When ladies were not afraid to be 'as frightful as a precipice'
PAUL JOHNSON
In November 1813, Lord Dudley, who was holding a literary dinner party in honour of Madame de Stael, asked Jane Austen's brother Henry if his sister, who was in London, would come to attend it. But Miss Austen declined. Though flushed with the triumph of completing Mansfield Park, her most difficult and serious novel, she felt that to be pitted against the Gallic lioness in a prandial display `would have given pain instead of pleasure'. Quel dommage! Germaine de Stael's observations on English men of letters were apt: Coleridge, for instance, was 'brilliant at monologue, no good at dialogue'. Byron was 'a demon', an 'English Rousseau'. What would she have had to say of the discreet 38-year-old from Chawton Cottage? We long to know. And what would Miss Austen have thought of her? Would she have endorsed Byron's judgment — 'frightful as a precipice'?
I love to dwell on meetings of well-matched lady writers or, if they never took place, to imagine them. George Eliot never met Charlotte Bronte, though her dreadful 'partner', George Lewes, did, and must have paralysed the Yorkshire rector's daughter with rage by leaning across a dinner table in 1850 and calling out, 'There ought to be a bond of sympathy between us, Miss Brontë, for we have both written naughty books.' What a withering glance of contempt that must have evoked! Lewes was notorious for his loose talk. Mrs Lynn Linton, another novelist, and by no means censorious as a rule, said that she was revolted by his dinner-party chatter. 'I heard more startling things from Lewes, in full conclave of young and old, men and women, than I have ever dreamed of or heard hinted at before and . . it was all very embarrassing and shocking.' Oddly enough, George Eliot liked it. One of the things that attracted her to the man was his bawdy talk and dirty stories; strange things, the minds of solemn and elevated women. But the Mercian Sibyl could not bear jesting about the Other World (in which she did not believe). She conducted an intense correspondence with the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin — at least 25 letters between them survive, though they never met — and became furious when Mrs Stowe told her that she had conjured up the spectre of Charlotte Brontë at a planchette séance. The idea of the voice of the genius described to her by Lewes as 'a little, plain, provincial-looking old maid' being bandied about a New England drawing-room full of
credulous Yankees did not appeal to her sense of literary decorum.
George Eliot did not, alas, meet Elizabeth Barrett Browning either, though she used one of her Italian poems, 'Casa Guidi Windows', while writing her novel about Renaissance Florence, Romola. She was not allowed to meet Jane Welsh Carlyle because the Carlyles, like almost everyone else in society, literary or otherwise, disapproved of the couple living in sin. Men would go to their entertainments, but not their wives; conversely, Lewes, known to the Carlyles as 'the Ape', was welcome in Chelsea, but the lady whom they called 'the Strong-minded Woman' was not. Jane wrote that when she heard that Lewes and George Eliot were cohabiting, 'it was just as startling as if a woman of one's acquaintance had gone off with the strong man at the circus.' Here is another lost opportunity for a striking literary friendship, for Jane and Marian could have been devoted friends, and their correspondence would have been a golden treasury of acidic delights.
The social ostracism of Eliot is all the more deplorable in that she was made by nature to be a high-minded and authoritarian moral arbiter. Frederic Myers never forgot 'the terrible earnestness' with which she pronounced 'the words God, immortality, duty'. 'How inconceivable was the first,' she added; 'how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.' This insistence on moral duty, delivered in an Oxford college garden, put the wind up poor Myers, a rather meretricious fellow, and might have stunned even Byron himself for a minute or two. And no doubt George Eliot looked 'frightful as a precipice' as she spoke.
What has become of the old-style battleaxes, those survivors from the Victorian age who still lingered on in London when I was a young man? They were to be found particularly in politics and diplomacy, and were never afraid to rebuke someone like me if in conversation or print, I 'overstepped the mark' (a favourite expression) or. worse. 'forgot myself — though as Harold Nicolson, commenting on this usage, cynically remarked, 'That is about the last person you are likely to forget.' There were a lot of powerful people, particularly grandes dames, who felt that it was one of their social functions to 'put down' ambitious young men who had not yet 'learnt their place'. I have, literally, had my fingers rapped by Mrs Annie Fleming, been told that I was using the wrong fork by Lady Violet Powell, and been given the Full Monty (in its Alamein sense) by Lady Violet Bonham-Carter for describing the hobbies of her father, Mr Asquith, as 'bridge and brandy'.
The literary battleaxes would have made a sizable army in those days. High on the list I put Pamela Hansford Johnson who, together with her husband, C.P. Snow, ran a salon with a rod of iron. Indeed, it was for failing to turn up at one of its manifestations, invitations being regarded as a privilege, that Lady Snow gave me an icy rocket, to which her bumbling husband provided a bassoon obbligato. Then there was Rose Macaulay, of distinguished ancestry and formidable presence; she was tall and wiry and could spot an offender across a crowded party, be over in a few long strides, and nail him to the wall. She wrote the weekly diary for this journal at one time, and was a stickler for historical accuracy: 'Mr Johnson, as President Routh of Magdalen remarked — and you, as an alumnus, ought to know it — "Always verify your references." ' Good advice, too, which I sometimes fail to take. Even more terrifying was Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, flanked by her two sons, 'the Pope' and 'Young Beelzebub', a lady never afraid to tell a writer, even a quite senior one, his faults. Where younger women shimmered or sashayed across a literary room — I am thinking of Barbara Skelton, Sonia Orwell or the young Edna O'Brien — these well-stacked ladies wore the kind of full rigging that allowed them to sail. They would bear down on you like a Nelsonian First Rate, as though you were a French commerce-raider hoping to slip into Cherbourg unobserved: 'Mr Johnson, I have a little bone to pick with you.'
The species is now extinct, or almost so. I suspect that Elizabeth Jane Howard is still capable of delivering a magisterial rebuke; I once heard her at my own lunch table dress down a young woman writer (now famous) for suggesting that Miss Austen was a lesbian. But I know no up-and-coming contenders for the role of militant literary matriarchs. Lady Antonia Fraser is much too softhearted. Miss Victoria Glendinning is diffident. Joanna Trollope and Anita Brookner carry heavy guns but are pacific. Even Claire Tomalin has mellowed. No wonder the rate of literary delinquency is rising, with no one to keep order — and the girls are even worse than the men. It is all the fault of the women's movement, which made battleaxes politically incorrect.
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