Her talent was for love
Elizabeth Lowry
EMILY TENNYSON: THE POET'S WIFE by Ann Thwaite Faber, £25, pp. 716 After a week spent at Farringford on the Isle of Wight in June 1859, which had given him an opportunity to observe the Tennysons at home, Edward Lear wrote to his friend Chichester Fortescue: I should think computing moderately that 15 angels, several hundreds of ordinary women, many philosophers, a heap of truly wise and kind mothers, three or four minor prophets, and a lot of doctors and schoolmistresses, might all be boiled down, and yet their com- bined essence fall short of what Emily Tennyson really is.
It was also Lear's private opinion that no one else would have endured being mar- ried to Tennyson for more than a month. The Poet Laureate was something of an icon, not only to a public hungry for his work but also to his own family (at four his grandson Aubrey was convinced that Tennyson had written the Bible). As Lear's comment indicates, however, friends of the couple knew how completely the prolific Tennysonian output depended on a subtle system of checks and balances, a delicate domestic equilibrium that was carefully maintained by the poet's wife throughout their long marriage. Ann Thwaite's excellent biography of Emily Tennyson, coming a century after the latter's death, is the fast to do real jus- tice to the odd mixture of intimacy and anxiety that characterised their life togeth- er. One must suppose that all successful writers experience a disjunction between their public persona and private self, but Tennyson felt this discrepancy more sharply than most. As Laureate his public persona, which partook of the rather delib- erate stateliness of the age, required that he associate with its other figureheads, with the result that the Tennysons' guest list for any given time reads like a précis of the Dictionary of National Biography. Their cir- cle included not only Lear but the Brown- ings, George Eliot, Gladstone, Millais, Hardy, Clough, Thackeray, Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, Benjamin Jowett, Granville Bradley and Julia Cameron; Garibaldi stopped by after receiving the freedom of the City of London, and the Prince Consort was content to drink his wine standing up in their stripped drawing-room when he called while they were moving house.
Yet Tennyson's ample social life always existed in tension with a crabbed need for solitude and a debilitating melancholia. Throughout his life he suffered from an inherited disposition to depression, exacer- bated in some members of his immediate family by epileptic seizures, and although his fear of epilepsy proved unnecessary, his lapses of temper are abundantly recorded in the letters and diaries of his contempo- raries. The young Henry James, having endured an excruciating dinner at which Tennyson's manners conspicuously lacked the monumental dignity of his verse, noted grimly that 'Tennyson was not Tennysoni- an'.
Tennyson's mood swings were partly responsible for the long delay between his engagement and late marriage, in 1850, to Emily Sellwood, who had loved him ever since he had startled her on a walk near Somersby Rectory 20 years previously by leaping out from behind a tree with the words, 'Are you a Dryad or a Naiad or what are you?' The biography amasses a wealth of detail to show that the links between the Tennysons from Somersby and their near neighbours the Sellwoods in Horncastle were much closer than previ- ously supposed, and that, far from discour- aging her, Emily's prior awareness of the `black blood' of the Tennysons may have forearmed her for marriage. Tennyson later recalled that 'the peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her': like Jessie Conrad, or Rossini's wife Olympe, or indeed Arthur Hallam before her, she clearly understood the part played by his work in maintaining his mental equi- librium.
The biography deals equally sensitively with the issue of Emily's own mysterious ill health. Previous biographers, taking the lead from an innocent remark made by Carlyle, who met Emily when she was in the early stages of her first pregnancy, have assumed that her illness was psycho- somatic. Thwaite, who has with patient scholarship made an analysis of every refer- ence to Emily's health in her journal and surviving letters, suggests a gynaecological cause instead, which is not implausible Learning to crawl since Emily's first child was stillborn and she later suffered an extremely difficult third confinement when she was already 41.
Another explanation offers itself, too, although it is not spelled out. What the book conveys so shockingly, in a way that the existing biographies of Tennyson in which Emily is a peripheral figure do not, is the sheer strain that monitoring his depres- sion — even though, or especially because there were intervals when he could be very charming indeed — must have placed on her. One of her most pathetic journal entries reads, simply, 'Words in enigmas', which speaks volumes about her own men- tal state. The quantity of work which she was nevertheless able to undertake in her capacity as Tennyson's secretary — answer- ing letters for up to seven hours a day, copying his poems for the printer, proof- reading his manuscripts, dealing with his publisher, keeping all their accounts while running the Farringford household, educating their two sons and even sketch- ing designs for Tennyson's second house at Haslemere, would suggest that, far from being hysterical, she was both resilient and determined.
More serious than the charge of hysteria is the old allegation that Emily's protective- ness towards her husband had a damaging effect on his poetry. Edward FitzGerald thought so, believing that Tennyson would have been better off with an acerbic house- keeper like Moliere's; but then, FitzGerald also thought, absurdly, that In Memoriam read as if it had been produced by a poeti- cal machine, a remark that is much more applicable to the Rubaiyat.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, strangely enough — since she had obviously flour- ished as the result of her husband's untem- pered belief in her abilities — also felt that Emily was too uncritical a wife. As Thwaite suggests, however, these are nonsensical quibbles about an arrangement that enabled Tennyson to go on writing without mental breakdown, or any other interrup- tion for that matter, until he was in his eighties.
One of the book's epigraphs is taken from Middlemarch and is particularly apt, since Emily Sellwood, like Dorothea Brooke, was a woman who found her life's task in facilitating the career of her hus- band. Although she was intelligent, she would never have become a successful author in her own right — the short stories which she occasionally wrote, on the evi- dence of the passages quoted, were compe- tent but sentimental. The musical settings which she composed for 15 of Tennyson's poems, of which an example is reproduced, were technically unambitious. Gladstone humoured her by reading her plans for a savings bank for the poor and a combined income and property tax, but neither idea was practicable and she was rather naively disappointed when he did not adopt them.
Thwaite does not pretend that Emily Sellwood would have found her own great work had she not married Tennyson: few men and women do, in the sense that biog- raphers understand the phrase. Her talent was for love. If the limited companionship of her marriage was perhaps not entirely the sort of dispensation she had expected, it is nevertheless pointless to ask whether she might have been conventionally happi- er had she married someone else, since her deep attachment to Tennyson (at 77 she was able to say, 'I do not find that age cools passionate feeling') ruled out this possibili- ty. This sympathetic and timely biography shows that it was to Tennyson's undoubted advantage, and the great good fortune of English poetry, that she did not.
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