The Duchess of Newcastle. Mrs. Behn. Mrs. Manley
In the many volumes containing the records of the past, the names of few women appear, and the number is still smaller of those who have won fame in art or literature. Sappho, however, has shown that poetic feeling and expression are not denied the sex; Jeanne d'Arc was chosen to free France; Mrs. Somerville excelled in mathematics; Maria Mitchell ranked among the great astronomers; Rosa Bonheur had the stroke of a master. These women possessed genius, and one is tempted to ask why more women have not left enduring work, especially in the realm of art. The Madonna and Child, what a subject for a woman's brush! Yet the joy of maternity which shines in a mother's eyes has seldom been expressed by her in words or on canvas. It was left for a man, William Blake, to write some of our sweetest songs of childhood.
But as soon as the novel appeared, a host of women writers sprang up. Women have always been story-tellers. Long before Homer sang of the fall of Troy, the Grecian matrons at their spinning related to their maids the story of Helen's infidelity; and, as they thought of their husbands and sons who had fallen for her sake, the story did not lack in fervour. But the minstrels have always had this advantage over the story-tellers: their words, sung to the lyre, were crystallised in rhythmic form, so that they resisted the action of time, while only the substance of the stories, not the words which gave them beauty and power, could be retained, and consequently they crumbled away. When the novel took on literary form, women began to write. They were not imitators of men, but opened up new paths of fiction, in many of which they excelled.
The first woman to essay prose fiction as an art was Margaret, Queen of Navarre. In the seventy-two tales of The Heptameron, a book written before the dawn of realism, she related many anecdotes of her brother, Francis the First, and his courtiers. Woman's permanent influence over the novel began about 1640, and was due directly to the Hotel Rambouillet, in whose grand salon there mingled freely for half a century the noblest minds of France. This salon was presided over by the Marquise de Rambouillet, who had left the licentious court of Henry the Fourth, and had formed here in her home between the Louvre and the Tuileries a little academy, where Corneille read his tragedies before they were published, and Bousset preached his first sermon, while among the listeners were the beautiful Duchess de Longueville, Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné and Mademoiselle de Scudéri, besides other persons of royal birth or of genius. The ladies of this salon became the censors of the manners, the literature, and even the language of France. Here was the first group of women writers whose fame extended beyond their own country, and has lasted, though somewhat dimmed, to the present. Since the seventeenth century the influence of women novelists has been ever widening.
In England, women entered the domain of literature later than in France, Spain, or Italy. Not until the Restoration did they take any active part in the world of letters; and not until the reign of George the Third did they make any marked contribution to fiction.
The first woman writer of prose fiction in England was the thrice noble and illustrious Princess Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. During the Commonwealth, the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle had lived in exile, but with the restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660, they returned to London, where the Duchess soon became a notable personage. Crowds gathered in the park merely to see her pass, attracted partly by her fame as a writer, partly by the singularities she affected. Her black coach furnished with white curtains and adorned with silver trimmings instead of gilt, with the footmen dressed in long black coats, was readily distinguished from other carriages in the park. Her peculiarities of dress were no less marked. Her long black juste-au-corps, her hair hanging in curls about her bared neck, her much beplumed velvet cap of her own designing, were objects of ridicule to the court wits, who even asserted that she wore more than the usual number of black patches upon her comely face.
More singular than her habiliments were her pretentions as a woman of letters, which caused the courtiers to laugh at her conceit. She was evidently aware of this failing as she writes in her Autobiography: "I fear my ambition inclines to vain-glory, for I am very ambitious; yet 't is neither for beauty, wit, titles, wealth, or power, but as they are steps to raise me to Fame's tower, which is to live by remembrance in after-ages."
But, notwithstanding her detractors, she received sufficient praise to foster her belief in her own genius. Her plays were well received. Her poems were declared by her admirers equal to Shakespeare's. Her philosophical works, which she dedicated to the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge, were accepted with fulsome flattery of their author. When she visited the Royal Society at Arundel House, the Lord President met her at the door, and, with mace carried before him, escorted her into the room, where many experiments were performed for her pleasure. In 1676, a folio volume was published, entitled Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, written by men of high rank and of learning, with the following dedication by the University of Cambridge:
To Margaret the First:
Princess of Philosophers:
Who hath dispelled errors:
Appeased the difference of opinions:
And restored Peace
To Learning's Commonwealth.
Yet this praise was not all flattery, for the scholarly Evelyn always speaks of her with respect, and after visiting her writes, "I was much pleased with the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse of the Duchess."
Amid the arid wastes of her philosophical works are green spots enlivened by good sense and humour that have a peculiar charm. At the time when the trained minds of the Royal Society were broadening scientific knowledge by careful experiments, this lady, with practically no education, sat herself down to write her thoughts upon the great subjects of matter and motion, mind and body. She was emboldened to publish her opinions, for, as she says: "Although it is probable, that some of the Opinions of Ancient Philosophers in Ancient times are erroneous, yet not all, neither are all Modern Opinions Truths, but truly I believe, there are more Errors in the One than Truth in the Other." Some of her explanations are very artless, as when she decides that passions are created in the heart and not in the head, because "Passion and Judgment seldom agree."
Her philosophical works are often compounded of fiction and fact. Her book called The Description of a New World called the Blazing World reminds one of some of the marvellous stories of Jules Verne. According to the story a merchant fell in love with a lady while she was gathering shells on the sea-coast, and carried her away in a light vessel. They were driven to the north pole, thence to the pole of another world which joined it. The conjunction of these two poles doubled the cold, so that it was insupportable, and all died but the lady. Bear-men conducted her to a warmer clime, and presented her to the emperor of the Blazing World, whose palace was of gold, with floors of diamonds. The emperor married the lady, and, at her desire to study philosophy, sent for the Duchess of Newcastle, "a plain and rational writer," to be her teacher. The story at this point rambles into philosophy.
Nature's Pictures drawn by Fancy's Pencil contains many suggestions for poems and novels. Particularly beautiful is the fragment of a story of a lord and lady who were forbidden to love in this world, but who died the same night, and met on the shores of the Styx. "Their souls did mingle and intermix as liquid essences, whereby their souls became as one." They preferred to enjoy themselves thus rather than go to Elysium, where they might be separated, and where the talk of the shades was always of the past, which to them was full of sorrow.
The Duchess of Newcastle wrote a series of letters on beauty, eloquence, time, theology, servants, wit, and kindred subjects, often illustrated by a little story, reminding the reader of some of the Spectator papers, which delighted the next generation. As in those papers, characters were introduced. Mrs. P.I., the Puritan dame, appears in several letters. She had