Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [13]
For the Stricklands, stuck in East Anglia, opportunities for women with literary ambitions still seemed hopelessly out of reach. But one day an old friend of Thomas Strickland’s came to visit, and chanced upon a children’s story about a highland piper that Catharine had written. When he left, he took it with him and showed it to a publisher in London. To Catharine’s delight, the friend arrived a month later and pressed five golden guineas into her hands. The publisher wished to produce a little book under the title The Blind Highland Piper and Other Tales. Five guineas was a considerable sum in those days, enough to finance a trip to London. It was particularly exciting for a young woman who had no expectations of legacies or marriage settlements. Catharine’s success encouraged the literary efforts of four of her sisters: Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Susanna. All five began to see that writing might offer an escape from their pinched circumstances, and an opportunity to shape better lives for themselves. Only pretty Sarah, known within the family as “the baker” because she made such delightfully light loaves, never showed any interest in publication.
Agnes, the brilliant and bossy elder sister, was the first of the Stricklands to see her work in print.
By the early 1820s, the Strickland girls had secured a limited entrée into the kind of London literary circles where Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas were debated and Fanny Burney’s latest novel discussed. Their second cousin, Rebecca Leverton, was a wealthy widow who held court in the elegant terraced house in Bedford Square bequeathed to her by her husband, Thomas Leverton, the square’s architect. Bedford Square was one of the “best addresses” in the newly built district of Bloomsbury. Rebecca often invited her cousins to stay with her. She certainly appreciated their willingness to run errands and bring glasses of warm milk to her before she rose each morning, but she also tried to expand their horizons. Catharine particularly enjoyed the visits. “I am indeed very happy and enjoy the society of my London friends,” she wrote to her friend James Bird, a well-known poet who ran a stationery shop in the Suffolk village of Yoxford, and his wife Emma. “Mrs. Leverton takes me abroad in the carriage everyday to shew me some building or public place of note….I am so enchanted with [Westminster] Abbey that I could stand for hours looking on it.”
A less grand, but more exciting, connection was the artist Thomas Cheesman. Cheesman, whom the girls referred to affectionately as “Coz,” was a colourful character in a grubby artist’s smock who moved in somewhat raffish circles. His house in Newman Street was cluttered with musical instruments, books and half-finished paintings. Cheesman was a man ahead of his time, who encouraged Agnes and Susanna (the two most determined writers) to press ahead with their literary ambitions.
Agnes, who had been twenty-two when her father died, moved to London in the early 1820s to capitalize on her literary connections and potential. She was the first Strickland in print: in 1817, the year before Catharine earned her first five guineas, Agnes had published a poem about Queen Charlotte’s death in a Norfolk newspaper. The success of this florid eulogy to royalty catapulted Agnes into rather grand circles, and she never looked back. Soon she was mixing with minor aristocrats, dropping names and insisting that, in addition to the family connection with Catherine Parr, she had the Stuart blood of Scottish kings. With the sense of theatre acquired during their childhood dramatic evenings, and with an imperious toss of her well-dressed silky black hair, Agnes always enjoyed making an entrance at social events. She expended as much creative energy on her appearance as on her literary output.