Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel

• Introduction: Locating Elizabeth Singer Rowe
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 1-45
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INTRODUCTION
Locating Elizabeth Singer Rowe

Few eighteenth-century writers are as familiar and as ubiquitously characterized in a single word as the “pious” Elizabeth Singer Rowe. Although she was an active, even somewhat outspoken, and sociable presence, her life is usually described as Sharon Achinstein did in an ELH essay: “Rowe returned to Frome where she had inherited a small property from her father, remaining there for the rest of her life, writing devotional poetry and publishing these and other literary works.”¹ Norma Clarke bluntly summarizes another pervasive consensus, that her moral legacy “far from being attractive, has repelled.”²

Although primarily known today for her poetry and for Friendship in Death, a book ridiculed for its title rather than read, she published three additional volumes of epistolary prose fiction, and they raise arresting questions. Editions of Friendship in Death in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. To which are added, Letters Moral and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse, in Three Parts. By the same Author came out nearly annually through the end of the century (I shall refer to this collected edition as Letters throughout my book). For example, there were editions in 1735, 1736 (advertised as the fourth edition), 1738 (two), 1740 (two), 1741, 1743, 1745, and 1746, nine in the decade of the 1750s, and fourteen editions in the 1760s: 1760 (four: two London, one Dublin, and one Glasgow), 1762 (four: one London, two Edinburgh, and one Glasgow), 1763, 1764 (two), 1767, and 1768 (two). There were three in 1770 and eight more in that decade, eight editions in the 1780s, and yet more in 1790 (two), 1792, 1793, 1795 (two in New York), and 1797.³ An enlarged edition published in London by J. & A. Archy included more of her work and Thomas Rowe’s translations and sparked a new wave of editions. Prestigious publishers such as William Strahan, William Osborne, Thomas Longman, and the Rivingtons acquired the copyright. Alexander Donaldson printed it in Edinburgh, and editions were also printed in Dublin, Glasgow, Boston, and New York by the most respected booksellers.

Few prose fictions by any eighteenth-century writer can compete with this record. Just as Daniel Defoe’s Farther Adventures was almost invariably sold with Robinson Crusoe as a single volume in the century, so were Rowe’s four volumes of epistles, first collected and published in early 1734.⁴ In comparison to the seven editions of Rowe’s text in the 1730s, there were three of Robinson Crusoe with Farther Adventures (these figures include Dublin and Glasgow editions). In the 1740s, there were three editions of Robinson Crusoe / Farther Adventures and six of Rowe’s; in the 1750s, four of RC/FA, five of Richardson’s Clarissa, and nine of hers; but in the 1760s, four of RC/FA, three of Clarissa, and an astonishing fourteen of hers. By 1825, there had been at least seventy-nine editions of Rowe’s Letters, and by 1840, eighty-nine.

In the twenty-first century, a small number of critics have begun to give Rowe’s poetry serious attention, and some misconceptions about her and it have been corrected.⁵ Reconsideration of her fiction, however, has lagged far behind that of her poetry, and feminists who have done so much work with the novel have almost completely neglected her prose fiction. As Sarah Prescott writes, “Rowe’s significance has been read only in terms of this feminized virtuous image and she earns her place in the history of women’s writing as an early example of the increasingly restrictive expectations about virtuous femininity which women writers had to conform to as the century progressed.”⁶ Her prose writing career corresponded with the beginning of English novel writing, 1691–1737, and, considering the long, impressive popularity of her fictions, that she has been largely omitted from serious treatment in histories of the formation of the English novel is surprising.

I begin that integration in this first in-depth consideration of her prose fictions as they were most commonly sold in the eighteenth century, as the four-part book. I will argue that Rowe’s writing and her lifestyle are more influential—and differently influential—than we have recognized. I see her as a pivotal figure in the history of the English novel. As Rowe published her successive volumes of prose fiction, England entered the 1730s, the absolute low point of the production of new novels, histories, and romances. What prose fiction was published was almost entirely in backward-looking forms such as secret histories, travel narratives, and short amatory stories that were common digressions in French romances.⁷ Defoe, Jane Barker, Charles Gildon, Mary Davys, and Penelope Aubin were recently dead, and Eliza Haywood had temporarily turned to the stage and political fictions such as The Adventures of Eovaai (1736). Franco Moretti’s graph of the rise of the novel in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria shows that the severe dip in British novel production in the 1730s was strikingly anomalous. Except for Italy, in which there was a small dip in the 1840s, all of the other nations show a very steady rise in numbers of novels published per year.⁸ Perhaps even more telling than numbers is the absence of texts of what we think of today as novels—reasonably long, unified narratives usually with psychological elements. The conclusion must be that style, content, quest, and reader desire needed to be rethought.

