquake; in the years that followed his whole generation, it almost seemed, was dispersed and destroyed – murdered on fascist orders, murdered in Spain, driven (like himself) into exile. In 1946, as the world repaired itself, the stepson of his second marriage was tried and executed as a collaborator in France. He comes through it all, in this portrait, suffering, resilient and mocking, with just a hint of secular sainthood.

Here Iris Origo’s conviction that ‘Every individual life is also the story of Everyman’ occupies the foreground. Her last subject, Ignazio Silone, is allowed to characterise himself, in passages from Fontamara, Bread and Wine and Emergency Exit, but at the same time the book’s structure quietly manoeuvres him into an exemplary role, as the priest of a non-existent church. Silone’s defection from the Communist Party, his long exile and his even longer wait for recognition in his own country, even the form of his final illness, in 1978, when agraphia scrambled words for him with a last irony – all of this piles up as evidence of ‘the need to testify’.

Strategy for survival
Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett HILARY SPURLING

‘I AM ILL AT ease with people whose lives are an open book’ – so says Felix (aptly and most deliberately named) in More Women Than Men (1933). Ivy Compton-Burnett’s happiest, wisest and most uncharitably perspicacious characters are all convinced of the virtue of concealment. As, famously, was their creator, who was apt in her later years to regale learned and inquiring fans with tea, toast, Gentleman’s Relish and advice on (say) how to mend holes in rugs. Her ‘inner’ life – the obsessive family scenarios that fed her fiction – seemed to belong, like her clothes and hairstyle, to a period before the First World War, locked away in the past.

Hilary Spurling, in her splendid biography of 10 years ago, Ivy When Young, rather shared this carefully fostered impression. The tragic passions she unravelled in the lives of the Compton-Burnetts seemed more than sufficient to account for an after-life spent, as it were, writing them up. However, as she says, there turned out to be another story to tell, with its own rather different fascination: the story of how, when ‘family life was in ruins, her last link with the only world she knew had been snapped by the death of her brother Noel on the Somme in 1916, and she herself had nearly died in the great influenza episode of 1918’, Ivy reinvented herself as a woman and as a novelist.

The title Mrs Spurling has chosen – Secrets of a Woman’s Heart – has a teasing irony about it, since what she’s doing this time is exploring secretiveness itself as a strategy for survival. It is, as she shows, by evolving ‘layer by layer the extraordinary protective armour’ that Ivy became so subtle and radical a writer.

The relationship with Margaret Jourdain which sustained her, and which ended only with Margaret’s death in 1951, seems to have held no ‘secrets’ of the sexual sort (they adopted each other, they weren’t lovers). Only, shockingly, it was based on the assumption that living in any ambitious or indeed ‘normal’ way was hideously dangerous. To start with, Ivy played the invalid – there were ‘months, even years, when she lay about the flat eating sweets, reading Wilkie Collins and silently watching Margaret’s callers’ before producing Pastors and Masters in 1925. They perfected what one might call, travestying F. R. Leavis, an irreverent closedness before life. Not in the social sense (their tea parties, like the Mad Hatter’s, were never-ending) but in the sense of an offensive neutrality (‘we are neuters’) in the midst of the permanent state of hostilities represented by marriage and the family.

Like Ivy, Margaret Jourdain was a veteran of that battlefield. Her vicarage family was large, proud, almost penniless and wretchedly quarrelsome, though full of energy and talent. Three elder sisters were teachers (Eleanor eventually became Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford), Margaret herself became an eminent historian of furniture and the domestic arts, brother Frank was a founding father of British ornithology, and Philip was a distinguished mathematician though afflicted, like the youngest sister, Milly, with multiple sclerosis, thought to be hereditary.

