Sisters in the Wilderness (5 page)

Yet Catharine, Susanna and their sisters were aware of the intellectual ferment of the age in which they lived. Their father's own library, inherited from Sir Isaac Newton, was out-of-date by the time they were old enough to take down the leatherbound volumes. Nevertheless, it contained enough early examples of Enlightenment thinking—the works of John Locke, several accounts of exotic travel and Sir Isaac Newton's own scientific publications—to give them a sense of what was happening in the wider world. All the old institutions were under scrutiny—religion, monarchy, slavery and patriarchy. With their father's death and their plunge into genteel penury, the sisters had a particular interest in some of the new thinking about women's lives, such as Mary Wollstonecraft's
Vindication of the Rights of Women,
first published in 1792. Wollstonecraft (who died in childbirth in 1797, before Catharine and Susanna were born) passionately championed women's claim to equal treatment in the spheres of education, the professions, the law and politics.

The boldness of Wollstonecraft's thinking was anathema to establishment figures such as Horace Walpole, who dismissed the author and her followers as “hyenas in petticoats.” Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft's legacy directly touched the Strickland sisters' lives. The spread of literacy among women during the previous hundred years meant that Wollstonecraft's manifesto was widely read. And, thanks in part to her success, publishers realized that there was a growing market for works by lady authors. The tradition of women writers in England began to gather momentum: gentlewomen were producing belles-lettres, travel memoirs and domestic tales. Fanny Burney had already published four successful novels, the best-known of which was
Camilla
, depicting the lives of virtuous but inexperienced girls entering society. By 1815 Jane Austen had two bestsellers to her name (
Sense and Sensibility
and
Pride and Prejudice
) and had been invited to dedicate her new novel,
Emma,
to the Prince Regent. Writing was beginning to be both respectable and lucrative for women.

England had not yet been engulfed in the claustrophobic glorification of the family, and the idea of woman as the “angel in the house,” that would later characterize middle-class attitudes in Victorian Britain. Regency London was permeated with the elegance, extravagance and sartorial splendour that defined the age. It was a jolly, if exhausting, time to be alive, for both men and women. The preferred literary style was urbane and fastidious, and women excelled at it.

For the Stricklands, stuck in East Anglia, opportunities for women with literary ambitions still seemed hopelessly out of reach. But one day an old friend of Thomas Strickland's came to visit, and chanced upon a children's story about a highland piper that Catharine had written. When he left, he took it with him and showed it to a publisher in London. To Catharine's delight, the friend arrived a month later and pressed five golden guineas into her hands. The publisher wished to produce a little book under the title
The Blind Highland Piper and Other Tales
. Five guineas was a considerable sum in those days, enough to finance a trip to London. It was particularly exciting for a young woman who had no expectations of legacies or marriage settlements. Catharine's success encouraged the literary efforts of four of her sisters: Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Susanna. All five began to see that writing might offer an escape from their pinched circumstances, and an opportunity to shape better lives for themselves. Only pretty Sarah, known within the family as “the baker” because she made such delightfully light loaves, never showed any interest in publication.

Agnes, the brilliant and bossy elder sister, was the first of the Stricklands to see her work in print.

By the early 1820s, the Strickland girls had secured a limited entrée into the kind of London literary circles where Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas were debated and Fanny Burney's latest novel discussed. Their second cousin, Rebecca Leverton, was a wealthy widow who held court in the elegant terraced house in Bedford Square bequeathed to her by her husband, Thomas Leverton, the square's architect. Bedford Square was one of the “best addresses” in the newly built district of Bloomsbury. Rebecca often invited her cousins to stay with her. She certainly appreciated their willingness to run errands and bring glasses of warm milk to her before she rose each morning, but she also tried to expand their horizons. Catharine particularly enjoyed the visits. “I am indeed very happy
and enjoy the society of my London friends,” she wrote to her friend James Bird, a well-known poet who ran a stationery shop in the Suffolk village of Yoxford, and his wife Emma. “Mrs. Leverton takes me abroad in the carriage everyday to shew me some building or public place of note….I am so enchanted with [Westminster] Abbey that I could stand for hours looking on it.”