Rowe entered into this near void, and she entered using the most popular forms, but epistolary fiction, like the amatory tale, had become repetitive and in need of revitalization. In 1725, Mary Davys wrote in the preface to her Works of Mrs. Davys that “for some time, … Novels have been a great deal out of Use and Fashion … the chief Reason that put them out of vogue, was the World’s being surfeited with such, as were either flat and insipid … ; or that they found them only a Circle of Repetition of the same Adventures.”⁹ Various kinds of epistolary fictions and collections of tales dominated publishers’ lists, and both were held together in a surprisingly small and undisguised number of ways. In my first two chapters, I position Rowe’s work with kinds of prose fiction common before hers were written and begin to point out what she drew upon but also how she adapted and revised them. I argue in chapter three that she developed a distinctive, modern, novelistic register, a “voice” for the novel that departed from the often wildly uneven prose found in the early novel. At every point, I contextualize Rowe and her fiction within major movements and social changes. This chapter draws upon theories of the “reading revolution” to explain some of the appeal of her texts and the ways changes in reading practices increased her authority as a writer and interpreter. The fourth chapter demonstrates major ways that she moved fiction forward by, among other things, absorbing the ideology and sensibility of another major movement, the politeness, or gentility, movement.

Rowe revolutionized the characters, plots, and quests that she inherited and shaped a major strain of novels that still have large numbers of readers. Her major focus was on creating characters who were seeking a harmonious, contented life, often in the face of considerable social pressure, and this plotline and quest became the substance of a very large number of novels beginning in the 1740s. Imitations, critiques, and varying models of the plot of a woman in difficult situations attempting to attain peace of mind and a steadfast philosophy became, perhaps, the most common kind of English fiction. Women who followed her coined names for the genres she created: “pastoral adventure” and “moral romance.” Chapter four concludes with explorations of a few of these novels.

Rowe lived at a time when writers, including some women, could conceive of themselves as lifelong, professional artists, and Rowe was one of them. In addition to what we know about her writing and publication habits, she left evidence of this identity at her death. The preparation of her work for publication is nearly unprecedented in her time, and, in a small but telling sign, she left one of the very few objects named in her will, her “Picture in Wax of Sappho,” to her beloved nephew.¹⁰ Among women, I believe it was not until Anna Seward at the end of the century that a woman so carefully prepared her work for posthumous publication. Especially after the publicity that accompanied her death and the publication of the biography in Miscellaneous Works, Rowe herself became a text to be read and imitated. Many people saw her whole, knowing about her poetry, fiction, and lifestyle. At appropriate moments, therefore, I bring her poetry and fiction together as no other critics have and at other times juxtapose her personal and fictional letters.

As text, she was not a reified object but an active signifying practice, a cultural performer located in history, influencing the future, and negotiating personhood. The conclusion traces her legacies into the lifestyle we identify with the Bluestockings, women so interested in Rowe that they wrote about her and traveled to read her manuscript letters. The Bluestocking society was a movement that recast the terms and perceptions that had defined and stigmatized intellectual women and their work, and Rowe’s empowering example has been overlooked. Thus, I round out my claim about the important influences of her lifestyle as well as of the revisionary writing models she left. For the first time, Rowe will be treated in both senses as one of the most read authors of the entire century.

Then and Now

During most of Rowe’s life, she was known as a poet, but by the time of her death, she was more recognized for her fiction. Over a dozen obituaries read, “She has oblig’d the World with Friendship in Death, and Letters Moral and Entertaining, besides several excellent Poems in the Miscellanies.”¹¹ Her poetry was appreciated for its metrical craftsmanship, beauty, and imagery. She was better known than Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, today considered the best woman poet of the eighteenth century, and her works were more widely read in America than those of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, or Samuel Johnson.¹² “The Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe” from The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (2 vols., 1739) was of such interest that it was serialized in the Gentleman’s Magazine.¹³ As Chantel Lavoie observes, she was “perhaps the most popular woman writer of the eighteenth century.”¹⁴ By 1754, John Duncombe in The Feminiad wrote what could be said of very few other writers and their work: “The character of Mrs. Rowe and her writings is too well known to be dwelt on here.”¹⁵

Two of the most forward-looking and profit-motivated booksellers of the time, John Dunton and Edmund Curll, published editions of her poetry. During the hiatus between the publication of the first book of her poetry (Poems on Several Occasions, 1696) and Philomela: or, Poems by Mrs. Elizabeth Singer {now Rowe} (1737 with a Dublin edition in 1738) and Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse (1739), her poetry appeared in collections published by the most prestigious and literary booksellers of the time: Bernard Lintot’s Poems on Several Occasions: by His Grace the Duke of Buckingham and other eminent hands (1717) and Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies (both the 1704 and 1709 editions) and Poems on Several Occasions (1718).¹⁶ The latter is an enormous folio with beautiful engravings. She was featured in the title of Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Occasions … by Philomela, and several other ingenious persons (1704).¹⁷ By then, she was well known as Philomela. There is disagreement over whether Rowe or Dunton chose her nom de plume, which he used in the 1696 collection of her poems. If not her idea, she certainly embraced it. She signs herself “Your Philomela” in one of her published letters to Thomas Rowe (Misc. Works, 2:185) and occasionally refers to herself that way in poems.

