Some Eminent Women of Our Times

In earlier and happier days the habit of the sisters had been, when their aunt went to bed at nine o’clock, to put out the candles and pace up and down the room discussing the plots of their novels, and making plans and projects for their future life. Now Charlotte was left to pace the room alone, with all that had been dearest to her in the world under the church pavement at Haworth and in the old churchyard at Scarborough. But Charlotte was not one to give way to self-indulgent idleness, even in the hour of darkest despair. She was writing Shirley at the time of Anne’s last illness. After the death of this beloved and only remaining sister, she resumed her task; but those who knew what her private history at the time was, can trace in the pages of the novel what she had gone through. The first chapter she wrote after the death of Anne is called, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

The first venture in authorship of the sisters was a volume of poems, to which they each contributed. They imagined, probably with justice, that the world was at that time prejudiced against literary women. Therefore they were careful to conceal, even from their publishers, their real identity. The poems were published as the writings of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte’s stories which was published, but The Professor was the first that was written with a view to publication. The sisters each wrote a story – Charlotte, The Professor; Emily, Wuthering Heights; and Anne, Agnes Grey, and sent them to various publishers. Charlotte was the only one of the three sisters whose manuscript was returned on her hands. But she was not discouraged by the disappointment. Just at this time Mr. Brontë, who had been suffering from cataract, was persuaded by his daughters to go to Manchester for an operation. Charlotte accompanied him, and it was while she was waiting on him, in the long suspense after the operation had been performed, that she began Jane Eyre, the book that made her, and ultimately the name of Brontë, famous. Nothing is more striking in Charlotte’s personal history than the way in which she reproduced the events and personages of her own circle into her novels. Probably the belief that she was writing anonymously encouraged her in this. Her father’s threatened blindness and her own fear of a similar calamity are reflected, as it were, in the blindness of Rochester in Jane Eyre. The success of Jane Eyre was rapid and complete, and there was much dispute whether its author were a man or a woman. The Quarterly Review distinguished itself by the remark that if the author were a woman it was evident “she must be one who for some sufficient reason has long forfeited the society of her sex.” Sensitive as Charlotte Brontë was, the coarseness of the insult could not wound her; it could at the utmost be regarded as nothing worse than a trivial annoyance; for when the words reached Charlotte, the grave had not long closed over Branwell’s wasted life; Emily was just dead, and it was evident that Anne was dying. The greatness of her grief and the anguish of her loneliness dwarfed to their proper proportions the petty insults that at another time would have caused her acute pain. On the whole she had nothing to complain of in the way her book was received; she suffered no lack of generous appreciation from the real leaders of the literary world. Thackeray and G. H. Lewes, Miss Martineau, and Sidney Dobell were warm in their praise of her work. Charlotte’s manner of making her literary fame known to her father was characteristic. The secret of their authorship had been very strictly kept by the sisters; but when the success of Jane Eyre was assured, Emily and Anne urged Charlotte that their father ought to be allowed to share the pleasure of knowing that she was the writer of the book. Accordingly one afternoon Charlotte entered her father’s study and said, “Papa, I’ve been writing a book.” When Mr. Brontë found that the book was not only written, but printed and published, he exclaimed, “My dear, you’ve never thought of the expense it will be! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one knows you or your name.”

“But, papa, I don’t think it will be a loss; no more will you, if you will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it.” At tea that evening Mr. Brontë exclaimed to his other daughters, “Girls, do you know that Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely?”

The pacing up and down of the sisters in the firelight, discussing the plots of their novels, has been already mentioned. Mrs. Gaskell records that Charlotte told her that these discussions seldom had any effect in causing her to change the events in her stories, “so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described reality.” This confirms what Mr. Swinburne has said of her strongest characteristic as an author, that she has the power of making the reader feel in every nerve that thus and not otherwise it must have been. It must not, however, be thought that the conversations with her sisters were therefore useless; no doubt they were very stimulating to her imagination, and gave her creations more solid reality than they would otherwise have had.

In 1854 Charlotte Brontë married Mr. Nicholls, an Irish gentleman, who had for eight years been her father’s curate. She only lived nine months after her marriage. She was happy in her husband’s love, and appreciated his devotion to his parish duties. But the loving admirers of Charlotte Brontë can never feel much enthusiasm for Mr. Nicholls. Mrs. Gaskell states that he was not attracted by her literary fame, but was rather repelled by it; he appears to have used her up remorselessly, in their short married life, in the routine drudgery of parish work. She did not complain; on the contrary, she seemed more than contented to sacrifice everything for him and his work; but she remarks in one of her letters, “I have less time for thinking.” Apparently she had none for writing. Surely the husband of a Charlotte Brontë, just as much as the wife of a Wordsworth or a Tennyson, ought to be attracted by literary fame. To be the life partner of one to whom the most precious of Nature’s gifts is confided, and to be unappreciative of it and even repelled by it, shows a littleness of nature and essential meanness of soul. A true wife or husband of one of these gifted beings should rather regard herself or himself as responsible to the world for making the conditions of the daily life of their distinguished partners favourable to the development of their genius. But pearls have before now been cast before swine, and one cannot but regret that Charlotte Brontë was married to a man who did not value her place in literature as he ought.

