Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850

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• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. ix-xvi
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PREFACE

A decade ago I opened a copy of Victorian critic Jerom Murch’s Mrs. Barbauld and Her Contemporaries (1877). Skimming the slim volume, I noticed that it concluded with a short section titled “How Long They Lived!” followed by a table of female author’s names, listing the year in which they died and sorted by their ages at death. (Barbauld was squarely in the middle, at age 82.) Looking over this list, I thought, “These women lived awfully long lives. I wonder why nobody talks about that?” That moment, naive as it was, provided the genesis of this book. Now I see more to question in Murch’s data. I learned that it was not so very strange for a woman to live a long life prior to the twentieth century. I, like many before me, had confused life expectancy with life span. It is true that life expectancy in Europe remained at around 35 years until 1800—less than half of what it is today in developed countries. But the age to which one might have been expected to live in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain looks quite different when deaths in infancy and childhood are factored out. Life span (the maximum age that humans generally reached) was not all that different in past centuries. Even for those individuals who did not make it to the upper limits, living to what was considered old age was by no means extraordinary.

Although his conclusions were based on a handful of examples, Murch believed that women writers’ long lives were remarkable, even when compared with the lives of literary men.¹ Still, Murch’s chart is fascinating, indicative of an ability—or perhaps a willingness—to perceive aged authors as a group. As it turns out, Murch’s was not a voice in the wilderness. In the mid-nineteenth century, claims about the long lives of previous generations of British literary women were made with frequency, viewed as sound scholarship, and used in some surprising ways. For example, a short periodical piece, “Modern Old Age,” appeared in the London periodical Once a Week in 1863. The essay’s anonymous author briefly analyzes the longevity of statesmen, military men, and philosophers, but at the end of the essay notes, “There is something remarkable in the longevity of our literary women in modern times, even if we do not look beyond our own country.”² Oddly, the writer concludes that Hester Piozzi (1741–1821) and Mary Delany (1700–1788) “scarcely enter within the conditions,” though both women authors lived into their eighties (584). Even more unexpectedly, as if to point out that some geniuses die young, the author concludes, “the still-lamented Jane Austen was under an early doom” (582). Then it is noted that “Miss Edgeworth was above eighty when she died; Joanna and Agnes Baillie were older still; and Mrs. Trollope died the other day at 84” (582). This paragraph on women writers and longevity was judged important enough to be excerpted and republished abroad in the Scientific American.³ Throughout the Victorian era, there was a demand for stories about and explanations of longevity, and British women writers featured prominently in this literature.

Some decades before this piece was published, and before Edgeworth, Baillie, and Trollope had died, another writer created a Murch-like list, noting the names of celebrated eighteenth-century women writers who reached old age. That comment occurred in a review of R. R. Madden’s The Infirmities of Genius (1833).⁴ One portion of Madden’s study attempted to calculate and account for the average age to which celebrated men lived, depending on their profession. He tried to account for the discrepancies in longevity discovered among practitioners, claiming that natural philosophers lived the longest lives and poets the shortest. His first reviewers were skeptical, and the Quarterly Review was especially damning. Its anonymous reviewer began “Here is a good subject sadly marred.”⁵

Though it does a hatchet job on Madden’s book, the Quarterly spends pages describing what the book might have been in more capable hands. In one colorful section, the reviewer criticizes Madden for overlooking celebrated women. It is strange to say, the reviewer notes, but “Mr. Madden, who mentions in his volumes some hundreds of writers, does not allude to one single female—unless, indeed, the name Radcliffe … is meant … for Mrs. Radcliffe the novelist” (52). The reviewer is skeptical that the cleverest women in the population are those who become writers but asserts that “the flagrant omission of Mr. Madden’s tables has turned our attention to the longevity of many of the female authors of the last century” (53). The reviewer then constructs a new table of the most celebrated authors and their ages at death (some of which are in error): Lady Russell (87), Mrs. Rowe (63), Lady M. W. Montague (73), Mrs. Centlivre (44), Lady Hervey (70), Lady Suffolk (79), Mrs. Sheridan (47), Mrs. Cowley (66), Mrs. Macaulay (53), Mrs. Montagu (81), Mrs. Chapone (75), Mrs. Lennox (84), Mrs. Trimmer (69), Mrs. Hamilton (65), Mrs. Radcliffe (60), Mrs. Barbauld (83), Mrs. Delany (93), Mrs. Inchbald (68), Mrs. Piozzi (80), and Mrs. Hannah More (88).⁶