Some of the greatest poets of the eighteenth century admired her work. Pope, for instance, included On the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe in the second edition of Eloisa to Abelard (1720). Even before she died, she was known as the Heavenly Singer.¹⁸ Upon her death, periodicals received numerous tributes to her; the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine described them as arriving daily. Twelve poetic tributes preface the Miscellaneous Works, and poems recognizing her as an inspiration were written throughout the century. An unbroken stream of tributes to Rowe in the eighteenth century illustrates what she represented to women. Finch compliments her in The Miser and the Poet by putting her in the company of Matthew Prior, John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Rowe, Ambrose Philips, and others not given the appreciation they deserve.¹⁹ Mary Masters’s Written in a blank Leaf of Mrs. Row’s Works (1755) is typical in its recognition of the subjects of her poetry and its forceful poetics: “Raptur’d I read these soft inspiring Lines, / Where Rowe’s fair Mind in sacred Lustre shines; / Love, Friendship, Virtue, with full force appear.”²⁰ In On the Death of Mrs. Rowe, Elizabeth Carter wrote that Rowe represented poetry’s highest purposes and praises her for “seraphic fire” and “sublime passions.” Above all, she finds Rowe a poet:

Bold as when raptur’d Seraphs strike the Lyre,

Chaste as the Vestal’s consecrated Fire;

Soft as the balmy Airs, that gently play,

In the calm Sun-set of a vernal Day;

Sublime as Virtue; elegant as Wit;

As Fancy various; and as Beauty sweet.²¹

The recognition of Rowe’s varied subjects and styles continued throughout the century. For instance, at the end of the century Janet Little wrote,

To sue for the prize, fam’d Rowe did arise,

More bright than Apollo was she:

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

O excellent Rowe, much Britain does owe

To what you’ve ingen’ously penn’d.²²

Also years after her death, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Verses on Mrs. Rowe (1773) pays tribute to her harmony of sound and image and her poetic “fire” and asks that Rowe be her muse. She praises her in terms previously reserved for Philips:

Such were the notes our chaster SAPPHO sung,
And every muse dropt honey on her tongue.
Blest shade! how pure a breath of praise was thine,
Whose spotless life was faultless as thy line.²³

As she had been to poets before her, Rowe to Barbauld is an example as a poet, an intellect, and a virtuous, happy human being: “Smooth like her verse her passions learn’d to move, / And her whole soul was harmony and love.” George Colman and Bonnell Thornton included eight of her poems in Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755). Until at least 1855, Rowe’s poetry was regularly reprinted and anthologized in Great Britain and America. These publications and others kept her work before the public and maintained her reputation.

In contrast to the earlier period, in the twenty-first century, the only full texts in print are a facsimile of the fiction (1972) and a camera-ready edition of a representative sample of her poetry (1987).²⁴ In spite of recent, high-quality criticism on her poetry, Rowe’s reputation even among most eighteenth-century specialists persists as a one-note, pious poet. As Sarah Prescott observes,

Rowe’s life and reputation has tended to overshadow any critical engagement with her writing. In Rowe’s case, her pious and sentimental persona may have secured her a place in the history of women’s writing as a modest exemplar, but it has also led to an almost wholesale neglect of her poetry.²⁵

Prescott’s and others’ work has provided a more accurate account of her poetry. Norma Clarke, for instance, points out that Rowe existed in the cultural world of “the Augustan poet celebrating love … and passion” and that of the “pious moralist.” She questions whether the “passionate poet” was ever lost to eighteenth-century readers and explores aspects of Rowe’s influence.²⁶ Understanding what Clarke calls the “libidinised energies” is a project several critics have undertaken.²⁷ Other critics have explicated some of Rowe’s political and aesthetic commitments.²⁸ Susan Staves’s brief discussion of her religious poetry in A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 is exceptionally intelligent. Not only does she give the importance of religious poetry in the time its due, but she recognizes the intellectual ambitiousness of Rowe’s and teases out the formal religious influences in individual poems.²⁹ Necessarily, journal articles and book chapters treat single aspects of her poetry, and our preference for historicizing approaches has contributed to the almost total neglect of analyses of the formal properties of Rowe’s (and other women writers’) prose and verse.³⁰ As several critics observe, Anglican and Tory women poets have received much more attention than Nonconformist women.³¹ When the line of Nonconformist and Church of Scotland women that includes Rowe, Mary Chandler, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Hands, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld is considered, the problem of this imbalance becomes clear. What Carol Barash did for Royalist women poets needs to be done for Nonconformist women.

