I wrote in an earlier blog, while reviewing Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things, about how important it is to know about material realities when trying to understand people’s lives in the past – their bed-coverings, their cooking-vessels, the images they put on their walls, the gifts they gave each other, the food they ate and the clothes they wore and how they prepared that food and maintained those clothes. The two biographies below are particularly vivid because each, in different ways, pays attention to the ‘materiality’ of the lives of the women being written about.
Katherine Cahill’s delightful Mrs Delany’s menus, medicines and manners is all ‘materiality’. Based on the many, many letters this woman wrote to her family, friends and acquaintances through a long and busy life, it moves the reader from the kitchen to the eating-parlour to the sickroom, bedroom and servants’ quarters of Mrs Delany’s house. As well as spending most of her life in one domestic space or another, Mrs Delany lived (from the age of 43) in that very tight space, the eighteenth-century Protestant (Church of Ireland) Irish upper class, but most upper-class people everywhere and anywhere inhabited (and inhabit) narrow little worlds. It is what they do in and with these worlds that makes them interesting or the opposite. Mary Delany was neither boring, nor bored.
She was born Mary Granville into a very prominent political family in England in 1700 and due to family difficulties, was virtually sold into marriage at the age of 17 to the 60-year-old alcoholic Alexander Pendarves. Old husbands could be kind and generous to young brides but Pendarves was neither, and he had ‘altogether a person [i.e. a figure or body] disgusting rather than engaging’ as she wrote despairingly not long after her marriage. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were no children of this union. By the time he died in 1724, she had developed a vigorously independent social life – as well-connected married women could – and was persuaded to visit Dublin. From then on she was over and back the Irish Sea quite often. In Dublin she made a lot of friends, including the Dean of St Patrick’s, Jonathan Swift. It was another Dean, however, Patrick Delany, who proposed to her when she was 43, and the two settled into a very happy marriage, in Delville House, Glasnevin, Dublin. Patrick was the Dean of Down and she always referred to him in correspondence as ‘D.D.’ but, like many office-holders (ecclesiastical, civil or political) of that time, he was more or less an absentee. They had no children of their own but, in common with most childless couples in all walks of life in those days (from farmers to physicians, tradespeople to labourers), they always had at least one teenage niece or nephew or friend’s child living with them.
Cahill sketches out Delany’s life, and also her times, by pouncing on the details of everyday doings she revealed in her letters. Dinners were cooked by servants (mainly) but planned by the mistress. They were served at two or three o’clock in the day, and menus for dinner parties were staggeringly extensive in variety. However, a particular dinner menu with several meats (e.g. turkeys, ‘boyled neck of mutton’, partridge, sweetbreads, pigeons, veal and venison for one entertainment in 1745) ‘did’ for several days for family and servants after the guests had gone; visitors were expected to take little morsels of this and that, and not stuff themselves. All the dishes were put on the table at once and even the supposedly hot dishes were often cold, so such meals cannot have been very appetising. Chocolate was the beverage of choice for casual callers, some of whom stayed too long for Mrs Delany’s liking. She was always either cooking/supervising cooking or sewing or decorating or painting. And, like most women rich or poor, she was the household medic. Her letters are full of ‘receipts’ for cures mainly of ‘natural’ origin (bark, ginger, ‘rotten apple-water’ and so on), and some are what Irish people would, in time, come to call piseogra – one cure she suggested for a child’s ague was a spider put into a goose quill, well sealed and secured and hung about the child’s neck ‘as low as the pit of his stomach.’
At a time when people’s houses were the main places of sociability and hospitality (the only hotels were rooms above public houses for weary wayfarers) and all social classes often lived under one roof, a domestic life was not a narrow one. Mary Delany was lucky enough to enjoy good health and to survive some of the more dangerous medical fads that bedevilled the wealthy ‘worried well’ of her time, and she lived to an active old age, dying in 1788. There was plenty to engage women of this class even in houses with multiple servants, especially if they looked after those household employees when they were sick, as Mrs Delany did, and took an active interest in multiple generations of the young. She comes across as somebody who took a genuine interest in people of all sorts.
