8. Gossip & Heartbreak in the Letters of Emily Eden

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES [co-host]: Hi everyone! We’re back with another “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW [co-host]: And I’m Kim Askew. So, we use our phones these days for just about everything, including listening to this podcast. And technology is amazing in all of these different ways, but I do think it’s kind of turned the practice of letter writing into a lost art. Amy, when’s the last time you put pen to paper and really wrote a letter to someone?

AMY: It’s been a while, for sure. I do still like to write thank you notes when I can, but I have to admit, even that tends to slip, especially these days when you can just send a text or email. However, I am trying to teach my kids the importance of hand-written thank yous. I used to write to friends who lived in other cities back before email was commonplace, but (Oh my gosh, that’s dating me, right? Geesh.) But I only have a few of those letters saved. I never hung onto most of them.

KIM: Okay, so I’m on the same page. I’m really big on thank you notes, too, but since I had my daughter, I’m a little bit guilty of letting them slip up. Though I spend a lot of time feeling guilty when I could have probably just sent the thank you notes instead. But anyway, lesson learned. But as for the letters, I have a box full of letters that I’ve treasured for years. I have some old love letters, I have some letters from my grandmothers and from childhood friends. We moved a lot when I was a kid, so I have a lot of letters from friends, and I really do miss corresponding with people in that way. There was something really special about that.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, and I could see how back in the day, receiving a letter would have been so thrilling. That sort of connection to the outside world was so important. So, the last “lost lady” that we featured on this show, Emily Eden, she published a book of her letters from India while she lived, and after she died, another book of her letters (both those she wrote and received) from her younger days ended up getting published as well. So I’m not really always too keen on reading collections of other people’s letters. I think you have to know so much context, often, and there’s usually a lot of references to places and people and events that, if you’re not familiar with, you can kind of get lost. But I know that is the sort of thing historians love to pore over.

KIM: Yeah, that’s true, I think, typically, you might look at a letter to get some special information, but you don’t necessarily want to read the whole book… unless it’s somebody like Madame de Sevigne (I don’t know if I’m pronouncing her name right) but I love her letters to her daughters and friends. They’re really witty, and they have takes on the scandals of the day, from her privileged “courtside” view, and by “courtside,” I mean the actual court of France. That said, I know you were checking out Eden’s Letters in recent weeks in anticipation of maybe talking about them. What did you find? Did you find anything interesting in there?

AMY: Yeah, it’s definitely kind of that “slice of life” look into somebody’s existence, and I loved that in the case of Emily’s letters you could see her lighthearted, sometimes sarcastic personality on display, but we definitely got to see a sense of humor in the letters that I read. These were mostly letters from when she was a late teen and in her twenties. So for example,  at the age of 17, she wrote to one of her sisters — the family had just found out this friend had gotten engaged to marry Lord Byron, and the whole family was in a tizzy — and she wrote to her sister that the friend… “does not seem to be acting with her usual good sense, is Mama’s opinion, as by all accounts Lord Byron is not likely to make any woman very happy.” 

KIM: That’s, like, the understatement of the year, probably. I love how understatedly funny that is and probably how true from what we know about Lord Byron and his love life. I also love that they have an acquaintance engaged to Lord Byron. I mean, they can gossip about him and actually really have real gossip about somebody they know. It’s perfect. I love that.

AMY: Yeah. And since she was kind of in the upper social spheres in England, she did have these kind of VIP friends. But in another instance, she writes about a man she calls “Rogers the Poet” who came to call on the family one morning. And she says: “I never saw such a satirical, odious wretch, and I was calculating the whole time, from what he was saying of other people, what he could find ill-natured enough to say of us. I had never seen him before and trust I never shall again. Your most affection, E. Eden.”

KIM: Okay, that’s hilarious too, and I love that it brings up the idea of she’s talking about other people, but they’re probably talking about her, too, and she gets that. I would guess, and you would know, was this letter published after her death, maybe? One of the ones after her death?

AMY: Yeah, for sure. These letters didn’t come out until 1919, well after her death. They were put together by her great niece, who was named Violet Dickinson, who, incidentally, was a good friend of Virginia Woolf’s. But despite writing about sort of trivial things like dresses and neighborhood gossip, Emily also has some poignant sections in this collection of letters and sections that definitely I could tell informed her novels. We read The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple, and there are lots of incidents in the letters that you can see directly parlayed into plotlines from the novels. One example of that is after her brother’s wife gave birth, (this is kind of sad, actually), the baby, she says, was not expected to live, and she was writing to a friend to pass this sad information along. So, in the first letter, she basically says that after seeing what her sister-in-law went through, (or hearing about what her sister-in-law went through) she had no inclination whatsoever to ever have kids. She writes: “What a horrid piece of work a lying-in is! I am more and more confirmed in the idea that a life of single blessedness is the wisest, even accompanied, as Shakespeare mentions, by the necessity of chanting faint hymns to the cold lifeless [fruitless] moon, which, as I have no voice, rather discomposes me.” 