Despite the reviewer’s acknowledgment that some of these women became authors involuntarily by the publication of their private letters, he or she concludes: “On the whole, we believe it will be found that eminent literary ladies are longlived.” This is the case, the reviewer argues, because “the works on which their fame rests are generally the production of matured age” (53). As with the material from Once a Week, this reviewer’s chart of “eminent literary ladies’” names and ages was considered significant enough to circulate further, reprinted in the Medical and Chirurgical Review.⁷ No one took up the reviewer’s challenge to tackle the subject of long-lived literary women in a better book than Madden’s, and even Murch’s book recapitulated rather than advanced knowledge on the subject. Still, anecdotes about the longevity of female authors from the recent past were published with regularity.

From today’s scholarly perch, it is evident that Murch and his ilk were overstating the case about the extent to which British women writers enjoyed unusually long lives. If we were able to compile reliable information, it seems unlikely that we would find a significant tendency toward superlongevity among female authors, particularly if we controlled for class or financial status. Regardless of previous critics’ exaggerations or errors, however, their studies show a shared perception that famous women writers lived long lives. These writers who reached advanced ages came to be considered interesting as a group and were believed to share certain personal qualities. For Murch, the lives of women writers in old age were “calm and gentle” (175). For Madden’s reviewer, they were almost all of “immaculate private character” (53). Regardless of the ways in which they were criticized or condescended to individually, old women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were almost always celebrated as a collective in the decades that followed. Reaching old age was not presented as something that long-lived female authors alone might appreciate; it was also understood as a condition for which Britons should rejoice. The people were encouraged to congratulate themselves for having provided the fertile soil that produced so many women writers of distinction and that nurtured those women into old age. To be able to boast long-lived eminent female authors was, at least for a time in the nineteenth century, a badge of national pride. This was something new indeed in English literary history, although rarely pursued as a subject by twentieth-century scholars.⁸ Longevity studies turned in a different, more scientific direction, and British women writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no longer provided a patriotic rallying cry.

If the study of aged women writers in the past did not experience a flowering in the twentieth century, the study of the aged themselves did. In 1977, the Cambridge historian of aging Peter Laslett defined gerontology as “the study of aging as a process and of the old as a social group,” noting that historical sociology was then the newest of the social sciences.⁹ It would seem that the study of old age in the humanities got off the ground later. Labeling our work still remains a challenge, though Margaret Morganroth Gullette has suggested a shift from “literary gerontology” to “age studies,” a term she coined to define “age more explicitly as a set of historical and cultural concepts (like gender or race) useful for investigating how a culture builds age constructions and reproduces them.”¹⁰ As she argues, “Age studies undoes the erasure of the cultural in the sphere of age and aging,” much as feminist theory “denaturalized female/male difference.”¹¹ It has been suggested that today’s “feminists are beginning to examine age theory because feminists are themselves aging.”¹² If so, we have thus far been most interested in our own lives and times.¹³ For a while, I took to calling what I was trying to accomplish in this book literary historical gerontography, though that neologism seemed to confuse more than clarify. I still like the way it suggests that writing about lives with a focus on advanced age is a compensatory gesture, following what has so often been a slight to that life stage in traditional literary—and even feminist literary—biography.

In the years since I started working on this subject, I have been surprised at how many times I have been asked why a “young” (or middle-aged) person would choose to study the old. Though fewer and fewer academics today seem to raise an eyebrow at colleagues writing books about those not of their race, gender, class, sexuality, or nation, it seems that old age remains a subject assumed somehow unfit for the young. Or perhaps old age is perceived as an area of study of interest only to the old. Scholars themselves have tried to prove their credentials for writing about the old by stating their own ages, as when Laslett begins a book by revealing, “My first writing on the history of ageing … appeared when I was sixty-one and nearly all the rest of the work was done in my later sixties and early seventies.”¹⁴ I became so accustomed to getting questions about why I would choose to write this book before my own old age that my responses must have started to sound canned. Sometimes I offered my close questioners an academic answer—the one described at the beginning of this preface—charting an interest in the subject as it arose from reading in British women’s writings and historiography. At that time, I had also been teaching William Wordsworth’s poems, wondering about his allegedly becoming conservative (or even boring) in old age, in relation to Gloria Steinem’s essay on why young women are more conservative.¹⁵ The two subjects ignited the spark of this book.

