Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [12]
Susanna Strickland was impulsive and defiant, with a wicked sense of humour.
At the same time, Catharine enjoyed the fact that Susanna was, in her younger sister’s own words,a “wild Suffolk girl so full of romance.” Susanna could infuse placid Catharine with her own giddy joie de vivre. “Possibly it was the contrast between us that had the effect of binding us nearer to one another,” Catharine mused later in life. The primal bonds between the two women—far stronger than either felt for their four sisters and two brothers—were deep-rooted and comforting to both.
In Norwich, Catharine was a frequent visitor at the city library, and she was soon venturing “once more to indulge the scribbling fever.” At first, she didn’t see her little stories as a way to make money. Nor did her sisters, although by now both Agnes and Eliza (her contempt for “trash” notwithstanding) were experimenting with poetry and simple literary sketches. Their mother, clinging to respectability, would have decreed that it was unthinkable for a gentlewoman to consider earning her living. This was, after all, the era in which Jane Austen, the parson’s daughter from Hampshire, covered her notebooks with a piece of muslin when she heard somebody approach her room, and when the Norwich writer Harriet Martineau wrote her articles for a church magazine in her freezing bedroom between five and seven o’clock in the morning so her mother wouldn’t discover what she was up to. It was dangerous for a woman even to suggest that she had a brain: the eighteenth-century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had once advised her daughter to hide her intellect “with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness.”
Yet Catharine, Susanna and their sisters were aware of the intellectual ferment of the age in which they lived. Their father’s own library, inherited from Sir Isaac Newton, was out-of-date by the time they were old enough to take down the leatherbound volumes. Nevertheless, it contained enough early examples of Enlightenment thinking—the works of John Locke, several accounts of exotic travel and Sir Isaac Newton’s own scientific publications—to give them a sense of what was happening in the wider world. All the old institutions were under scrutiny—religion, monarchy, slavery and patriarchy. With their father’s death and their plunge into genteel penury, the sisters had a particular interest in some of the new thinking about women’s lives, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, first published in 1792. Wollstonecraft (who died in childbirth in 1797, before Catharine and Susanna were born) passionately championed women’s claim to equal treatment in the spheres of education, the professions, the law and politics.
The boldness of Wollstonecraft’s thinking was anathema to establishment figures such as Horace Walpole, who dismissed the author and her followers as “hyenas in petticoats.” Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft’s legacy directly touched the Strickland sisters’ lives. The spread of literacy among women during the previous hundred years meant that Wollstonecraft’s manifesto was widely read. And, thanks in part to her success, publishers realized that there was a growing market for works by lady authors. The tradition of women writers in England began to gather momentum: gentlewomen were producing belles-lettres, travel memoirs and domestic tales. Fanny Burney had already published four successful novels, the best-known of which was Camilla, depicting the lives of virtuous but inexperienced girls entering society. By 1815 Jane Austen had two bestsellers to her name (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice) and had been invited to dedicate her new novel, Emma, to the Prince Regent. Writing was beginning to be both respectable and lucrative for women.
England had not yet been engulfed in the claustrophobic glorification of the family, and the idea of woman as the “angel in the house,” that would later characterize middle-class attitudes in