Aristocrats (14 page)

Madame – La Marquise – de Sévigné was born in 1626. Her letters were published posthumously in 1725 and then more fully in several new additions over the next three decades. ‘I have got a new volume of that divine woman’s letters,’ Horace Walpole wrote when another volume appeared in 1773. Over a thousand of Madame de Sévigné’s letters survived, mostly written to her daughter, Madame de Grignan. While many commentators praised her descriptions of Parisian life, it was her love for her daughter and her opinions about everyday life that captivated Caroline and Emily. Madame de Sévigné was, for them, the quintessential rational woman of feeling.

Madame de Sévigné wrote about books and people. She commented on the act and art of letter writing and she indulged in moral reflections about time and death. But it was maternal love that she described and celebrated most of all. Her style, with its asides, snatches of dialogue and exclamations was praised by self-conscious letter writers as both natural and perfected, its art consisting precisely in its artless-ness. Like Caroline and Emily, Madame de Sévigné moved deliberately from the ponderous to the domestic and, in so doing, heightened the emotions she wished to convey. ‘What are you reading, my dear?’ she asked her daughter in April 1672. ‘I am reading the discovery of the Indies by Christopher Columbus, which I am finding extremely entertaining. But your daughter appeals to me still more. I love her and don’t really see how I can help it. She makes a fuss of your portrait and pats it in such a funny way that you have to rush and kiss her.’

Caroline and Emily aspired to this sort of style. Madame de Sévigné became their authority and, because they knew no Latin, their alternative to the Catullus or Ovid that male writers used to give their letters a canonical grounding. ‘Dear
Madame de Sévigné,’ Emily called her. ‘I love you for calling her “dear Madame de Sévigné”. I’m quite glad to think I shall have forgot her letters enough to read them over again,’ Caroline replied. Caroline was fond of quoting Madame de Sévigné on the nature of life: ‘as Madame de Sévigné observes, le temps s’en va et nous emporte avec lui si terriblement vite.’ She sent friends in France on a pilgrimage to find her heroine’s descendants, and she envied Horace Walpole, who in 1766 had ‘a pretty snuff box sent him with a miniature portrait of Madame de Sévigné on the top, and her cipher at the bottom set in … stones.’

Like Madame de Sévigné, the Lennox sisters often described their letters as conversational and sprawling, even while they aspired to a ‘formed’ style; so their writing was characterised by a deliberate sloppiness. ‘Since you are so kind as to complain,’ Sarah wrote to Emily in the mid-1770s, ‘I am encouraged to begin one of my monthly magazines; for I think my letters very like them, a compound of unconnected stuff and a little sense par-ci, par-là.’

First and foremost, they believed, letters were conversations between writer and recipient in which both could construct and (paradoxically) display a private self. In letters they shared thoughts, troubles, jokes and gossip. Finishing off a long letter written to cheer Emily up during a troublesome pregnancy, Caroline wrote, ‘Adieu, I’m tired of writing. I hate to be so much in arrears, a constant regular correspondence is so much more comfortable. I don’t expect you tho’ to write much now, poor soul. Let me know just how you do and I’ll write constantly to you, for believe me, conversing, sweet siss, with you is one of my greatest pleasures.’ Emily agreed. ‘When one receives a letter,’ she wrote, ‘sitting down immediately to answer it is like carrying on a conversation.’ Once they started writing, Caroline and Emily were prolix. Often they felt they could not stop: Caroline wrote in 1759, ‘Since you love a folio sheet of paper, dear siss, you shall have one. I’m sure I shall fill it, for when once I get into a talking or
writing way there is no end of me.’ Caroline called Emily ‘the only person in the world I can freely open my mind to on all subjects, except Mr. Fox.’ All her life Caroline got up early in the morning, and before breakfast she would sit down in her dressing-room and write letters. Towards the end of the 1750s she started wearing spectacles for reading, writing and sewing. Peering through them at the thick creamy paper, she scribbled the story of her life, troubles and all in what her husband and sons described as atrocious handwriting. ‘I must wear you to death, sweet siss, with my complaints, but it is so comfortable to unburden one’s mind.’ ‘Adieu, my dearest siss, I must always unburden my mind to you which is the only purport of this letter.’ In happier times than these, Caroline and Emily swapped declarations of love. In 1762, Caroline wrote, ‘believe me, except Mr. Fox and my children, there is nothing I love in this world in the least to compare to you; nobody but Ste is so often in my thoughts; your happiness and peace of mind is one of the things I have most at heart.’