XII

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Sydney Smith, writing in 1810 upon the extraordinary folly of closing to women all the ordinary means of literary education, remarked that one consequence of their exclusion was that no woman had contributed anything of lasting value to English, French, or Italian literature, and that scarcely a single woman had crept into the ranks even of the minor poets. While he was writing this, a little baby girl was beginning to prattle, who within a very short time was destined to win a place among the great poets of this century. The very great gifts of Elizabeth Barrett were discernible from her earliest childhood. Her father was Mr. Edward Moulton, of Burn Hall, Durham. The date and place of her birth are disputed. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie states in the National Dictionary of Biography that the future poetess was born at Burn Hall, Durham, in 1809; Mr. J. H. Ingram says in his Life of Mrs. Browning in the Eminent Women Series that she was born in London in 1809; while Mr. Browning has written to the papers to say that she was born at Carlton Hall, Durham, in 1806. Three birthplaces and two birthdays are thus assigned to her. It is not, however, disputed that she was christened by the names of Elizabeth Barrett, and that her father afterwards exchanged the name of Moulton for that of Barrett on inheriting some property from a relative. At eight years old little Elizabeth could read Homer in the original Greek, and was often to be seen with the Iliad in one hand and a doll in the other; this picture of her gives a beautiful type of her future character, its depth of loving womanliness, combined with the height of poetic inspiration and learning. She was certainly one of the women of whom her brother poet, Tennyson, sings, who “gain in mental breadth nor fail in childward care.” She says herself of her childhood that “she dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses her black pony.” At about eleven years old she wrote an epic poem in four books on The Battle of Marathon, which her father caused to be printed. Her home, during most of her childhood, was at Hope End, near Ledbury, in Herefordshire. Many pictures of her happy childhood among the beautiful hills and orchards of the West country are to be found in the poems, especially in “Hector in the Garden” and in her “Lost Bower.” Much of her young life, too, is described in the earlier part of her greatest work, Aurora Leigh. We do not hear much about the mother of the poetess, but her grandmother, it is said, looked with much disfavour on the little lady’s learning, and said she would “rather hear that Elizabeth’s hemming were more carefully finished than of all this Greek.” Her father, however, was a worthy guardian of the wonderful child that had been entrusted to him; he fostered and encouraged her genius by all means in his power. He must have had a singular power of self-devotion and self-sacrifice; and it is probable that much of his daughter’s beautiful moral nature was inherited from him. When Elizabeth was about twenty, her mother lay in her last illness, and simultaneously money troubles, brought on by no fault of his own, fell upon Mr. Barrett. He would allow no knowledge of this to disturb his wife during her illness; and in order effectually to hide the truth from her, he made an arrangement with his creditors which very materially reduced his income for life, so that no reduction of his establishment should take place as long as his wife lived.

Two other misfortunes had an important influence on Elizabeth Barrett’s youth. When she was about fifteen, she was trying to saddle her pony by herself in the paddock, when she was thrown to the ground, and her spine was injured in a manner that kept her lying on her back for four years. Scarcely had she recovered from this injury, when another terrible calamity nearly overwhelmed her. She had been sent to Torquay for the benefit of her health, and had been there nearly a year, when her eldest brother came to visit her, in order to consult her about some trouble of his own. With two other young men, all good sailors, he took a little boat, intending to have a sail along the coast. Within a few minutes of starting, and almost under his sister’s window, the boat went down, and young Barrett and his companions were drowned. The grief and horror caused by this terrible event nearly killed her. It was almost a year before she could be moved by slow stages of twenty miles a day to London. Those who knew her best at that time believe that she would have died if she had not been sustained by her love of literary pursuits, which afforded some relief to her mind from the constant dwelling on the tragedy of which she accused herself of being the cause. Miss Mitford says in her Literary Recollections: “The house she occupied at Torquay had been chosen as one of the most sheltered in the place. It stood at the bottom of the cliffs, almost close to the sea; and she told me herself that during that whole winter the sound of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying. Still she clung to literature and Greek; in all probability she would have died without that wholesome diversion to her thoughts. Her medical attendant did not always understand this. To prevent the remonstrance of her friendly physician, Dr. Barry, she caused a small edition of Plato to be so bound as to resemble a novel. He did not know, skilful and kind though he were, that to her such books were not an arduous and painful study, but a consolation and a delight.” She, however, appeared to be condemned to a life of perpetual invalidism. She now lived in London with her father, and was confined to one large darkened room, and saw no one but her own family, and a few intimate friends, the chief of whom were Miss Mitford, Mrs. Jameson, and Mr. John Kenyon. The impression she produced on all who came into contact with her was that she was the most charming and delightful person they had ever met. Her sweetness, her purity, and the tender womanliness of her character, made her friends forget her learning and her genius. Miss Mitford says she often travelled five-and-forty miles expressly to see her, and returned the same evening without entering another house. The seclusion in which she lived was perhaps not unfavourable to literary work. She lay on her couch, not only, as Miss Mitford says, reading every book worth reading in almost every language, but “giving herself heart and soul to that poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess.” In 1835 she published Prometheus and other Poems, which, in the opinion of the most competent judges, raised her at once to a high rank among English poets. In 1843 she wrote The Cry of the Children, to which Lord Shaftesbury owed so much in his efforts to protect factory children from being ground to death by overwork; and later she wrote the noble “Song for the Ragged Schools of London,” whose words go straight to every mother’s heart.