The subjects of Rowe’s verse actually include romantic love, politics, friendship, war, and social mores, all important subjects in her fiction.³² She wrote coterie poems, public poetry about national events in the modes of John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Richard Blackmore, and Matthew Prior, and, based on the thirty-five poems in Divine Hymns and Poems and the poems left for Miscellaneous Works, she deserves to be known as one of the most skilled, original religious poets in English literature. It is literary history’s misfortune that Rowe wrote religious poetry when it had ceased to be a major artistic and aesthetic interest.³³ The creativity and variety of Rowe’s religious poetry are unmatched in the eighteenth century, and it was surely her major literary effort in her middle years.

In the rest of this introduction, I sketch Rowe’s biography, point out some significant contradictions regarding her life and reputation, and begin to make the case that she deserves an important place in the history of the development of the English novel.

Life and Times

Elizabeth Singer, born 11 September 1674 in Ilchester, Somerset, was the eldest daughter of Walter and Elizabeth Portnell Singer and their only child to survive into adulthood. Portnell met Walter when she was bringing provisions to the imprisoned Nonconformists in Ilchester. They married, and he gave up his ministry and became a successful clothier. Like so many Dissenting daughters, Elizabeth was carefully educated and also indoctrinated with their political and religious beliefs. In Description of Hell, she wrote of religious oppressors:

Beyond them all a miserable hell
The execrable persecutor finds;
No spirit howls among the shades below
More damn’d, more fierce, nor more a fiend than he.
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
His enmity to good; once falsly call’d
Religious warmth, and charitable zeal.

On high, beyond th’unpassable abyss,
To aggravate his righteous doom, he views
The blissful realms, and there the schismatic,
The visionary, the deluded saint,
By him so often hated, wrong’d, and scorn’d,
So often curs’d, and damn’d, and banish’d thence:
He sees him there possest of all that heav’n,
Those glories, those immortal joys, which he,
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
His pompous creeds, and boasted faith, has lost.³⁴

Moreover, as an adult, she practiced the activism within her church that Nonconformist women, in contrast to Church of England women, were allowed. They believed that women should participate in choosing ministers, in decisions to admit members, and in speaking and voting publicly at congregational meetings, and Rowe did.³⁵ She took an active interest in the local school, in London theatrical news, and in colonial Georgia.³⁶ A thorough-going “revolution principles” adherent, she has recently been identified with the rise of a Williamite “Whiggish literary-political agenda,” which “fought an aesthetic battle that was also allied to a country party, an anticourtly politics, positioning themselves against the urbane, decadent wits; they were to be the defenders of religion, nature, ethics and justice.”³⁷ Her reading included Shakespeare, Molière, John Milton, Nicholas Rowe, Thomas Otway, Joseph Addison, John Gay, James Thomson, Colley Cibber, Henry Fielding, George Berkeley, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Blaise Pascal, Robert Law, and Abraham Cowley.³⁸ Her familiarity with ancient and contemporary religious and philosophical arguments informs her letters and literary texts.³⁹ A precocious child “doted on by her father,” Rowe learned French and Italian early and “easily,”⁴⁰ and she translated and imitated a number of Italian forms, including the sonnet, throughout her life. She wrote a number of adaptations from Tasso at various times and appended her own translation of part of Pierre Nicole’s Thoughts on Death from the Essais de morale (1671–1678) to Friendship in Death.⁴¹

Her mother died when she was a teenager, and her father moved to Eggford Farm at Frome, Somerset, around 1692. He became an acquaintance of Thomas Thynne, first Viscount Weymouth, of Longleat, Wiltshire (fig. 1), and his son Henry tutored Elizabeth in Italian, French, and possibly Latin. She began publishing her poetry in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury shortly after she returned from boarding school. In 1696, Dunton published Poems on Several Occasions Written by Philomela. She and her poetry made a great impression on him, and, almost immediately after his wife died in 1697, he appeared at her home to propose marriage, which she declined. Other suitors included Isaac Watts, whom she allegedly declined because of his physical unattractiveness, and the American Benjamin Colman, a graduate of Harvard and the influential pastor of the Brattle Street, Boston, church.⁴²

Fig. 1. Longleat, Wiltshire, the home of Grace and Thomas Thynne, first Viscount Weymouth, where Rowe made lifelong friends. From Beautiful Britain (London, 1894).

