These indulgences irritated friends of long standing who saw Emily as a kind of saint, certainly much better than Alfred deserved. ‘Do not throw away your life,’ Jowett wrote to her. He thought ‘there was hardly enough of self in her to keep herself alive.’ Lear (half envious of the closeness of marriage, half repelled by it) wrote in his diary that ‘no other woman in all this world could live with [A. T.] for more than a month.’ They were mistaken, however, if they thought Tennyson was ungrateful. He knew very well that he was blessed, and would, he said, have worked as a stonebreaker to be allowed to marry her earlier. ‘If she were not one of the sweetest, justest natures in the world, I should be almost at my wits’ end.’ And the two of them faced together the death of two children—their first son, who was stillborn, and Lionel, who died at sea in 1885 on the passage home from India.
The usual image of Emily Tennyson is that of one more sickly Victorian woman, ruling from her sofa. (That, certainly, was how Virginia Woolf represented her in her play Freshwater.) From early childhood she had been considered a weak creature and as a married woman she was often in too much pain to walk, and yet, as Thwaite points out, when her sons were little she writes of climbing ladders, scrambling over rocks, and getting down the Alum Bay cliffs with her feet in eel-baskets. It was not until Hallam and Lionel were students that she had some kind of serious collapse. But nineteenth-century ailments defeat twentieth-century biographers. Reducing sufferers to a wreck, pain was accepted as a lifetime companion. Patience was prayed for, a cure was hardly expected. It’s a relief to know that Emily was a great believer in champagne, and brandy in her bedtime arrowroot.
After five years of research, Thwaite asks herself and the reader: was Emily Sellwood’s life (as Jowett put it) ‘effaced’? After she left school to become an angel in the house, she educated herself, like so many spirited Victorian daughters, by reading. (My own step-grandmother entered in her diary on her wedding-day: ‘Finished Antigone; Married Bishop.’)
Emily read Dante, Goethe, Schiller, science, and theology, as Thwaite says, ‘as though in preparation for eternity.’ When she was introduced to Queen Victoria, they talked ‘of Huxley, of the stars, of the millennium, of Jowett.’ Did she squander her intelligence, or worse still, did she wear herself out for nothing? Mrs Gilchrist (the widow of Blake’s first biographer) told William Rossetti that she believed that Emily did positive harm, when ‘watching him with anxious, affectionate solicitude, she surrounds him ever closer and closer with the sultry, perfumed atmosphere of luxury and homage in which his great soul—as indeed any soul would—droops and sickens’. Edward Fitzgerald, the sardonic friend, considered, in the 1870s, that Alfred would have done better with ‘an old Housekeeper like Molière’s’, or perhaps ‘a jolly woman who would have laughed and cried without any reason why’; Tennyson’s best things, he thought, had gone to press in 1842. What, then, is the value of a woman, and what is poetry worth, even one poem, say Maud, or ‘To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’? Thwaite, although she gently reproves Fitzgerald, doesn’t discuss these things. She has set her own limits, and she is not writing a book about Tennyson, but about Emily.
In fact, Tennyson understood, or at least comprehended his wife very well. He knew that she was motivated by love in its highest form of compassion, not only for himself but for every other human being. Motherless herself, she was conscious every hour of the day of ‘the forlorn ones.’ It wasn’t only that she dreamed on a large scale of old-age pensions for the poor, justice in Schleswig-Holstein, furnished rooms for single working women. Her instinct to rescue and console extended to the future and the past. Admiring Turner’s paintings, she added ‘How one wishes one might have done something to make his life happy.’ Simply to be unfortunate was a good enough claim on Emily.
Her faith, Tennyson wrote in the dedication to his last poems, was ‘clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven.’ Easy enough to treat this ironically or even satirically, but Ann Thwaite has done neither—she has gone right in among these people like a good, if inquisitive, neighbour who becomes a lifelong friend. She persuades us, or almost persuades us, that Emily mustn’t be thought of as a victim, since she believed her work was as important as it was possible to be. This doesn’t mean that she was satisfied with it. ‘I could have done more,’ she said on her deathbed.
Times Literary Supplement, 1996
Twice-Born
Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, by Georgina Battiscombe
Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and:
I bent by my own burden must
Enter my heart of dust.
Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry,” and such I will back against all skilled labour.’ Biographers, though not Christina herself, feel themselves obliged to explain where the passion came from, how it was restrained, and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this:
The mangled frog abides incog,
The uninteresting actual frog:
The hypothetic frog alone
Is the one frog we dwell upon.
But she was also, and this was central to her whole existence, twice-born. At the age of about thirteen she became, in company with her mother and sister, a fervent High Anglican. The keynote, which Pusey and Keble had set, was self-sacrifice. To find enough to sacrifice and to suffer for, ‘not to keep back or count or leave’—the same impulse as Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’—became her prayer, in extremity. She saw herself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, waiting for release.
She was born the youngest of a family of happily settled Anglo-Italian exiles: a pedantic, sentimental, slightly cracked father, an imperturbable mother, Italian visitors and refugees in and out at all hours. The children had their grandfather’s fruit garden near Amersham for a paradise, poverty to keep them from contact with the outside world, admiring relatives to pet them and their mother to educate them. Dante Gabriel and Christina were the ‘storms’ of the family, and, when in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms.’ On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do so.’ Christina needed both the saintly narrow-minded sister and the ‘brothers brotherly,’ and there they were: ‘wherever one was, the other was, and that was almost always at home.’
Like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mew, and Eleanor Farjeon, she knew the greatest happiness of her hushed life-drama very early on. No wonder that the most radiant of her lyrics are the children’s verses of ‘Sing-Song,’ or others that children readily understand (‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ ‘Does the Road Wind Uphill?’) or half-understand and can’t get out of their minds, like ‘Goblin Market.’ It is easy to remember this luscious and suggestive temptation poem not quite as it is—or perhaps one remembers it wrong on purpose. ‘The central point,’ as William insisted, is that ‘Laura having tasted the fruits once, and being at death’s door through inability to get a second taste, her sister Lizzie determines to save her at all hazards; so she goes to the goblins, refuses to eat their fruits, and beguiles them into forcing their fruits upon her with so much insistency