A recent biography of a very different woman, Emily Bronte (1818-1848), shows that the author of that utterly anti-domestic novel, Wuthering Heights, and of many equally passionate poems, was what Americans would call ‘a real homebody’. Juliet Barker wrote a brilliant biography of the Bronte family in 1994, and Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night: the life of Emily Bronte builds on her achievement. Lutz illuminates the everyday life of Haworth, telling us what they ate, how they washed, how they kept warm in winter, where they sat of an evening, how they maintained their clothes in bad weather, how they coped with periods.
Haworth Parsonage might have been physically cold, like most multi-roomed houses of its time, but it was emotionally warm. Patrick Bronte was an indulgent father who allowed his growing family to read racy French novels and never censored the very precocious literary worlds of their juvenile writing (the goings-on in their two fictional worlds, Gondal and Angria, bear comparison to the Game of Thrones world). A clergyman devoted to his flock, Bronte campaigned against the workhouse regime and later concerned himself with Haworth’s water supply. He was a good man. The boarding-school the girls were sent to (Cowan Bridge, fictionalised as Lowood in Jane Eyre) was, Lutz refreshingly insists, not bad at all compared with many other schools of its type, not to mention the textile factories where little girls were often worked to death. Nineteenth-century people believed that swampy locations bred disease, and this is why Cowan Bridge has been held responsible for the deaths of the two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth. But it probably wasn’t.
When the four surviving Brontes were young adults, their house at Haworth was full of friends and relations of both sexes, lively and pleasant – Charlotte had three proposals of marriage by the age of 22. After she came back from Brussels, however, she kept writing emotional letters to Constantin Heger, the married man she fell in love with there, to the extent that he eventually asked his wife to dispose of all letters with her handwriting. She was (I remember this from Barker) an unpleasant governess who actively disliked children, and unforgivably, she tried to ‘manage’ her sisters’ reputations after their deaths. Far from being a shrinking violet, Anne was sturdy, resourceful and brave, tackling violence against women and marital breakdown in her novels, and far from being a wild child of the moors, Emily was the practical, domestic one. Charlotte, the one who published most and lived longest, was the most volatile and emotional.
Emily went to Brussels for a while with Charlotte but that was the only time, really, she lived away from Haworth, apart from boarding-school. She tried teaching, and didn’t like it. She certainly loved roaming the moors (they all did) but she also liked running the house with the family’s servants, first Tabitha Ackroyd and then Martha Brown. Emily made beds, swept floors, peeled potatoes, ironed clothes, killed chickens, planned menus, emptied chamber-pots and did all the other tasks necessary for the maintenance of comfortable life. Lutz did not – probably could not – explain where Emily came up with the crazy story of Wuthering Heights. A lot of the stories woven in and around it are likely to have come from long hours spent with Tabitha and Martha, whose deep roots in the locality made them repositories of lore and legend. But the everyday, repetitive performance of domestic tasks probably unstuck Emily’s imagination too – who hasn’t had a good idea while washing, ironing, cooking or cleaning?
Lutz tells us where the sisters actually got the paper they wrote on, what they wrote with, where they wrote (Emily on a wooden ‘desk box’), and how they presented their manuscripts for publication. Paper and pens and all these things we take for granted were hard to come by in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the three sisters were always able to find time for writing, as children, and as adults. When working as governesses, they worked in their rooms in their time off, and when they were at home, theirs was not the kind of family circle where the papa demanded ever-available loving females to soothe the day’s cares and sing and play the piano to him. Patrick was a learned man as well as a busy one, and relished catching up quietly with his reading in whatever time he could spare from his duties.
Katherine Cahill, Mrs Delany’s menus, medicines and manners (Dublin: New Island 2005). This is a beautifully-produced book, a collector’s item, with delicate illustrations and a very pretty typeface.
Deborah Lutz, This Dark Night: the life of Emily Bronte (London: Bloomsbury 2026).
Juliet Barker, The Brontes: a life (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicholson 1994).
Samantha Ellis, Take Courage:Anne Bronte and the Art of Life (London: Chatto & Windus 2017). Samantha Ellis always has an interesting take on everything, and this is well worth a read.
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