She met Matthew Prior, who was serving on the Board of Trade and Plantations with Lord Weymouth, at Longleat in 1703. Prior helped place eight of her poems in Jacob Tonson’s prestigious Poetical Miscellanies: the Fifth Part (1704), and she and Prior carried on a flirtatious and apparently somewhat combative courtship.⁴³ In a previously unpublished letter to Arabella Marrow written in 1708, she recalled their wrangling over religion: “Mr. Prior’s life of Solomon is at last finished; about 3 weeks since he was at Bath, and came one afternoon to drink tea with me. I could not perswade him that anything about me had an air of Devotion.”⁴⁴ He seemed to test her acceptance of him by refusing to conform to her demands about his behavior. He insulted her religion and sent her his obscene reworking of the Baucus and Philemon myth, The Ladle (1703), and then nudged her to comment on it. He encouraged her writing, however, and helped her reputation as a poet. In a folio edition with beautiful engravings, he published her Love and Friendship and his To a Lady, She refusing to continue a Dispute with Me.⁴⁵ Indeed, the poetry that Prior published in 1703 may be a remarkable record of his hopes and frustrations with her, and they metaphorically and allegorically express experiences mirrored in Dunton’s and Colman’s correspondence with her.⁴⁶

In 1709, she met Thomas Rowe at Bath, and they married the next year and settled in Hampstead. He was the son and grandson of Nonconformist clergymen and had been educated at the University of Leiden because the English universities were not open to Dissenters. He was a poet and translator, and before he died of consumption in 1715 at age twenty-eight, he was working on a series of lives of classical heroes who had opposed tyranny and been omitted by Plutarch. Elizabeth had continued to publish poetry and, after her husband’s death, moved back to Frome. Her father died in 1719, leaving her substantial property and income in Frome and Ilchester. Henry Thynne’s daughter Frances became her closest friend, and she visited and corresponded with her for the rest of her life.

The more carefully Rowe’s career is considered, the more significant the Thynne family and especially Frances Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford (later Duchess of Somerset, 1748), appear. Frances was the daughter of Henry and Grace Strode Thynne, and she lived at Longleat House until her father died in 1708. Her widowed mother moved back to her family home in Dorsetshire, but she continued to spend time at Longleat with her grandparents. She married Algernon Seymour, Earl of Hertford and the son of Charles, Duke of Somerset, and they lived primarily at Marlborough, Wiltshire, in the home settled on him. They had a town house on Dover Street until 1721 (and then one on Grosvenor Street) and from 1730 a country retreat at St. Leonard’s Hill near Windsor. In 1723, Lady Hertford became a Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline, Princess of Wales. She wrote poetry and published a little of it, and her younger sister Mary and her great-aunt Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, joined Rowe as part of a community of women poets.⁴⁷ One of Finch’s coterie poems to Arabella Marrow mentions both “Philomela” (Rowe) and “Cleone” (Grace Thynne).⁴⁸ Finch published Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions in 1713, the time when Rowe was contributing to prestigious London collections.

Rowe was often at Longleat, and she visited Hertford a few times at various places; once, in 1728, Hertford visited her at Frome. Rowe occasionally praises Caroline, who became Queen in 1727 and retained Hertford; she identifies her with the goddess Virtue (Letters, 1:88). She also praises Anne, the Princess Royal, finding her behavior infinitely superior to the performance of a noble princess on the stage (Letters, 2:50–51). Rowe always came to the family when they needed her. She went to Grace in London when her daughter Mary Thynne Brooke died in 1720, and she spent part of June and all of July and August with Hertford at Marlborough after her mother died in the spring of 1725.⁴⁹ Hertford carefully copied Rowe’s letters into a book bound in green leather; known as the Green Book, it contains 159 letters and attracted visitors from the time of Rowe’s death. Posthumous publications of Rowe’s work drew considerable attention to their friendship. John Duncombe’s Feminiad moves smoothly from his characterization of Rowe to “Nor can her noble Friend escape unseen, / … / The Peeress, Poetess and Christian rise.”⁵⁰

As was common in the century, a circle of writers might be mostly virtual, sustained more by correspondence than by frequent meetings. Rowe may have met Edward Young at Longleat and had quoted one of the two religious poems mentioned in her dedication in a consoling 1726 letter to Lady Hertford shortly after the death of Heneage Finch, Lord Winchilsea, her great-uncle. She includes veiled correspondence about the death in a letter by herself and one by “Cleora” (Hertford) in Letters, part 1.⁵¹ If she did not know Young, she knew a lot about him, because two years earlier he had been named chaplain to Princess Caroline, and Hertford surely knew him well. By then, he had an influential network of friends and Whig patrons and was publishing in a variety of genres. He had just published his two satires, On Women.⁵² His contribution of the preface to Friendship in Death had advantages for them both, as it allied Rowe with a fashionable writer whose name would attract attention and him with the publication of a book consistent with the direction his career was taking. In 1739, the year her Miscellaneous Works was published, he wrote to a friend that “Letters from the dead are so entertaining.”⁵³

