Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [11]
Elizabeth Strickland, now forty-six, was left a widow, with a meagre income, six unmarried daughters (three still in their teens) and two sons, thirteen and eleven, still at an expensive grammar school.
Chapter 2
“The Scribbling Fever”
E lizabeth Strickland was determined not to let the family’s social status slip after her husband’s death in 1818. Until she herself died forty-six years later, at the robust age of ninety-two, she continued to live at Reydon Hall and cling to the position Thomas had established for them. In the early years of her widowhood, she even maintained the house in Norwich so the boys could carry on attending school there, and she sent her daughters Eliza, Agnes and Catharine to run that household. But with the loss of the family breadwinner, the Stricklands were plunged into a penny-pinching existence behind the brave front. Cooks, maids and gardeners all disappeared, and so did General Wolfe’s desk and the elegant carriage. The family tended the vegetable garden, and went out less and less.
Keeping up appearances was a strain on Mrs. Strickland; her temperament soured and she took to her bed. Many of the rooms of Reydon Hall were closed up, and one guest would remember that it smelled of “rats and dampness and mould.” When the girls travelled anywhere, they either had to borrow a neighbour’s donkey to pull their donkey cart or take the public coach. Invitations from neighbouring gentry dried up, since the Stricklands were unable to return the hospitality. Nor was there any hope of staying abreast of the rapidly changing fashions of the 1820s. This was an era when female clothing was increasingly influenced by Romantic attitudes. Puffy sleeves, tightly corseted waists and wide girlish skirts, in flower-bed colours of lilac and rose, transformed women into fragile Fragonard heroines, dependent on male protection. But Susanna and Catharine could barely afford to renew their wardrobes, let alone play out a fantasy that had little to do with the threadbare reality of their lives.
The lives of the Strickland sisters were now constricted by genteel poverty and rural isolation. They were excluded from the masculine world of army, navy, commerce or politics. Their brothers both embraced one of the few options open to gentlemen without means as soon as they were old enough to flee the stifling matriarchy of Reydon Hall. Both set off to settle in the years old when, in 1825, a family friend encouraged him to cross the Atlantic and try his hand at farming in the colony of Upper Canada. Within a few months, young Thomas too was gone, on his way to India and a life in Britain’s merchant fleet. After their brothers’ departure, the Strickland girls had few opportunities to meet men of the standing required for marriage. Socially, they fell between two stools—they were not wealthy enough to claim membership in the landed gentry class, but their residence in the country meant they were excluded from the new urban merchant class.
Catharine Parr Strickland, sweet-tempered and placid, was her father’s favourite child.
Catharine and Susanna were sixteen and fifteen when their father died. In the crisis of quiet desperation that followed, they forged a close alliance, based on their position as the two youngest daughters and on their shared love of reading. Both clung to the catalogue of family maxims—a belief that the darkest hour comes before the dawn, and a certainty that God helps those who help themselves. The difference in their personalities reinforced their reliance on each other. Catharine wrote of herself, “I think that I have a happy faculty of forgetting past sorrows and only remembering the pleasures,” and she often found herself reassuring her sensitive younger sister when Susanna plunged into the depths of despair. Only Catharine could cope with Susanna’s emotional intensity. While Susanna resented Catharine’s imperturbable patience, she also adored her. “I know I would rather give up the pen,” Susanna wrote to a friend in 1829, “than lose the affection of my beloved sister Catharine,