During her long period of illness her chief link with the outside world was her cousin, Mr. John Kenyon, to whom Aurora Leigh is dedicated. He knew all who were best worth knowing in the great world of London, and he occasionally introduced to her one and another of those whom he believed to be most capable of appreciating her and pleasing her. In this way, in 1846, he brought Mr. Robert Browning to see Miss Barrett. In the autumn of that same year the poet and poetess were married. What his love was for her and hers for him may be gathered in the lovely poem, “Caterina to Camoens,” and in the forty-three Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Mrs. Browning wrote before her marriage. Almost directly after her marriage Mrs. Browning was ordered abroad for the benefit of her health, and the chief part of the remaining fifteen years of her life was spent in Italy. She identified herself completely with those who were struggling for the unity and independence of Italy, and much of her poetry from this time onwards is coloured by her political convictions. In Florence, in 1849, her only child, Robert Browning the younger, was born. The deep joy of motherhood suffuses much of the noblest part of Aurora Leigh. One is tempted to believe that the lovely description of Marian Erle bending over her sleeping child, could have been written by no one who had not felt a mother’s love. In any case, it adds to one’s pleasure in reading it to know that the poetess was drawing her inspiration from her own excessive happiness in the bliss of motherhood.

The yearling creature, warm and moist with lifeTo the bottom of his dimples,

Many have singled out Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese as her chief work. Mrs. Ritchie, in a very interesting article in the National Dictionary of Biography, says of them, “There is a quality in them which is beyond words: an echo from afar, which belongs to the highest human expression of feeling.” Many other of the best judges have said they are among the greatest sonnets in the English language. But the work for which the world is most deeply in her debt is Aurora Leigh. It probes to the bottom, but with a hand guided by purity and justice, those social problems which lie at the root of what are known as women’s questions. Her intense feeling that the honour of manhood can never be reached while the honour of womanhood is sullied; her no less profound conviction that people can never be raised to a higher level by mere material prosperity, make this book one of the most precious in our language. She herself speaks of it in the dedication as “The most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” If she had written nothing else, she would stand out as one of the epoch-making poets of the present century.

Mr. Browning has published some interesting information as to the manner in which he and his wife worked. They were very careful not to influence each other’s compositions unduly. Their styles in writing are entirely unlike. They abstained from reading each other’s poems while they were in process of composition. Mrs. Browning always kept a low writing-table, with inkstand and pen upon it, by her side. Mr. Browning wrote: “My wife used to write it (Aurora Leigh) and lay it down to hear our child spell, or when a visitor came in it was thrust under the cushions. At Paris, a year ago last March, she gave me the first six books to read, I never having seen a line before. She then wrote the rest and transcribed them in London, where I read them also. I wish, in one sense, that I had written and she had read it.” No one but a poet could have expressed so perfectly the great pleasure the reading gave him. There is an anecdote that when the Brownings left Florence for London, in 1856, the box containing the MS. of Aurora Leigh was lost at Marseilles. It also contained the velvet suits and lace collars of the little boy; and it is said that Mrs. Browning was far more distressed at losing the latter than the former. However, both were fortunately recovered, for the box containing them was found by Mrs. Browning’s brother in one of the dark recesses of the Marseilles Custom House.

As evidence of her position in the literary world, it may be mentioned that when Wordsworth died in 1850 the Athenæum strongly urged that Mrs. Browning ought to be made Poet Laureate.

Her sympathy with Italy was so strong that it is believed that the news of the death of Cavour, through whom in so large a measure the unity of Italy was achieved, hastened her own. She was very ill when the news reached her, and she died in Florence on 30th June 1861. The municipality of Florence placed a tablet upon her house expressing their gratitude and admiration for her, and saying that in her womanly heart she had reconciled the wisdom of the learned with the enthusiasm of the poet, and with her verses had made a golden ring uniting Italy with England.

