Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [15]
The Stricklands’ contributions to glossy anthologies were terribly conventional. Maidens swooned, lions roared, Byronic heroes martyred themselves. For Eliza, Catharine and Jane, this was enough. But Agnes and Susanna pushed at the limits of convention. Competition crackled between these two young women. Each recognized in the other a talent for expression that their sisters could never claim. All their lives, Susanna and Agnes envied each other’s successes even as they exchanged congratulations on achievements. The edge of competition was blunted only by the difference in their writing styles. At this stage, Susanna was pouring more and more of her creative energy into verse. She was also using, in some of her stories for La Belle Assemblée, a first-person narrative voice, which allowed her to include her own wit, and interest in magic and spiritualism, in her sketches of Suffolk characters. Agnes was going in a different direction. Acknowledging that she couldn’t make it as a poet, she had begun to interest herself in the past and to haunt the newly completed British Museum. Amongst its untidy piles of stilluncatalogued collections of state and private records, she took her first step towards her lifetime avocation: history.
As Susanna approached her late twenties, she became increasingly irritated by the dainty constraints of the glossy anthologies. At the same time, she was enmeshed in religious doubts. She was a young woman in search of herself, torn between her literary aspirations and a fierce religious faith. A close friend told Susanna that she sounded like “a mad woman and a fanatic” when she gave vent to the intensity of her emotions. Perhaps the young writer was simply disgusted by the vicar of Reydon’s preference for “huntin’ and fishin’” over giving sermons; perhaps she was swept away by the fervently anti-establishment views of her hero, Thomas Pringle, a Methodist. Pringle denounced Tory smugness with histrionic passion. For whatever reason, in 1830, Susanna turned her back on the pomp and rituals of the Church of England, whose comfortable pews were occupied each Sunday by the carriage set, and was admitted into a Nonconformist congregation in a village church three miles from Reydon. Most of her co-worshippers were farmers and their labourers, who arrived on foot or in creaking hay-wagons.
Mrs. Strickland and her three elder daughters, who were all busy clinging to the upper rungs of society, were horrified. This was a most unconventional step for a young woman of Susanna’s breeding. They had already had to deal with the fact that the fourth Strickland sister, Sarah, had also become a Dissenter. But Sarah’s conversion was less threatening than Susanna’s, since it had remained a private matter. The family knew that Susanna, unlike demure Sarah, would immediately rush into print, to embarrass her relatives with fervent proclamations of her new allegiance and criticisms of the spiritually slack. Sure enough, Susanna soon published an ambitious and heartfelt poem entitled “Enthusiasm.” She belittled “men of pleasure” in this epic work and glorified “the unlearned and those of low estate” who, with their simple faith, are the only Christians who will attain salvation. Agnes was mortified, wondering what her smart friends would think. It wasn’t the last time that Susanna would embarrass her.
Susanna was not only taking an unconventional spiritual path, she was also being politicized. Thanks to Thomas Pringle, she was increasingly involved in the abolitionist movement—as radical a political movement in the early nineteenth century as feminism would be in the mid-twentieth century. Pringle invited Susanna to transcribe the stories of two former slaves from British colonies, a twenty-four-year-old