Mrs Spurling, who is especially good on this kind of thing, traces their histories in some detail: Margaret’s early poetical leanings, suppressed in favour of furniture; the family’s disgust at Philip’s marriage; Eleanor’s intrigues and forced retirement; Milly’s lucid poems on her own decay. The final score is daunting:

Margaret died, like her four sisters, unmarried, and though the five brothers each took a wife … only Frank had children: they were born before the disease affecting Philip and Milly had declared itself fully, and all three died … without issue, so that by the middle of the century it was clear that the Jourdains like the Compton-Burnetts – families of 10 and 13 children respectively – drew the line at reproducing themselves.

Margaret – formidable, mocking, protective – had had other protégés, though none so (eventually), successful as Ivy. Though it’s clearly not the case, as she once confided to a strange man from Gollancz on a bus, that she was the real author (‘I write all her books’), her strength and her acid wit helped stake out Ivy’s special ‘no-man’s-land’. As did her 1920s Country Life set, which included Firbankian figures like Ernest Thesiger, cousin to the Viceroy of India, actor, narcissist and needleman (nothing was more terrible, wrote Beverley Nichols, than to see Ernest ‘sitting under the lamplight doing this embroidery’), or interior decorator Herman Schrijver (whom Margaret referred to as ‘Ivy’s Jewish friend’) who bet Ivy she couldn’t name one heterosexual male among their acquaintance. The bleak, unillusioned tone of the novels was, as Mrs Spurling points out, part forged in this heretical set, for all ‘Ivy’s old-world style’.

In fact, it matched the times increasingly well. As Edward Sackville-West wrote in 1946, ‘Apart from physical violence and starvation, there is no feature of the totalitarian regime which has not its counterpart in the atrocious families depicted in these books.’ Or, as Mrs Spurling more moderately puts it, ‘the moral economy of Ivy’s books had always been organised on a war footing’. After the war her fame burgeoned. People at the tea parties included Angus Wilson, Nathalie Sarraute, Mary McCarthy … and Ivy perfected her techniques of evasion.

She did, however (especially after Margaret’s death), unbend to some of the younger writers who sought her out, like Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Kay Dick, who provide evidence of her kindness and generosity as well as her more ‘frightening’ habits, like interspersing conversations with muttered asides to imaginary characters. In 1967, two years before her death, she was made a Dame, which it’s hard not to see as a tribute to her tea-table persona, as much as to her writing. She had kept her counsel; her atrocities were committed in the books. Hilary Spurling’s brilliant and meticulous account – studded with scones, sticky with honey – is a study in secret survivalism.

Honest woman
Selections from George Eliot’s Letters EDITED BY GORDON S. HAIGHT

GEORGE ELIOT’S PERSONAL LIFE is one of the grand anomalies of Victorian culture. She ought to have been an outsider, a Bohemian, a George like George Sand, whereas of course she made her way to the centre of things, to become the lion of her day and its literary conscience.

Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton, nervously contemplating paying a call on her at ‘The Priory’ in 1869, described her position with such comic, twitching refinement that it’s worth quoting the whole passage:

She is an object of great interest and great curiosity to society here. She is not received in general society, and the women who visit her are either so emancipée as not to mind what the world says about them, or have no social position to maintain. Lewes dines out a good deal, and some of the men with whom he dines go without their wives to his house on Sundays. No one whom I have heard speak, speaks in other than terms of respect of Mrs Lewes, but the common feeling is that it will not do.

However, as you can tell from his tone (he protests altogether too much), he managed to transcend ‘common feeling’ and not only go along to one of ‘Mrs Lewes’s Sundays’ but to take Mrs Norton too. George Eliot’s enormous critical prestige and popular success had overborne the old story that years before someone called Mary Ann Evans openly set up house with George Henry Lewes when he couldn’t divorce his wife. But it wasn’t just that: she had a special authority precisely because people came to her on her own terms, as an author, which they wouldn’t have done anything like so much if she had been ‘received in general society’. She was condemned – and freed – to live in a world more concentratedly literary than that of any of her female contemporaries.