XIII

LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES IN AFGHANISTAN

The first Napoleon is said to have remarked to Madame de Staël that women had nothing to do with politics; whereupon the lady rejoined that women ought at least to be sufficiently acquainted with political subjects to understand the reason why their heads were cut off. When we read the account of the great sufferings of the English ladies who were held as prisoners or hostages by Akbar Khan in Afghanistan in 1842, we are reminded of Madame de Staël’s epigram, and think that they ought at least to have had the consolation of understanding the political meddling and muddling, which led to the prolonged pain and danger to which they were subjected.

Afghanistan is a wild mountainous country beyond the north-west frontier of the British Empire in India. Its people consist of savage, desperate, lawless tribes, constantly at war with one another; indeed, they are hardly ever united unless they are attacked by some foreign foe. They are particularly jealous of any kind of foreign influence or interference. Every man among them is bred to arms, even children being provided with dangerous knives; they are trained to great endurance, they are splendid horsemen, and are proficient in many kinds of manly sports and martial exercises; but with these superficially attractive qualities they possess others of a different stamp, for they are treacherous, utterly regardless of truth, revengeful, bloodthirsty, sensual, and avaricious. It will thus be seen that both their good and their bad qualities render them particularly dangerous as foes. The character of their country is very much like their own. It is a land of rocky mountain passes, and a great part of it is savage and sterile. It is separated from India by narrow rocky defiles, the principal one of which, the Khyber pass, is twenty-eight miles long, and runs between lofty, almost perpendicular precipices; the pass itself is so covered with rocks and boulders that progress along it, even under the most favourable circumstances, must necessarily be very slow. The rocky precipices which command the pass are so steep that they cannot be mounted; but they are perforated by many natural caves, which for centuries have been the strongholds of bands of robbers. It is easy to understand that an army endeavouring to go through this pass is at a terrible disadvantage, and is almost entirely at the mercy of the wild tribes of warriors and robbers who infest the heights.

About 1838-39 there was more than usual of internal fighting between the savage tribes of Afghanistan. Some tribes wished for Dost Mahomed as their king, or Ameer, and others wished for Shaj Soojah. It was considered by those who directed the policy of the British Government in India, a favourable time for us to interfere. It appears to have been thought that we should make the ruler of Afghanistan our friend, if he felt that he owed his throne to our espousal of his cause. It was, however, forgotten that, however much the Afghans quarrelled among themselves, they would forget all past enmities and unite against a foreigner who tried to intervene between them; and they would hate and despise any ruler who owed his nominal sovereignty to the help of foreign soldiers. Therefore, although the English succeeded, in the first instance, in driving away Dost Mahomed and making Shaj Soojah king, they soon found that this first success was the beginning of their difficulties. Sir George Lawrence has told the story in his interesting book called Forty-three Years of my Life in India, and another narrative of the same events may be found in Lady Sale’s Journal. An Afghan horseman, with whom Sir George (then Major) Lawrence conversed, expressed the feelings of his countrymen and the difficulties of our position in a few words. “What could induce you,” he said, “to squander crores of rupees2 in coming to a poor rocky country like ours, without wood or water, and all in order to force upon us a kumbukbt (unlucky person) as a king, who, the moment you turn your backs, will be upset by Dost Mahomed, our own king?”

However, for a time the English army in Afghanistan did not realise the difficult and dangerous position in which they were placed. Dost Mahomed fled; and not long after he surrendered himself to the English, and was sent, with his wives and children, as a prisoner of war to India. Everybody now thought all trouble and danger were over, and the married officers and men of the English garrison sent for their wives and children to join them at Cabul. Shaj Soojah was established there and received the congratulations of the English. Lawrence, however, observed that the Ameer’s own subjects did not join in these congratulations, and moreover Shaj Soojah himself began to show signs of getting tired of his English friends. No special danger was, however, anticipated; the English envoy, Sir W. MacNaghten, was about to leave Cabul, having been appointed to the Governorship of Bombay. Had he left, he would have taken Lawrence with him as his secretary. When the preparations for his departure were nearly complete, the clouds that had long been gathering at last burst in storm. The Ghilzye tribe rose in rebellion because they had been deprived of an annual subsidy of £3000, nominally paid them by Shaj Soojah, but really supplied by the British. This insurrection had the effect of a match applied to a train of gunpowder. The whole of Afghanistan was presently in arms; the safest and most easily defended routes for the return to India were cut off. The insurrection spread to Cabul itself; the houses of the English residents were attacked and burned, the Treasury was sacked, and several officers and men were murdered in the streets. An attempt to send help to the English from Jellalabad was unsuccessful; the Afghans were victorious, and held the small British force entirely in their power.