Confessions of misery and expressions of love occupied the beginnings and ends of letters. Between them was stuffed a ragbag of news and anecdotes. In the 1750s, talk of children – their illnesses, intelligence and education – covered many pages. Emily’s children had coughs, colds, fevers and occasionally more serious complaints. Ste Fox’s shaking and trembling agitated Caroline’s heart and pen. But in spite of regular purges, diets and treatments with mercury and tin, he survived. In 1756 Ste was sent to Eton College, his father’s old school, and was soon ‘very jolly’ there. At about the same time Charles, discovering that Caroline had made an error in Roman history, decided to go to school as well. Fox and Caroline gave him free rein in his choice of school. After a week’s deliberation the seven-year-old child plumped for Mr Pampellone’s Academy at Wandsworth. The same year Emily sent her two sons, George, now eight and William, now seven, to England. George joined Ste at Eton and William went to
Wandsworth with Charles. Caroline took charge of them in the holidays and the sisters commiserated over their loss. ‘I pity you, dear siss, from my heart, being obliged to part with them, but I do think Wandsworth School is the best nursery for delicate children in the world. I pity you, for I can hardly accustom myself to the absence of my two boys (Ste indeed I live in continual fears about), but sweet Charles I miss vastly.’

Other family news was dispersed amongst accounts of children’s health and schooling. The third Duke of Richmond married in 1757. His bride was Lady Mary Bruce, only daughter of the late Earl of Ailesbury. Relations between the new Duchess and her sisters-in-law were to be extremely volatile. In 1758, one of the sisters’ second cousins, Caroline Brudenell, married ‘an immense rich citizen’ Sir Samuel Fludyer. Their first cousin, Lady Caroline Keppel, Lady Albemarle’s daughter, ran away with the celebrated surgeon, Robert Adair in the same year. ‘I pity the poor girl very much,’ wrote Caroline, remembering her own elopement. These and innumerable other tidbits of London and Dublin gossip passed to and fro. Sometimes such domestic news was more emotionally charged. In 1759 Caroline hinted obliquely to Emily that Fox and she were quarrelling, but she didn’t give any details, thus admitting that she could not tell everything in her letters. In her next letter she decided to come clean: the trouble was about one of Fox’s illegitimate children, Lizzie, now a pretty teenager. It was difficult for Caroline to write about Lizzie but she needed to share her feelings. ‘I don’t know why I scrupled naming Lizzie in my letter as the person I was so silly as to be uneasy about.’ Caroline struggled with her feelings of guilt and jealousy. Although she acknowledged Lizzie’s charm and her claims on Fox, Caroline insisted on being first in her husband’s heart. She refused to allow Lizzie to live in Holland House. Many aristocratic women tolerated illegitimate children in their houses, sometimes on the same footing emotionally – though not legally – as their own offspring. Such tolerance, celebrated
by the novelist Samuel Richardson in
Pamela
, was impossible for Caroline. She wanted Lizzie out of sight. ‘I can’t bear her being here as one of the family. Mr. Fox would dote on her if she was and I am unreasonable enough to be unhappy about it. He don’t want her here on the footing of a fine lady, but to dine with us when alone, be sent for to play at cards with the boys, and to be with us in that sort of way. She loves and courts Mr. Fox very much, which is mighty natural, and I own to you my feeling in my own mind how hard it is in me to want to deprive her of that pleasure makes me imagine myself wicked sometimes, and the dread I am in of not behaving quite well to her is one of my greatest reasons for keeping her away as much as possible.’

Caroline’s jealousy got the better of her guilt and Lizzie did not come to live at Holland House. Lizzie’s claims on her father had no chance when they were pitted against Caroline’s need to be the centre of Fox’s world. Materially Lizzie did as well as any illegitimate child of an aristocrat could hope. She married a cleric, Edward Young, who was tutor to the Fox children. In 1761 Young was appointed to an Irish living by the Lord Lieutenant Lord Halifax, probably at Fox’s prompting. He and Lizzie, safely out of Caroline’s way, prospered and had a daughter. But Lizzie died in 1765. Caroline, now able to show compassion, wrote of Young to Emily a year or so later, ‘poor man, he felt the loss of his pretty wife severely’.

