Two Women of Letters

SEX in literature is as subtle and pervasive as in any other manifestation of life. Doubt may arise, in the case of single works of art whether a man or a woman was behind them, but a Chevalier d’Eon has hard work of it in literature. It is even more noticeable that when woman is triumphantly brought forward as man’s equal in the republic of letters, her life and her work reveal unmistakably the truth that her position has been obtained through the retention, and not the subjection, of her womanly qualities. We may claim stoutly that art knows nothing of sex, but nature is too much for us, and the deeper we look into woman’s work in literature the more of the woman we find.

A curious parallel might be drawn between Miss Edgeworth and Miss Mitford, involving many considerations of English literary and social history. Each led her life contemporaneously with men of letters, who respected her and associated with her. Each was in a degree a force in literature. They had friends in common, and their periods overlapped. Each, again, was somewhat an exponent of the finer life of her time, for both performed that function so attributive of woman, of catching quickly the current wind, and showing its direction, before duller men had adjusted their more scientific anemometers. Even in minor details there were points in common : each had a father who receives the derisive criticism of the world, but had much to do with the determination of the daughter’s literary life. Miss Edgeworth’s father, indeed, is represented as a blundering theorist, who kept his larger-minded daughter in humiliating subordination ; while Miss Mitford’s father was a gay spendthrift, who encouraged his daughter’s industry, with a mingled pride in her achievement and content at the ease it brought him. But in each instance the objectionable father brings out more emphatically the womanly and affectionate nature of the daughter, and the very circumstances which may make a biographer indignant serve to increase our admiration that the woman triumphs over the author.

Mrs. Oliver’s work on Maria Edgeworth ¹ is called a study, perhaps because the author wishes to emphasize the fact that she has not written a biography, but has collected the material for an acquaintance with Miss Edgeworth and her associates, and a knowledge of what her contemporaries thought of her. There is scarcely any attempt at a study of Miss Edgeworth’s contributions to literature, but we have what is, on the whole, more acceptable, — an opportunity to know in a pleasant manner the surroundings of a writer who has been a familiar friend to her readers. Mrs. Oliver makes copious extracts from the memoirs of Mr. Edgeworth, and from the reminiscences and descriptions of contemporary writers, and is not always careful to save her readers the labor of reading the same general descriptions of Miss Edgeworth’s home twice over; but if she has erred in the plenitude of her material, she has selected the most fruity portions of Mr. Edgeworth’s garrulous memoirs, and given them a new and convenient setting. She has also collected industriously from a number of sources, and has arranged her collection in a methodical manner. Her own writing is not very graceful, nor always very clear, as in the passage, “ Miss Edgeworth was always pleased to make friends; but she had not that disagreeable characteristic of modern literary people, — a desire to meet new people, and make new conquests, and an inordinate capacity for being bored by old friends, who were not literary, or sufficiently useful in helping one on in a career.” We have tried to believe that by a change of punctuation we could relieve Miss Edgeworth from the aspersion now cast on her in the last clause, but we find no way to save Miss Edgeworth except by throwing Mrs. Oliver overboard.

What a delightful picture one forms of Miss Edgeworth, and from what a singular background it is projected! Her much-married father and the ingenious Mr. Day fill a large part of the frame, and it is only by remembering the unconquerable good-nature of Miss Edgeworth that we can refrain from pitying her, under the experimentation of the fussy theorists who presided over her education. She was an artist who had fallen among philosophers, and they came near stripping her of her genius ; but they did not wholly succeed, and the best parts of her stories are not the surplusage of her father’s educational whims, but the creation of a mind singularly susceptible to influence, and ready to receive the impressions which human nature made upon it. Not to give Mr. Edgeworth too much blame, the whole tone of thought which prevailed was of the school-master order ; and we come to respect Miss Edgeworth’s power as a character-painter all the more, when we discover how emphatically her best work was an escape from the toils which bound her. She had a large, cheerful spirit, and her art was healthy and free. The priggishness which appears in her work was accidental. Under other influences, it might have been absent.

The old-fashioned, mannered air, which clings about the Edgeworth school, has a faint continuation in Miss Mitford’s work, but in any comparison between the two women as writers it would quickly be seen that the earlier woman was far more vigorous and genuine ; that the later had greater delicacy and sweetness. It is with their lives and circumstances, however, that we have to do. Mr. L’Estrango had already edited the Life of Mary Russell Mitford, and he now furnishes a supplementary volume,² devoted chiefly to letters addressed to her by various literary friends. We cannot wholly praise this sectional treatment of biography. The most satisfactory form would show the two sides of the correspondence at once. As it is, one has a little the feeling, in reading this book, that he is overhearing one end of a telephonic conversation. So far as Miss Mitford herself is concerned, the book gives us nothing more than a renewed impression of her affectionate, attractive nature, and that her books and her life had already shown. The testimony, indeed, to the power which she had of drawing friends to herself is very emphatic. Miss Mitford lived in a retired country village, and rarely showed herself in the city. Friends more than once found their way to her, yet her true salon was in her correspondence, and the range which her friendship took indicates well the strong side of Miss Mitford’s nature. She was not a creative artist, like Miss Edgeworth, but she was a woman of literary sympathy and taste. It had become easier to be a woman of letters when Miss Mitford took up the pen, and the genial relations which existed between her and her English and American friends belonged to an order of things very different from that existing in Miss Edgeworth’s day. There is a spirit of comradery apparent in this volume, which is absent from the other, and one feels that the feminine element in literature, equally positive in both cases, here intimates delicately that finer, freer intercourse of men and women which modern society aims to secure. Miss Edgeworth’s career was slightly revolutionary; at any rate, it was contemporaneous with a state of society when a Miss Edgeworth was somewhat of a phenomenon. Miss Mitford’s gentle part in literature was a quiet expression of feminine forces which had already gained a right of existence.

We suspect, indeed, that it was the woman quite as much as the writer in Miss Mitford who called out the confidences and gallantries of the gentlemen who paid her court. There were ladies with them,—Lady Dacre, Mrs. Howitt, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Trollope, and others, — but men of letters had the more important place. It is curious to observe the gradation of epistolary style from the somewhat pompous letters of Sir W. Elford and Mrs. Hofland to the frank and familiar notes which she exchanged with her more immediate contemporaries. There are letters from Miss Barrett, before she married Mr. Browning; from De Quincey’s daughter ; from Ruskin, Talfourd, Howitt, Kenyon, and others less known among the English ; and from Mr. Fields, Mr. Whittier, Bayard Taylor, N. P. Willis, Mr. George Ticknor, and others on this side of the Atlantic. The editor, by the way, has erred in attributing to Bayard Taylor the letter on page 320. The circumstances mentioned in the letter do not fit the facts in Mr. Taylor’s life, and the style of the letter is quite foreign from his style.

One may spend an agreeable evening over each of these books. Possibly the study of Miss Edgeworth would send one to re-reading some of her stories. We are not sure that as much would be said of the Mitford volume, for Miss Mitford’s work was not so distinctively new and strong as Miss Edgeworth’s ; but there lingers on the mind a grateful sense of the pleasure which Our Village gave when it was published. One might well wish to cool his tongue with that book, after a too liberal taste of the work of some contemporaneous women of letters. The best side of any phase of life always contains the prophecy of enduring elements, and the student of modern society may take courage, after the glimpse which he gets of the literary coterie of which Miss Mitford was the unconscious centre.