A less grand, but more exciting, connection was the artist Thomas Cheesman. Cheesman, whom the girls referred to affectionately as “Coz,” was a colourful character in a grubby artist's smock who moved in somewhat raffish circles. His house in Newman Street was cluttered with musical instruments, books and half-finished paintings. Cheesman was a man ahead of his time, who encouraged Agnes and Susanna (the two most determined writers) to press ahead with their literary ambitions.

Agnes, who had been twenty-two when her father died, moved to London in the early 1820s to capitalize on her literary connections and potential. She was the first Strickland in print: in 1817, the year before Catharine earned her first five guineas, Agnes had published a poem about Queen Charlotte's death in a Norfolk newspaper. The success of this florid eulogy to royalty catapulted Agnes into rather grand circles, and she never looked back. Soon she was mixing with minor aristocrats, dropping names and insisting that, in addition to the family connection with Catherine Parr, she had the Stuart blood of Scottish kings. With the sense of theatre acquired during their childhood dramatic evenings, and with an imperious toss of her well-dressed silky black hair, Agnes always enjoyed making an entrance at social events. She expended as much creative energy on her appearance as on her literary output. “Last week I was obliged to assist the mantua maker in making and altering my robes,” she wrote to a Suffolk friend. “Fitting and refitting, frilling and grilling …chased from the secret chambers of my brain a multitude of excellent ideas which had I been at leisure to have instituted would have furnished employment for a month.”

A third ally in the young women's pursuit of publication was an old friend of their father's, Thomas Harral, who had moved from Suffolk
to London to edit a fashionable magazine entitled
La Belle Assemblée.
Harral's daughter, Anna Laura, was one of Susanna's best friends; his son Francis was Catharine's first serious beau. Harral introduced the Stricklands to various writers and poets in the capital, and he gave them advice on how to get published. Through Harral, Susanna met a man who quickly became a father figure. Thomas Pringle was a Scottish poet and outspoken leader of the Anti-Slavery League. He found the admiration of a clever, lively young woman immensely flattering, and he frequently invited her to stay with him and his family in their townhouse in the Finsbury district of London, or in their country home in Hampstead. Pringle indulged Susanna, praised her poems and encouraged her to question convention. In turn, Susanna adored him, and she wrote to him daily when they were apart. It was an intoxicating relationship: a mix of paternal and erotic affection. Susanna took to calling Pringle “Papa.”

With the help of people like Harral and Pringle, the Stricklands were able to take full advantage of the latest literary fashion—literary “annuals.” These lavishly bound, expensive anthologies offered short narratives of love and chivalry. Specially commissioned steel engravings depicted pensive maidens gazing at the heavens, or sitting in solitude by a roaring sea. To a modern reader, the annuals offer only sentimentality and bad writing; to the Stricklands, they offered liberation. They gave women the opportunity to support themselves. For example, Mary Shelley (Wollstonecraft's daughter, the author of
Frankenstein
and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley) earned enough money from the gushing romances she contributed to
The Keepsake
, edited by Lady Blessington, to keep her son in school at Harrow.

By 1829, five of the six Strickland sisters—Eliza, Agnes, Jane, Catharine and Susanna—had established toeholds in London's literary cliffs. Eliza, who always hated Reydon Hall, was living in a furnished room in London and editing
The Court Journal,
a jaunty and rather snobbish periodical stuffed with fashion tips, gossip about the royal court and theatre notices. Agnes was publishing rapture-filled epic poetry and
being mentioned as a writer of considerable promise (although a waspish reviewer suggested that “‘poems long and legendary' are above the calibre of your muse”). Catharine quietly and methodically published a children's book almost every year from 1825 onwards. Her income steadily rose, so that by 1830 she was being paid more than twelve pounds for
The Sketchbook of a Young Naturalist
. It is hard to estimate what this is worth in modern terms: the working rule for British historians is to multiply early-nineteenth-century values by fifty to render them in late-twentieth-century terms. Any equivalence is crude, since there were fluctuations within decades and the cost of services rose much more rapidly than the cost of manufactured goods. But Catharine was probably earning roughly six hundred pounds for each book in today's money. Her annual income of twelve pounds would have made a significant difference to life at Reydon Hall, but it would not have been enough to live on in an era when an English farm labourer earned about thirty pounds a year.