At other times, when asked why I was writing about women writers in old age, I gave biographical answers. When I was ten years old, I would explain, my father’s mother moved in with us. She was part of my nuclear family until she died, at the end of my first year in graduate school. Grandmother Looser and I had what is euphemistically called a “difficult relationship,” and it was formative, prompting me to take an undergraduate literature course, “Grow Old Along with Me,” from the amazing Barbara Andersen, at Augsburg College. We read Wendell Berry, May Sarton, and Elizabeth Jolley, among others, and twenty years later, I remember the course in vivid and appreciative detail. That indirectly led to my teaching an undergraduate course, “Stages and Transitions in Women’s Lives,” at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater—an enriching experience. Finally, I would turn skeptical questions about my fitness for writing about this subject into a joke that usually fell flat: Gee, I sure hoped I would finish the book prior to my own dotage.

In addition to the skeptics, there were also those who immediately expressed enthusiasm for this project, often with greater knowledge than I had. One of the first to encourage me to write about eighteenth-century old age was Paula Backscheider. When she heard of my plan, she copied and sent me every piece of paper she had collected in a file on the subject, as she had once contemplated writing a book on it herself. I know I have not done justice to the capacious and learned study she once envisioned writing, but her generosity throughout this project has been unwavering and inspiring. Others, too, supported this project at an early stage and allowed it to flower. Judy Slagle chaired a session on old age at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1998 and was kind enough to include me on the panel. Many audiences at conferences and in classrooms indulged my interest and provided food for thought. The Jane Austen Society of Australia and the organizers and audience of their 2002 conference—particularly Susannah Fullerton, Penny Gay, Meg Hayward, and Helen Malcher—offered friendship and feedback. The James Smith Noel Collection at LSU-Shreveport twice provided a warm welcome, during their Women’s Week Celebration and during the “Daring Women of the Enlightenment” symposium. (I cannot thank enough the incomparable Bob Leitz, Helen Taylor, and Diane Boyd.) The Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies hosted me as a plenary speaker in 2006, at a meeting that organizers Hank Keithley and Skip Brack made congenial and fruitful.

Colleagues at several institutions encouraged the writing of this book. I ought rightly to list more of them, but it seems especially important to note the support of Dan Bivona, Jim Broaddus, Martin Camargo, Sandy Camargo, Elizabeth Chang, Anne Coldiron, Kevin Cope, Sharon Crowley, Pat Crown, Matt Gordon, Myrna Handley, Katie Heninger, Haskell Hinnant, Becky Hogan, Joe Hogan, Kitty Holland, Jake Jakaitis, Elizabeth Kim, Ted Koditschek, Trudy Lewis, Jackie Litt, Mark Lussier, Michelle Massé, Linda Maule, Harriet McNeal, Elsie Michie, Rick Moreland, Anne Myers, Pat Okker, Catherine Parke, Irv Peckham, Katy Powell, Malcolm Richardson, Joe Weixlmann, Sharon Weltman, Eric Wertheimer, Nancy West, Ed White, Jeff Williams, and Paul Young. Some colleagues read part or all of this manuscript, and I would like particularly to thank Rita Cavigioli, Noah Heringman, Emily Hipchen, and Bill Kerwin. Research Assistant Mike Redmond provided significant and helpful labor at Louisiana State University, as did Jennifer Albin, Jennifer Garlich, and Emily Wiggins at the University of Missouri–Columbia. I am also indebted to the students of two MU graduate seminars, “Eighteenth-Century British Women Writers and Literary Traditions” (winter 2005) and “Jane Austen Among Women” (winter 2007), for their incisive comments and good will.