So she’s relaying sad news, but she kind of has a little sense of humor when she’s talking about that she never wants to have babies.

KIM: Yeah, and what a great person to correspond with! Clever, witty, poetic… she quotes Shakespeare in her explanation. But it also seems like she’s very honest, which is really great, too. And I also have to say, I would have been terrified to give birth in those days too, so I can really, you know, feel empathetic. 

AMY: Yeah. And sadly, in her next letter to her friend, Eden reports that the infant has passed. And I’m going to read that section, because it’s quite moving. She says: “Dearest Theresa, you will have heard before this that all is over. I could not write sooner, and I knew you would hear. To the last, the poor dear child’s sufferings were dreadful and she never had one moment’s consciousness. Lord Grantham arrived at the moment she expired. I wrote to him on Saturday to say he had better come, or rather, to ask him if he did not think so, and he came off instantly and I am so glad now, for you have no idea of the good effect it had on Mr. R [who was her brother]. Poor Sarah [the mother] surprised me more than anybody. She cried a great deal, but was perfectly reasonable in her grief and has fortunately taken the turn of feeling that it is only by her exertions her poor husband can be supported at all. And she kept repeating all the morning how much worse her calamity might have been, that at all events, she had him left and ought not to repine. She thanked sister and, in short, nothing could be better than her conduct. All hours come to an end at last. All griefs find or make a place for themselves.

So sad, you know! 

KIM: Really sad.

AMY: And people went through this all the time. It’s a reminder of how people lived back in that era. But moving on to a lighter topic, as we mentioned last week, Eden is an author who’s frequently compared to Jane Austen, and that reminded me that actually, last month, a version of Pride and Prejudice that relates to today’s topic of letters.

KIM: Oh, right, yes! So Barbara Heller, who is actually a Hollywood set decorator for film and television productions, she put this book together for Chronicle Books, which of course, always puts out these beautiful works of art in their own right. We love Chronicle Books. So the book itself is the full text of the novel along with 19 letters that are “handwritten” by Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennett and other characters in the story. How cool is that?

AMY: Yeah. The letters, with all the appropriate postmarks, etc, and they are dropped into these actual little envelope pouches within the pages of the book at the appropriate points in the story. They looked really authentic, I checked it out on Amazon to sort of see how it was all packaged. Apparently Heller and the calligraphers she worked with really studied archives of actual English correspondence from that time period to make sure that the handwriting examples would be spot-on. 

KIM: Ooh, I love that. And then she also even includes letters that are original material created by her, by Heller, and they are made to sound as though Austen’s characters would have written them. So it’s like you get some additional work from the characters that Jane Austen didn’t write but Heller has taken it upon herself to add to this, which is really cool.

AMY: Yeah, and I wondered what kind of task that was for her, you know, to add something into Pride and Prejudice? That’s quite a burden, I think, to tackle! 

KIM: That’s some confidence, to be able to do that.

AMY: Yes. There’s actually an article in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine that explains in more detail what went into making the book. And they interview Heller. She talks about creating some of that new content and says that it was “completely agonizing,” because she felt like she was “adding words to a beloved classic.” So I guess she did feel the pressure. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But, she apparently had help from two of her sisters (both of whom were also Austen fans), and so, as a trio, they kind of collaborated to come up with these “new” letters, which somehow, that feels very Austen appropriate to me, you know… a trio of sisters sweating over this. She mentioned that some of the lines they used for this new material were actually taken from Austen’s own personal letters, so they had some source material to work with and finesse. 

KIM: That’s so great. One, I want to read the book, and two, I’m nerding out, because I’m like, “Wow, it would be really cool to be mentioned in Smithsonian magazine.” That’s really cool. We’re going to have to link to that in our show notes, if they have it online, which I’m sure they do as well. So, that sounds like such a cute gimmick, and this would be an amazing gift. I’m going to note down that that’s something that I want to consider giving for the holidays. And apparently, Heller is going to be putting out a similar edition of Little Women, soon. Wow! She’s got a great thing going there.

AMY: Yeah! She could keep going with this. I mean, you could do a lot of books. 

KIM: Needless to say, the protagonist at the center of our next podcast had no time to be writing letters.

AMY: No, she didn’t sadly!

KIM: She was too busy scrubbing floors and screaming at her children!

AMY: Aww! [laughing] Poor Evangeline! She’s the heroine of The Home-Maker which actually was one of the top ten bestselling novels of 1924. It was written by the American author and activist, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who is our next “lost lady of lit.”

KIM: Okay, get ready: Anyone who has ever felt angst-ridden and miserable about housework and the gender inequity associated with it will find themselves deeply understood while reading this book.

AMY: I’m raising my hand… high.

KIM: Yes, I know. I’m raising my hand too, even though I said that. Yes. While I was reading it, I was thinking, “Uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh.” I could think of a few things today that happened that would check off the boxes for that.

AMY: But yes, we will be venting about that. Be sure to check in with us next week when we “dust off,” this classic, no pun intended. 

KIM: I obviously can’t wait for this one. So for more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, please leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.