In addition, there was a Strickland assembly line for the production of poetry, reviews and stories which regularly appeared in several of the seventeen annuals being published. The sisters often co-wrote stories, and several times an editor would attribute a certain piece to the wrong sister. Payment was meagre for most of these pieces, and the letters that the women wrote to their editors suggest more craven gratitude than aggressive pursuit of a fair fee. But anything was better than nothing. “I should be enabled to leave a sum for home expenses in Mamma's hands,” a hopeful Catharine wrote to Susanna, in one note about a few shillings that were due for a particular article.

The Stricklands' contributions to glossy anthologies were terribly conventional. Maidens swooned, lions roared, Byronic heroes martyred themselves. For Eliza, Catharine and Jane, this was enough. But Agnes and Susanna pushed at the limits of convention. Competition crackled between these two young women. Each recognized in the other a talent for expression that their sisters could never claim. All their lives, Susanna and Agnes envied each other's successes even as they exchanged congratulations
on achievements. The edge of competition was blunted only by the difference in their writing styles. At this stage, Susanna was pouring more and more of her creative energy into verse. She was also using, in some of her stories for
La Belle Assemblée
, a first-person narrative voice, which allowed her to include her own wit, and interest in magic and spiritualism, in her sketches of Suffolk characters. Agnes was going in a different direction. Acknowledging that she couldn't make it as a poet, she had begun to interest herself in the past and to haunt the newly completed British Museum. Amongst its untidy piles of stilluncatalogued collections of state and private records, she took her first step towards her lifetime avocation: history.

As Susanna approached her late twenties, she became increasingly irritated by the dainty constraints of the glossy anthologies. At the same time, she was enmeshed in religious doubts. She was a young woman in search of herself, torn between her literary aspirations and a fierce religious faith. A close friend told Susanna that she sounded like “a mad woman and a fanatic” when she gave vent to the intensity of her emotions. Perhaps the young writer was simply disgusted by the vicar of Reydon's preference for “huntin' and fishin'” over giving sermons; perhaps she was swept away by the fervently anti-establishment views of her hero, Thomas Pringle, a Methodist. Pringle denounced Tory smugness with histrionic passion. For whatever reason, in 1830, Susanna turned her back on the pomp and rituals of the Church of England, whose comfortable pews were occupied each Sunday by the carriage set, and was admitted into a Nonconformist congregation in a village church three miles from Reydon. Most of her co-worshippers were farmers and their labourers, who arrived on foot or in creaking hay-wagons.

Mrs. Strickland and her three elder daughters, who were all busy clinging to the upper rungs of society, were horrified. This was a most unconventional step for a young woman of Susanna's breeding. They had already had to deal with the fact that the fourth Strickland sister, Sarah, had also become a Dissenter. But Sarah's conversion was less threatening than Susanna's, since it had remained a private matter. The
family knew that Susanna, unlike demure Sarah, would immediately rush into print, to embarrass her relatives with fervent proclamations of her new allegiance and criticisms of the spiritually slack. Sure enough, Susanna soon published an ambitious and heartfelt poem entitled “Enthusiasm.” She belittled “men of pleasure” in this epic work and glorified “the unlearned and those of low estate” who, with their simple faith, are the only Christians who will attain salvation. Agnes was mortified, wondering what her smart friends would think. It wasn't the last time that Susanna would embarrass her.