Rowe and Hertford read poetry for enjoyment and enlightenment, stayed in touch with the publishing scene, and made recommendations to each other. Rowe had brought James Thomson’s Winter to Hertford’s attention in 1726, and she quoted lines that expressed a shared sensibility:

The year yet pleasing but declining fast
Soft, o’er the secret Soul, in gentle Gales,
A Philosophic Melancholly breathes,
And bears the swelling Thought aloft to Heaven.⁵⁴

Thomson was invited to Marlborough House in the summer of 1727 and to St. Leonard’s Hill in 1735. In one of her last letters to Hertford, Rowe writes that she is rereading The Seasons and enjoying the engravings by Kent.⁵⁵ Rowe quotes Thomson in Letters, part 1; in part 3, she quotes from Young’s Satire of Fame. It is not surprising that she knew the poetry of Young and Thomson, but some of the connections to male poets are less predictable. She had the same publisher as Richard Savage, and there is a connection to Hertford with him, too. Hertford had gone to Caroline, by then the queen, to plead for Savage’s pardon after he was sentenced to death for a tavern murder.⁵⁶ Savage and Thomson were at that time part of the circle of Aaron Hill, and Thomson may have appealed to Hertford.

The connections between Rowe and Hertford are deeply personal and richer than has been recognized. In addition to the consoling letter at Finch’s death, Rowe wrote that Letter 14 in Friendship in Death reminded her of Mary, Lady Brooke, and she quotes one of Brooke’s poems in Letters, 2:8–9. That Hertford contributed all or part of ten letters to part 1 is well known. Letter 2 to Cleora is a slightly changed version of a witty letter in the Green Book. It opens with a line reminiscent of the much-quoted (and misleading) statement by Rowe, “My Letters ought to be call’d epistles from the dead to the living, for I know nothing relating to this world” (Misc. Works, 2:118). What Rowe meant and what the correspondence was like are more accurately expressed in Letter 2: “I am certainly dead and buried, according to your notions of life; interr’d in the silence and obscurity of a country retreat, far from the dear town, and all its joys” (Letters, 1:93). Catharine Trotter Cockburn used the same trope about the same time in a letter in which she remarked that her acquaintances William Wycherley and William Congreve were dead, but, because of her residence in Aberdeen and then Northumberland, “I was in a manner dead long before them.”⁵⁷ Much has been made of the contrast offered by Rowe’s retirement, but letters such as these might spring from the fact that Rowe was twenty-five years older than Hertford, with the different interests and energy that this suggests.

Rowe lived through times of great change in both the political and literary domains. At age eleven, she would have heard talk of the ramifications of the ascension of James II to the throne. She was fourteen at the time of the Glorious Revolution and obviously shared her sect’s joy at the coronation of William and Mary and the victory at the Battle of the Boyne, which sent James II permanently to France. Queen Mary’s death and then William’s, Queen Anne’s sternly High Church principles, the extreme party turmoil of her reign, and the violence provoked by the ascension of George I to the throne—all events inflected by the nation’s religious divisions—occurred before she was thirty-one.⁵⁸ In her Letters, she mentions the South Sea Bubble (1720–1721), war with Spain, and the growth of empire.

She knew well Thomas Ken, formerly royal chaplain to Charles II and a bishop, and a living history of the difficult political choices and varied fortunes of his time. He was one of the bishops assigned to tell Monmouth he would be beheaded, to stay with him in the Tower, and to accompany him to the scaffold. He had been confined to the Tower for refusing to read King James’s Declaration of Indulgence from the pulpit and deprived of his bishopric for refusing to take the oaths swearing allegiance to William and Mary. Now in retirement at Longleat at the invitation of Lord Weymouth, he encouraged Rowe in a variety of ways. Her paraphrase of Job 19:26 published in the 1696 Poems may be the poem that he had requested and greatly admired. He had written three hymns in 1674 to enrich the devotional life of the boys at Winchester College where he was chaplain. This was before the congregational singing of anything but Psalm-based hymns, and he recommended the hymns be sung privately in their rooms. There was one for morning, one for evening, and rather oddly one for insomnia. Each ended,

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

These lines are, of course, now a doxology, the most widely sung Christian verses in the world. In the 1 December 1691 Athenian Mercury, one of the questions asked was, “Whether songs on Moral, Religious or Divine Subjects, composed by Persons of Wit and Virtue, and set to both grave and pleasant Tunes, wou’d not by the Charms of Poetry, and sweetness of Musick, make good Impressions of Modesty and Sobriety on the Young and Noble, make them really in Love with Virtue and Goodness … ?” In light of her acquaintance with Ken, this question takes on considerable significance and underscores the importance of the dedication to hymn writing that she and her friend Isaac Watts came to share. His To Mrs. Singer. On the Sight of some of her Divine Poems Never Printed (1706) makes the same commitment to the new kind of hymn writing, “Notes of Heav’n” that “propagate the Joy” of Heaven, that her much better The Vision does.⁵⁹