I am profoundly grateful to a wider circle of colleagues elsewhere who offered their wisdom, including Andrew Baster, Martine Watson Brownley, Antoinette Burton, Susan Carlile, Tita Chico, Tom DiPiero, Elizabeth Eger, Bob Erickson, Margaret Ezell, Patsy Fowler, Linda Frost, Jane Gallop, Anne Goldgar, Jocelyn Harris, Deb Heller, Catherine Ingrassia, Laurie Kaplan, Christine Krueger, Tom Lockwood, April London, Teresa Mangum, Albert Rivero, George Rousseau, Peter Sabor, Norbert Schurer, Rajani Sudan, Kathy Woodward, and Howard Weinbrot. I honor the teachers who led me to this scholarly work, especially Ann Kaplan, Boyd Koehler, Cathie Nicholl, Ron Palosaari, Cliff Siskin, the late Michael Sprinker, and Rose Zimbardo. I am especially thankful to those without any institutional connection to me who graciously read parts of the manuscript, particularly Eve Tavor Bannet, Kate Davies, Laura Mandell, Bill McCarthy, Tom McLean, Rebecca Shapiro, and Orianne Smith. Patricia Meyer Spacks led an amazing seminar on Jane Austen’s Emma in 2003 at the National Humanities Center, in which I participated. Both the time Pat spent talking with me about this project and the experience at the NHC itself were wonderful. I am also grateful for the immensely helpful comments of Susan Lanser, who was the reader for the Johns Hopkins University Press, as well as to editor Michael Lonegro, copyeditor Barbara Lamb, and others, who believed in this project and worked to shape it and make it better.

This book was made possible by several research grants. The University of Missouri–Columbia Research Council provided a summer fellowship and much additional assistance, and the University of Missouri’s Research Board provided a year’s leave from teaching to travel and write. During that time, several libraries supported archival research. The Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship supported research at the Huntington Library, where I became indebted to Gayle Richardson. I benefited enormously from a King’s College London Special Collections Fellowship and from the guidance of Katie Sambrook. Laura O’Keefe at the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library also went out of her way to offer expertise. My time as the Midwest Modern Language Association Fellow at the Newberry Library proved invaluable. The University of Kansas Spencer Library also provided a travel grant, and I was able to return there under the auspices of a Big 12 Fellowship. I am grateful to Karen Cook, Rick Clement, Bill Crowe, and the wonderful staff at the Spencer.

Quotations from the manuscripts of Jane Porter are reproduced by courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries; by kind permission of the President and Council of the Royal College of Surgeons of England; by permission of the Manuscripts Division of the National Library of Scotland; from the Gilder Lehrman Collection at the New-York Historical Society, courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (not to be reproduced without written permission); from the Jane Porter Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and from the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts. Quotations from the manuscripts of Hester Lynch Piozzi are reproduced by courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. The image of Hester Lynch Piozzi from Retrospection is used with the permission of the James Smith Noel Collection, Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Portions of the introduction first appeared in “What the Devil a Woman Lives for after 30: The Late Careers of Late Eighteenth-Century British Women Writers,” published in the Journal of Aging and Identity (4.1 [1999]: 3–11). They are used with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media. Portions of the introduction and chapter 1 appeared in “Women, Old Age, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” in The Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, edited by Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), used by permission. An earlier version of chapter 2, “‘Those Historical Laurels which Once Graced My Brow are Now in Their Wane’: Catharine Macaulay’s Last Years and Legacy,” first appeared in Studies in Romanticism (42 [summer 2003]), used by permission, with thanks to the Trustees of Boston University. Finally, portions of chapter 3 appeared in “Old Dogs and New Tricks: Austen’s Female Elders,” in Sensibilities (Journal of the Jane Austen Society of Australia) (25 [Dec. 2002]), also used by permission.

I save my final thanks for my family. Its two youngest members, Carl Anchor Justice and Lowell Williamson Justice, appeared during the writing of this book. I am extremely grateful to their caregivers—especially Libby Driscoll, Jessica Pike, Jesse Schulz, Amy Spindler, the teachers at Children’s House Montessori, and the unparalleled Toni Crowell—for all they did to raise our children with us. My in-laws, Judy and Jack Justice, and the Gellert and Porter families, have been unfailingly supportive. My parents, Sharon and LeRoy Looser, joyfully took on childcare duties that made this book possible. My thanks, too, to my grandmother, Virginia Sarslow, a model courageous and colorful older dame. Final thanks must go to the Chief Justice, colleague, editor, and husband extraordinaire: George, you are generous.