Their union (too close for letters) is the unspoken theme of the collection, the necessary condition for the warmth and sanity she is able to summon on topics as diverse as women’s suffrage, table-rapping or the Franco-Prussian war. Their mutual solitude, as she knew, was what enabled her range and freedom as a writer. ‘I prefer excommunication,’ she wrote to one of her closest women friends, Barbara Bodichon, who had suggested that perhaps Lewes might be able to get a dubious divorce abroad. ‘I have no earthly thing I care for, to gain by being brought within the pale of people’s personal attention, and I have many things to care for that I should lose – my freedom from petty worldly torments … and that isolation which really keeps my charity warm …
Not that ‘petty wordly torments’ are lacking. The letters are splendidly domestic in their running commentary on the myriad, wracking changes of the weather and touchingly ordinary and wifely – and ominous – in their concern with Lewes’s fragile health. His death (in 1878) is marked by a wordless gap, as though she ceased to exist for weeks on end. When she comes back she seems stunned, and only recovers herself when she can replace him (it’s hard to see it in any other light) with their young friend, her devoted admirer, John Cross.
Their marriage was more shocking, in its way, than the years with Lewes had been. But as Anne Ritchie (Thackeray’s daughter, who had herself married a man 17 years her junior) wrote: ‘She is an honest woman, and goes in with all her might for what she is about.’ It’s this honesty of need, perhaps, that makes her so eloquent an advocate of what she calls, in one letter, the ‘impersonal life’, the life that we identify with the George Eliot of the novels:
I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity – possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.
Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton FLORA FRASER
EMMA HAMILTON WAS ENDLESSLY gossiped about, in every tone imaginable from awe to contempt. The best quick summing-up seems to have been Lady Elgin’s: ‘She is indeed a Whapper!’ This was in 1799, in Emma’s hour of triumph, when a lifetime’s posing in classical attitudes paid off on the stage of world history, in her affair with Nelson. She was a heroine, larger than life, sublimely improbable and very possibly absurd. Flora Fraser’s biography, which mostly lets Emma and her contemporaries speak for themselves, produces an impression of a generous giantess, a woman constructed from the outside in.
Romney’s portraits of her in her teens already show her as somehow on a different scale from ordinary sitters. As of course she was – she had no social identity to speak of, and could impersonate goddesses partly because she was ‘nobody’, or worse. The first extraordinary thing about her is that she survived at all in the world of three dimensions, that she wasn’t just a vanishing ‘model’ sucked down into poverty and whoredom. It seems (the early years are very murky) that her beauty was so striking, as well as classically fashionable, that she brought out the Pygmalion in people.
Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh plucked her out of Mrs Kelly’s brothel (a ‘nunnery’ in the style of the brothel in Fanny Hill) and passed her on to his friend Charles Greville, a dilettante and collector who set her up in domestic seclusion in the Edgware Road and began the process of educating her into a largeness of spirit that would match her splendid physique. She was a collector’s item, ‘a modern piece of virtu’ as he proclaimed her (‘ridiculous man’ says Ms Fraser with unusual sternness), and he watched over his investment. It was he who introduced her to Romney; it was he who, when his finances became chronically embarrassed, passed her on to a more kindly and civilised collector, his uncle, the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton.
This part of the story is always fascinating. Greville seems to have conned Emma into believing that her trip to Naples was part of her education, while to Sir William (recently widowed) he represented it as a mutually beneficial arrangement – he would be free to look for an heiress, his uncle would become the possessor of an enviable objet, who was also pleasantly domesticated and quite likeable in bed.
Greville is here a study in himself, the quintessential dilettante—‘the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything’. He also seems to have been hoping to distract Sir William from a second marriage, since he was his uncle’s heir. In the event (served him right) Sir William became so attached to Emma that he made her Lady Hamilton, and forced English society to acknowledge her, though at the convenient distance of Naples.
Emma’s injured and statuesque innocence throughout the whole episode is (again) extraordinary. For a girl from Mrs Kelly’s she had already come a long way, and now she moved from a heroic passion of resentment against Greville (‘If I was with you, I would murder you and myself boath’) to a fervent attachment to Sir William in the grandest, most unhesitating style.
To the astonishment of her protectors, she took herself seriously: the classical ‘Attitudes’ in which Sir William perfected her (and which she performed for the company after dinner) were reflected in an awesome personal straightforwardness that made people accept her as a brilliant exception, outside the rules. Greville had written to Sir William that she was ‘capable of anything grand, masculine or feminine’; and Sir William, justifying his marriage, described her as ‘an extraordinary being’ – ‘It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes the best husband, Why not vice versa?’ Visitors to Naples saw in her classical antiquities brought to life. This is Goethe, one of the after-dinner audience:
The spectator … sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realised before him in movements and surprising transformations … in her [Sir William] has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere.
And so the stage was set for her apotheosis as Nelson’s consort. Here the sublime teeters on the edge of the ridiculous: he came along only just in time (she was getting dangerously large in her thirties) and few observers could quite take the real life enactment of a passion on the Olympian scale. Spiteful Mrs Trench was only one of many unbelievers – ‘She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain. Her figure is colossal … Lord Nelson is a little man, without any dignity.’
Suddenly she is a Juno lumbering among sceptics, her grandeur turned to grossness like one of Swift’s simple-minded Brobdingnagians. With Nelson’s death, her claims to heroic stature fell away, and the story leads with a sad inevitability to the boozy death in Calais, embittered further by the clause in Nelson’s will which bequeathed her (as though she were indeed a great work of art) to the nation.
Flora Fraser doesn’t moralise over the ending – not even over the nastiest part of it, Emma’s failure to acknowledge her daughter by Nelson, Horatia, who watched her die, repelled and mystified. ‘Why she should so fascinate is difficult to answer’ is the nearest we get to a conclusion.
Ms Fraser lays out the evidence in a conscientious, noncommittal fashion that reminds one that she’s a third-generation biographer, following in the footsteps of mother, and of grandmother Elizabeth Longford, and so confident (perhaps a touch too confident) that 200-year-old gossip will prove sufficiently riveting. But she has chosen her subject well – deeper speculation, one suspects, would be out of place with a character so entirely public property from the start.
Laurence Sterne: The Later Years ARTHUR H. CASH
‘HE IS IN VOGUE. He is the man of Humour, he is the toast of the British nation.’ So reported