Dinah Birch

Anne Lister was undoubtedly one of the most unorthodox women of the early 19th century. She was an active and entirely unashamed lesbian, a scholar, a dauntless traveller and a resourceful businesswoman. As an example of what female tenacity could achieve in the pre-Victorian period, she might be seen as a fortifying ideal. But she was also manipulative and snobbish, often careless of the welfare of her tenants and labourers, and a belligerent ultra-Tory. Not only was she quite without interest in women’s political advancement, she was clearly not at all nice. One of the most engaging features of this selection from her writings is Jill Liddington’s refusal to make either a heroine or a witch out of this resolutely selfish woman. Nor does she allow Lister’s sexuality to dominate her account, as earlier editors have tended to do. Though Lister’s clandestine homosexual marriage with her fellow heiress Ann Walker is the most extraordinary event of the years covered here, its dynastic and economic repercussions figure as prominently as its personal significance in Liddington’s commentary. Nothing can make Anne Lister anything other than sensational, but Liddington is determined to show that she was something more substantial than a sexual curiosity.

Like Many forceful Victorian women, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon had a strong father and an obscure mother. Benjamin Smith, known in the family as ‘the Pater’, came from a formidable line of radical activists who had campaigned vigorously against the slave trade, and fostered projects for educational and political reform. Capable and self-assured, he combined progressive liberalism with a sharp eye for business. His interest in social betterment evidently did not extend to an involvement with the temperance movement, and he saw no difficulty in making his fortune out of distilling spirits. Nor did he see any difficulty in arranging his private life according to his own convenience. Visiting his married sister Fanny Nightingale (mother of Florence, who inherited a full share of the Smith resolve), he met a young milliner, Anne Longden. She was the daughter of a local miller, far beneath him in fortune and rank. He made her his mistress, and Barbara Leigh Smith was the first of the five children she bore him. He did not marry Anne. The more fastidious Smiths including Florence Nightingale’s well-to-do parents, were never reconciled to this ‘tabooed family’, and refused to acknowledge them. Anne, like most of her numerous counterparts in fiction, did not live long, dying of tuberculosis when Barbara was seven. Ben called her ‘the least selfish being I ever saw’, a description which certainly could not have been applied to him. He soon found himself another mistress, still further down the social scale (the daughter of an agricultural labourer), with whom he had a second covert family, never acknowledged.‘

The daughter of Samuel Holland, a prosperous Cheshire farmer and land agent, the wife of William Stevenson, a scholar and writer of some reputation, and the mother of Elizabeth Gaskell, one of the most celebrated Victorian novelists, Elizabeth Stevenson has vanished. No portrait survives, no letter or scrap of journal, no cherished family anecdotes, no remembered trace of her character or opinions. She died at the age of 40 in 1811 – we don’t know how, or why – leaving a 12-year-old son and a sturdy little girl, also called Elizabeth, who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs Stevenson’s faded existence is not lost on him, and he does what he can for her – referring, twice, to a ‘desperately trivial’ mention of a curious fan she seems once to have owned (was it rare, he wonders, or finely worked?) as almost the only sure evidence that she had a life of her own. Her daughter seems to have felt something similar. Thirty-eight years after her mother died, Elizabeth Gaskell unexpectedly acquired some of her letters. Thanking the donor, she said that they were ‘the only relics of her that I have, and of more value to me than I can express, for I have so often longed for some little thing that had once been hers or been touched by her’.’

Anti-feminist women puzzle and infuriate their feminist sisters. How can a capable and rational woman persuade herself to oppose a cause from which she has gained so much? Is it self-hatred, or misguided self-interest? Craven subservience to men, or mean-minded jealousy of the success of other women? Understandably, feminist scholars have often preferred to focus on the onward march of liberation, rather than the perversities of female resistance to women’s advance. Yet the story of anti-feminism is a fascinating one, and we can scarcely understand the debates that have pushed feminist thinking forward without giving it some serious attention. Historians of Victorian women’s writing have found this a particularly unappealing task. George Eliot’s steady opposition to women’s suffrage is an embarrassment, and it is not encouraging to find Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s helpmeet.’ These are not popular sentiments in the 1990s. Yet no one would wish to deny the intelligence, courage or reforming imagination of these women.

Hardy’s wives were not inclined to be reticent about the trials of life at Max Gate. Florence was struck with uneasiness after one particularly edgy bout of discontent: ‘I hope you burn my letters. Some are, I fear, most horribly indiscreet.’ But her husband was by then the most famous literary man of his age, and Florence’s letters were not for burning. They might, after all, be worth something. Neither Emma nor Florence could come to terms with having the value of their lives measured by that of their husband. It is hard to know whether the first or second Mrs Hardy had the more doleful time. Emma is more mysterious. Already 33 when she married Hardy in 1874, she was a mature woman with decided opinions and a strong sense of self-esteem committing herself to a shy but ambitious novelist. Oddly, not one of the letters she wrote before her marriage, or for many years after it, has survived. She would have been far from pleased with Michael Millgate’s speculations on their disappearance. ‘In her later years she was often regarded as a faintly ludicrous figure, and in her earlier years her status as Miss Emma Gifford or even as Mrs Thomas Hardy might well have been insufficient to ensure that her letters would be kept and treasured.’ It was Emma herself who seems to have destroyed her early letters to her husband. Just two poignant scraps remain, transcribed by Hardy. In 1870, only months after they met, she wrote to him: ‘I take him (the reserved man) as I do the Bible; find out what I can, compare one text with another, & believe the rest in a lump of simple faith.’ Perhaps Emma was hurt to see such trusting intimacy transformed into grist for a literary mill. A revised version of what she had written appears in A Pair of Blue Eyes, published the year before her marriage to Hardy.