In the letters, selected by Gordon S. Haight from his monumental nine-volume edition (1954–78), you can see the effects of this. Instead of (say) Jane Austen’s network of family ties, here there’s a surrogate family of colleagues, peers and (latterly) admirers. She did salvage a few old friends, and she developed a motherly relationship with Lewes’s sons, but for the most part these are personal bonds created around the writing, and the warmth and respect it generated.

She had, as people remarked, a talent for friendship, and apart from a few early, preachy and pretentious letters addressed to school-friends and an ex-teacher from her evangelical days, she’s a generous, concerned, thoroughly unselfish correspondent. She even worries about the egoism of not wanting to seem an egoist: ‘… my anxiety not to appear what I should hate to be … is surely not an ignoble egoistic anxiety …’ And this is the way she hides herself. Or rather, the way she contrives to remain pseudonymous, removed from the mere marketplace of prejudices and opinions and controversy. This must have been part of the secret of her impressive ‘rightness’ – that she questioned conventional rigidities less by what she said than by what she was.

The other side of this is that there is always – nearly always – an embargo on intimacy. Only one letter here reveals the passionate and needy self she kept to herself, the woman who found fulfilment with Lewes, and it is, ironically enough, a letter not to him but to that cold fish Herbert Spencer with whom she had fallen horribly in love in pre-Lewes days:

I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can … I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions … I have struggled – indeed I have – to renounce everything and be entirely unselfish, but I find myself utterly unequal to it … I suppose no other woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed.

One is grateful that Spencer was cad enough to preserve this explosive, desperate stuff, because it enables one to measure something of the achievement of the creation of ‘George Eliot,’ the person she became with Lewes. As do, more indirectly, the letters to friends and publishers in which he figures as Muse, critic and go-between, her constant and loving companion.

Their union (too close for letters) is the unspoken theme of the collection, the necessary condition for the warmth and sanity she is able to summon on topics as diverse as women’s suffrage, table-rapping or the Franco-Prussian war. Their mutual solitude, as she knew, was what enabled her range and freedom as a writer. ‘I prefer excommunication,’ she wrote to one of her closest women friends, Barbara Bodichon, who had suggested that perhaps Lewes might be able to get a dubious divorce abroad. ‘I have no earthly thing I care for, to gain by being brought within the pale of people’s personal attention, and I have many things to care for that I should lose – my freedom from petty worldly torments … and that isolation which really keeps my charity warm …

Not that ‘petty wordly torments’ are lacking. The letters are splendidly domestic in their running commentary on the myriad, wracking changes of the weather and touchingly ordinary and wifely – and ominous – in their concern with Lewes’s fragile health. His death (in 1878) is marked by a wordless gap, as though she ceased to exist for weeks on end. When she comes back she seems stunned, and only recovers herself when she can replace him (it’s hard to see it in any other light) with their young friend, her devoted admirer, John Cross.

Their marriage was more shocking, in its way, than the years with Lewes had been. But as Anne Ritchie (Thackeray’s daughter, who had herself married a man 17 years her junior) wrote: ‘She is an honest woman, and goes in with all her might for what she is about.’ It’s this honesty of need, perhaps, that makes her so eloquent an advocate of what she calls, in one letter, the ‘impersonal life’, the life that we identify with the George Eliot of the novels:

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.

The girl from Mrs Kelly’s
Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton FLORA FRASER

EMMA HAMILTON WAS ENDLESSLY gossiped about, in every tone imaginable from awe to contempt. The best quick summing-up seems to have been Lady Elgin’s: ‘She is indeed a Whapper!’ This was in 1799, in Emma’s hour of triumph, when a lifetime’s posing in classical attitudes paid off on the stage of world history, in her affair with Nelson. She was a heroine, larger than life, sublimely improbable and very possibly absurd. Flora Fraser’s biography, which mostly lets Emma and her contemporaries speak for themselves, produces an impression of a generous giantess, a woman constructed from the outside in.