To Emily such matters were more simple. By the end of the 1750s she had six children of her own, besides her sisters Louisa, Sarah and Cecilia in the household. A few more did not matter very much. In her husband’s affections Emily was supreme. Casual affairs and their tiny human consequences simply made up the sexual imbalance in their relationship. Writing to Caroline in 1751, Emily made it clear that Kildare was sleeping with a woman in their household who was now pregnant. But she treated the affair more as a joke than a threat. ‘I must tell you by way of n.b. that things can breed in this house as well as her Lady K. You will hear more soon –
and ’tis to be hoped that my turn for getting a lover will come in good time; but you know hope deferred maketh the heart sick and that is my case; but adieu, I won’t tire you any longer.’ Emily’s hope was eventually to be realised. When it was, far from being a joke, it had a profound effect on the whole family.

Letters were not just channels for gossip and confessions. They also gave writers opportunities to make statements about the world around them: comments on books, on the nature of humanity, on society. Caroline in particular was given to a running commentary on life. Once Emily declared that human happiness consisted in taking pleasure from ‘trifling amusements’. Caroline commented in reply that she was ‘philosopher enough’ to think Emily wise, ‘for after all, how trifling are most of the serious amusements and concerns of human life’.

Despite comments of this sort, Caroline and Emily did not consistently present themselves as ‘philosophers’ or ‘bel- esprits’ as they called salon thinkers. Unlike Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or their friends Mrs Greville and Mrs Vesey, Caroline and Emily did not think of themselves as ‘blue stocking’ women, part of whose self-definition (and reputation) was as women dedicated to demonstrating that their sex was capable of intellectual endeavour. Caroline and Emily described themselves as ‘women of fashion’, thus emphasising social position rather than any set of beliefs. They could not be described as ‘feminists’, but they participated actively in debates about the role of women.

Caroline was frequently scornful of men, her own husband excepted, and in 1766 wrote acerbically to Emily, ‘some pursuit is necessary to man, particularly to an Englishman; ’tis an animal quite incapable of leading a rational life (that is what we should call so) and quite insufficient to itself. It must always be running after a fox, a hare, a blue ribbon, a place or some such thing, or given up to play. I do think nature has given us women the best lot in this queer jumble of life.’ What
women’s lot was, Caroline made a little clearer in her comment on her friends who disliked Rousseau’s
Émile
: ‘Mrs. Greville and several others don’t like what he says about women, nor his notions about them, so unwilling are our sex to give up being bel esprits, politicieux, gamesters and fine ladies, and to allow that a woman shines most in her own sphere.’ Adding up the two statements, Caroline suggests that women were more rational than men (or Englishmen, whom she looked upon as inferior to the French). She admitted that women were taking part in the sort of gambling, political intrigue and social climbing she derided in men, but insisted that their talents should be used where they shone brightest, their ‘own sphere’.

In theory this seemed to reserve the ‘public’ world for men and confine women to the ‘private’ or non-public. But exactly what Caroline meant was vague; her domestic space was both familial home and political base; she read without qualm or comment the works of hundreds of women who earned their living in the ‘public’ world of print; she patronised female business women so frequently that it was probably by preference, buying her books and prints as well as her watches, toys and clothes from women; and she went constantly to watch actresses on the stage. Her working definition of a ‘woman’s own sphere’ was fluid, changing its boundaries to suit the shape of her own life. Both Emily and Caroline read novels and advice literature which demanded a circumscription of women’s roles, but they were under no social pressure to comply with this growing body of thought. Their response was gestural rather than significant, a matter of taking what they wanted and discarding the rest.

Beyond saying that women had a better life than men (something she only half believed) Caroline made no general statements about women’s roles or aspirations. Emily was too wrapped up in the drama of her own life to do so, although when the time came to seize the initiative and act out newly fashionable ideas about the virtues of domesticity, marriage
for love and marital fidelity, she did not hesitate. All the Lennox sisters were open to new ideas, and their wealth and education gave them instant access to the newest books, most fashionable thinkers and latest ideas about women. But this openness was not specifically ‘feminist’. It was a reflection of the Whigs’ political philosophy; a way of life (refined and articulated as the century wore on) in which a belief in amelioration (or ‘progress’) was central. The Lennox sisters believed in improvement and, for the most part, responded to change positively, as an indication of it. Religious toleration; expansion and new methods in trade, commerce, agriculture, medicine and the arts; a greater role for Parliament in government: all these were welcome novelties and changing ideas about women were just part of the package, one set of new ideas among many. This was a modish and mannered culture in which ideas were talked as well as lived and the relationship between talk and life was complex and personal.