Bluestocking
I have been one of Fancy’s spoiled and wayward children… I have studied no other volume than Nature, have followed no other dictates but those of my own heart, and at the age of womanhood I find myself totally unfitted to mingle with the world.
– Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime
After Thomas Strickland’s death, Reydon Hall remained the family home, but barely. The servants were let go, the ornate carriage sold, and a general air of decay infiltrated the scantily furnished rooms, the unused attics, the empty barns and stables.
Portrait of Catharine by Cheesman.
Catharine was only a year older than Susanna and was her
“dear and faithful friend.” She married and emigrated
to Canada the same year as Susanna did.
Weakened by her grief over the loss of her father and sensitive to the dampness and mould in the house, Susanna fell ill with whooping cough and became so thin she wrote to a friend that she looked like a “perfect skeleton.” The usual medical recommendation at that time was “a change of air.” But how could Susanna go anywhere when there wasn’t even enough money to buy clothing?
Aunt Rebecca, who lived in London’s Bloomsbury district, came to the rescue. She invited Susanna, and her sister’s, to stay with her. Aunt Rebecca was a second cousin to their father, and a wealthy widow. She had been married to the architect Thomas Leverton, who had designed the fashionable Bedford Square where Aunt Rebecca lived.
At sixteen, Susanna liked to mingle with and pour cups of tea for the literary women known as “bluestockings” who often gathered in Aunt Rebeccas living room to discuss the latest books.
In 1826, Susanna stayed for several months at another London address, on Newman Street. Her sixty-year-old cousin, Thomas Cheesman, asked her to be a companion to his niece, Eliza. Cheesman was a sort of Renaissance man and amateur artist who became a father figure to her. He encouraged Susanna, and also Catharine, when she visited, to write.
One afternoon, Cheesman, or Cousin Tom, as the family called him, stared at Susanna as she entered his studio, where paper and paint cluttered the table, and the raw smell of turpentine filled the air. He remarked:
“You look particularly fetching, today, dear. Sit down. I would like to do your portrait. I must capture those red curls for posterity.”
Susanna couldn’t refuse. In fact, she did feel pretty in her new yellow jacket with its rolled collar and the string of pearls around her neck. She had even clipped a yellow ribbon in her auburn hair.
As she sat for the miniature oil portrait, Susanna was thinking, as she often did then: If only my father were still alive. I miss him so.
When Cousin Tom allowed her to look at the portrait, Susanna felt surprised at how he had been able to capture the sadness and apprehension that she tried to hide from everyone.
Back in Suffolk, Susanna continued to recover from her illness. She loved to ramble in the countryside, away from Reydon Hall. She now knew that she preferred the country to the city. She sought inspiration for poems in nature. Her favourite outing was to the North Sea where the salt air cleansed her lungs and cleared her thoughts. Her appetite had returned as a result of her long walks.
One afternoon she relaxed on the beach, her picnic basket empty except for the remains of her lunch of apples, cheese, and bread. She recited out loud to the gulls swooping overhead her favourite verses from the book everyone raved about, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these? and stem
A tide of suffering, rather than forego
Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm,
Of those whose eyes are only turned below,
Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which
dare not glow?
Susanna wanted to be one of those people whose thoughts dared to glow, and she hoped, as the waves curled and broke on the pebbly beach, that she would meet a man as passionate and soulful as Lord Byron, a man she could share all of herself with, someone who would travel the world with her.
Susanna overcame her isolation not only by reading her favourite authors such as William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and William Cowper, but by immersing herself in an exchange of letters with her new literary friends. One of her most important correspondents was a local man named James Bird, known as the Bard of Yoxford.
One morning, before her walk, Susanna sat at her desk in her bedroom and pondered how to respond to the verses Bird had sent her for criticism. She didn’t like their style. How could she express her true opinion without hurting Bird’s feelings? Soon her pen was scratching onto the blank sheet of paper her candid answer:
“You are most happy in your descriptive scenes and I care not for Story in a Poem. I know most of Scott’s descriptive scenes by heart while I scarcely remember his stories… Descriptive poetry often goes so home to my heart that I cannot read a beautiful drawn scene of this kind without weeping.”
Susanna’s high spirits came through. Tongue-in-cheek, she wrote,
“Mama is busy gardening and more interested in housing her potatoes for the winter than the blue stocking fraternity in composing sublime odes or entering the joys or sorrows of some imaginary heroine…”
Being a heroine was the goal of Susanna’s elder sister Agnes. Upon the death of Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, Agnes had written a eulogy that was published in a London newspaper, and this immediately had opened doors into the aristocracy for her. Agnes often stayed at Aunt Rebeccas house but didn’t think it was grand enough, according to Susanna. Her sister was theatrical and imperious by nature, and cared too much about her appearance.
The two rival sister’s often visited friends together. Susanna, unlike Agnes, never put on airs, and joked about their being “poor poets.” They even had to borrow the neighbours donkey to pull their chaise, for they didn’t have any other way to travel.
On one memorable evening, Susanna and Agnes returned from visiting the Birds in the village of Yoxford, about an hour away from Reydon Hall. The night was clear and the stars twinkled as the donkey, which Susanna