Romney’s portraits of her in her teens already show her as somehow on a different scale from ordinary sitters. As of course she was – she had no social identity to speak of, and could impersonate goddesses partly because she was ‘nobody’, or worse. The first extraordinary thing about her is that she survived at all in the world of three dimensions, that she wasn’t just a vanishing ‘model’ sucked down into poverty and whoredom. It seems (the early years are very murky) that her beauty was so striking, as well as classically fashionable, that she brought out the Pygmalion in people.

Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh plucked her out of Mrs Kelly’s brothel (a ‘nunnery’ in the style of the brothel in Fanny Hill) and passed her on to his friend Charles Greville, a dilettante and collector who set her up in domestic seclusion in the Edgware Road and began the process of educating her into a largeness of spirit that would match her splendid physique. She was a collector’s item, ‘a modern piece of virtu’ as he proclaimed her (‘ridiculous man’ says Ms Fraser with unusual sternness), and he watched over his investment. It was he who introduced her to Romney; it was he who, when his finances became chronically embarrassed, passed her on to a more kindly and civilised collector, his uncle, the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton.

This part of the story is always fascinating. Greville seems to have conned Emma into believing that her trip to Naples was part of her education, while to Sir William (recently widowed) he represented it as a mutually beneficial arrangement – he would be free to look for an heiress, his uncle would become the possessor of an enviable objet, who was also pleasantly domesticated and quite likeable in bed.

Greville is here a study in himself, the quintessential dilettante—‘the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything’. He also seems to have been hoping to distract Sir William from a second marriage, since he was his uncle’s heir. In the event (served him right) Sir William became so attached to Emma that he made her Lady Hamilton, and forced English society to acknowledge her, though at the convenient distance of Naples.

Emma’s injured and statuesque innocence throughout the whole episode is (again) extraordinary. For a girl from Mrs Kelly’s she had already come a long way, and now she moved from a heroic passion of resentment against Greville (‘If I was with you, I would murder you and myself boath’) to a fervent attachment to Sir William in the grandest, most unhesitating style.

To the astonishment of her protectors, she took herself seriously: the classical ‘Attitudes’ in which Sir William perfected her (and which she performed for the company after dinner) were reflected in an awesome personal straightforwardness that made people accept her as a brilliant exception, outside the rules. Greville had written to Sir William that she was ‘capable of anything grand, masculine or feminine’; and Sir William, justifying his marriage, described her as ‘an extraordinary being’ – ‘It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes the best husband, Why not vice versa?’ Visitors to Naples saw in her classical antiquities brought to life. This is Goethe, one of the after-dinner audience:

The spectator … sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realised before him in movements and surprising transformations … in her [Sir William] has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere.

And so the stage was set for her apotheosis as Nelson’s consort. Here the sublime teeters on the edge of the ridiculous: he came along only just in time (she was getting dangerously large in her thirties) and few observers could quite take the real life enactment of a passion on the Olympian scale. Spiteful Mrs Trench was only one of many unbelievers – ‘She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain. Her figure is colossal … Lord Nelson is a little man, without any dignity.’

Suddenly she is a Juno lumbering among sceptics, her grandeur turned to grossness like one of Swift’s simple-minded Brobdingnagians. With Nelson’s death, her claims to heroic stature fell away, and the story leads with a sad inevitability to the boozy death in Calais, embittered further by the clause in Nelson’s will which bequeathed her (as though she were indeed a great work of art) to the nation.

Flora Fraser doesn’t moralise over the ending – not even over the nastiest part of it, Emma’s failure to acknowledge her daughter by Nelson, Horatia, who watched her die, repelled and mystified. ‘Why she should so fascinate is difficult to answer’ is the nearest we get to a conclusion.

Ms Fraser lays out the evidence in a conscientious, noncommittal fashion that reminds one that she’s a third-generation biographer, following in the footsteps of mother, and of grandmother Elizabeth Longford, and so confident (perhaps a touch too confident) that 200-year-old gossip will prove sufficiently riveting. But she has chosen her subject well – deeper speculation, one suspects, would be out of place with a character so entirely public property from the start.

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