Born in the year John Milton published the twelve-book Paradise Lost and when John Dryden and Aphra Behn were already major playwrights, Rowe lived through dramatic changes in literary tastes and conceptions of the purposes of literature. The great social, reformist comedies of her girlhood, such as William Congreve’s Way of the World (1700), transitioned to the humane comedies of the first decades of the eighteenth century by George Farquhar, Colley Cibber, and Susanna Centlivre. Charles Sedley’s Antony and Cleopatra (1677), which she enjoyed in boarding school, could not compete with the vigor of the Exclusion Crisis tragedies. Although seldom noticed, some of the greatest religious writing in English history was published in her youth. Among these texts are all three of Milton’s great epic poems, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), Dryden’s Hind and the Panther (1687), and Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady’s New Version of the Psalms of David (1696). Rowe was influenced by Ken’s prescient opinions about hymns. In her childhood, the political uses of literature exploded. Within two years, Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus (both 1681), Behn’s The Roundheads, and Otway’s Venice Preserved (both 1682) demonstrated the power of the most respected, traditional literary forms in political debate. In 1689 both John Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government and Andrew Marvell’s Poems on Affairs of State came out. Texts such as Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684) indicated the potential of fiction to be political propaganda, and Defoe’s Lady Credit and Joseph Addison’s Count Tariff transformed allegorical narratives for the same purposes.

A strong literary movement was in progress, one expressed in the popular press by Addison as a call for British superiority in arts as well as arms. An impetus both for Neoclassicism and for English forms and innovations, literary nationalism produced texts as varied as Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), Swift’s Battle of the Books (1704), and Addison’s essays on topics such as the Royal Exchange and the ballad “Chevy Chase.” Translations of classic literature made Homer’s epics and the works of Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, and others available to English writers of all classes, and some, such as Horace’s Art of Poetry by Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (trans. 1680), propagated standards for an English republic of letters. They could be imitated and adapted widely for a variety of purposes and reached new audiences. John Dunton, Peter Motteux, Defoe, Addison, and Richard Steele revolutionized journalism. Samuel Butler, Dryden, and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, were replaced by Blackmore, Samuel Garth, and John Dennis, and then by Swift, Gay, and Pope. A group of women poets including Sarah Fyge Egerton and Mary Chudleigh joined women fiction writers in disputing prevailing images of the nature and capacities of women. Poetic forms that would come to rival satire in popularity by Mark Akenside, Finch, Thomson, and William Shenstone were widely circulated and reprinted. In 1731 the Gentleman’s Magazine was born.

The Image of a Woman Poet

The contradictions between the Elizabeth Singer Rowe that we think we know and the actual woman, her life and writings, are intriguing. Before Rowe was twenty-five years old, Mary Beale (1633–1699), the first important woman portrait painter in England, had painted a miniature of her—the provincial daughter of a member of an oppressed minority. Soon after, Susannah-Penelope Rosse (ca. 1655–1700), the first important woman miniaturist, copied it. It was common practice for miniatures to be copied, and it signals the desire of friends and loved ones to possess them. In fact, miniatures were an emotionally important part of friendships. Men and women wanted these memorabilia of their most intimate friends, sometimes rather desperately. Jonathan Swift’s repeated requests for Robert Harley’s is a familiar example; in one, he wrote, “I have now been ten Years solliciting for your Picture, and if I had sollicited you for a thousand Pounds (I mean of your own Money, not the publick) I could have prevailed in ten days,” and a year later: “I ever gave great allowance to the laziness of your temper in the article of writing letters, but I cannot pardon your forgetfulness in sending me your picture. … It is vexatious that I … should be now perpetually teasing for a letter and a picture.”⁶⁰ In fiction and life, what miniatures meant is eloquently expressed; for example, Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless steals and then broods over Trueworth’s, and Anna Seward wore and even slept with the miniature that John André had painted of Honora Sneyd.⁶¹ They were collected for display and mounted in boxes as sets; Marcia Pointon quotes Goethe as saying, “thus he could collect all his friends around him,” exactly what Swift was trying to do. As lockets, brooches, or ornaments on bracelets or ribbons, women were observed gazing on and pressing them to their lips.⁶²

Fig. 2. Miniature of Rowe painted by Susannah-Penelope Rosse, ca. 1695, from an original by Mary Beale before Rowe was twenty-five years old. Courtesy of Bonhams.

