Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [14]
A third ally in the young women’s pursuit of publication was an old friend of their father’s, Thomas Harral, who had moved from Suffolk to London to edit a fashionable magazine entitled La Belle Assemblée. Harral’s daughter, Anna Laura, was one of Susanna’s best friends; his son Francis was Catharine’s first serious beau. Harral introduced the Stricklands to various writers and poets in the capital, and he gave them advice on how to get published. Through Harral, Susanna met a man who quickly became a father figure. Thomas Pringle was a Scottish poet and outspoken leader of the Anti-Slavery League. He found the admiration of a clever, lively young woman immensely flattering, and he frequently invited her to stay with him and his family in their townhouse in the Finsbury district of London, or in their country home in Hampstead. Pringle indulged Susanna, praised her poems and encouraged her to question convention. In turn, Susanna adored him, and she wrote to him daily when they were apart. It was an intoxicating relationship: a mix of paternal and erotic affection. Susanna took to calling Pringle “Papa.”
With the help of people like Harral and Pringle, the Stricklands were able to take full advantage of the latest literary fashion—literary “annuals.” These lavishly bound, expensive anthologies offered short narratives of love and chivalry. Specially commissioned steel engravings depicted pensive maidens gazing at the heavens, or sitting in solitude by a roaring sea. To a modern reader, the annuals offer only sentimentality and bad writing; to the Stricklands, they offered liberation. They gave women the opportunity to support themselves. For example, Mary Shelley (Wollstonecraft’s daughter, the author of Frankenstein and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley) earned enough money from the gushing romances she contributed to The Keepsake, edited by Lady Blessington, to keep her son in school at Harrow.
By 1829, five of the six Strickland sisters—Eliza, Agnes, Jane, Catharine and Susanna—had established toeholds in London’s literary cliffs. Eliza, who always hated Reydon Hall, was living in a furnished room in London and editing The Court Journal, a jaunty and rather snobbish periodical stuffed with fashion tips, gossip about the royal court and theatre notices. Agnes was publishing rapture-filled epic poetry and being mentioned as a writer of considerable promise (although a waspish reviewer suggested that “‘poems long and legendary’ are above the calibre of your muse”). Catharine quietly and methodically published a children’s book almost every year from 1825 onwards. Her income steadily rose, so that by 1830 she was being paid more than twelve pounds for The Sketchbook of a Young Naturalist. It is hard to estimate what this is worth in modern terms: the working rule for British historians is to multiply early-nineteenth-century values by fifty to render them in late-twentieth-century terms. Any equivalence is crude, since there were fluctuations within decades and the cost of services rose much more rapidly than the cost of manufactured goods. But Catharine was probably earning roughly six hundred pounds for each book in today’s money. Her annual income of twelve pounds would have made a significant difference to life at Reydon Hall, but it would not have been enough to live on in an era when an English farm labourer earned about thirty pounds a year.
In addition, there was a Strickland assembly line for the production of poetry, reviews and stories which regularly appeared in several of the seventeen annuals being published. The sisters often co-wrote stories, and several times an editor would attribute a certain piece to the wrong sister. Payment was meagre for most of these pieces, and the letters