The miniature of Rowe (fig. 2) shows a beautiful woman with a wealth of blonde hair, luminous eyes, and a cupid’s bow mouth, the woman described by her suitors as “comely” in face and “shape” of medium height and slender. She had an English rose complexion—fair with rosy cheeks, and “eyes of a darkish grey, inclining to blue, and full of fire” (Misc. Works, 1:lv), and the eyes are blue-gray in the miniatures. Every portrait features her fine eyes. Beale was a friend of Peter Lely, the court painter, had been patronized by Charles II, and was popular with the extended Thynne family. She had painted Catherine Thynne, Viscountess Lonsdale in the 1670s; Henry Thynne; and later Thomas Thynne. Some of her earlier subjects were Katherine, Lady Kingsmill; Lady Elizabeth Percy, Countess of Ogle; Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset; and the Duchess of Somerset. Miniatures were important to the Thynne family, and the Victoria and Albert Museum has a portrait of Mary, Lady Brooke, younger daughter of the Thynne’s. It has many similarities to that of Rowe and was done by Christian Friedrich Zincke (the V&A dates it to ca. 1716).

It was common for people to order or collect sets of miniatures. They were often very small, usually less than an inch in height. Peter Cross’s miniature of Anne Finch is only 7.6 × 6.4 cm (fig. 3), and that of Heneage only slightly larger. The Beale miniature of Rowe is 2¾ inches (70 mm), and the Rosse one 3 inches (76 mm). Intriguingly, both are water color on vellum, and the frames for the Rosse miniature of Rowe and the Cross of Anne Finch are the same gilt metal with pierced spiral cresting; perhaps they were once in possession of the same person. The Beale miniature is in an ornate gilt frame with an elaborate flower and ribbon top as for a brooch. Rather than the draping poet dress, Finch is in the conventional aristocratic dress. The Rowe miniature is characteristic of Rosse’s work and illustrates connoisseurs’ observation that she worked “with great finesse on an exceptionally small scale.” Her parents were both court miniaturists, and her father, Richard Gibson, and Samuel Cooper, whose style she studied, were considered the leading miniaturists from the Interregnum forward. Later Thomas Flatman, who was a neighbor, was a friend of hers, and another neighbor, Matthew Snelling, was related to Mary Beale, while another neighbor was Peter Cross. She did a lovely set of her family and closest associates that includes two self-portraits, her husband Michael, her sister Anna Gibson van Vrijbergen, her sister-in-law Mrs. Priestman, and her neighbor Mrs. Prudence Philips.⁶³ Among the Thynne relatives that she did was Elizabeth Percy, second wife of the tenth Earl of Northumberland. The Rosse copy of Rowe is somewhat romanticized and not as sharp; for instance, the shoulders, neck, and jawline are not as slim and graceful as Beale’s portrait.⁶⁴ The most expensive paint color was ultramarine, which added a surcharge of 10 percent, and both Beale and Rosse used it for Rowe’s dress. It was made from lapis lazuli, and Charles Beale recorded paying £4.10s. for an ounce in 1674.⁶⁵ Art historians point to the growing appeal of small-format painting among the upper middle class, described as “a more modest clientele.”⁶⁶ When Beale moved to Pall Mall, she had attracted a wide clientele from among the gentry as well as from the clergy and aristocracy (ODNB), and the sale of her husband’s effects indicates Rosse’s even more prolific work.⁶⁷

Fig. 3. Miniature of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, by Peter Cross, ca. 1690. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Rowe’s portrait anticipates what will become the conventional dress of a woman poet. She is portrayed in a fashionable, loose dress of heavy satin that appears almost as a drape. The neckline shows a frame made of a ruffle on her white linen shift, the garment all women wore next to their skin. The ruffle was designed to show, and a pin modestly holds the drape in place. As the seventeenth-century popularity of the loose dress waned, the Roman drape replaced it (fig. 4). The portrait in the posthumously published Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse (1739) is no less striking in that it is by the respected, famous engraver George Vertue, perhaps the best line engraver of his generation. Vertue had apprenticed with a master who engraved arms on plate, perhaps Blaise Gentot.⁶⁸ This relationship may explain the elaborate decorations engraved at the top and bottom of the frame. Crowns, leaves, flowers, and musical instruments with drapes woven in are characteristic of Gentot but more ornamental than symbolic, which is somewhat unusual for the representation of a writer. Vertue studied at the Academy founded at Godfrey Kneller’s studio and apprenticed 1702–1709 with Michael Vandergucht, whose portraits of literary figures are well known. This engraving became the most frequently reprinted image of her into the present day, and Vertue was a highly fashionable engraver. All of Rowe’s portraits, then, were highly fashionable because they were done by those working in the highest, even noble, circles. Beale, for instance, had painted miniatures of King James and William III; Rosse had done Queen Mary,⁶⁹ Charles II’s mistress the Duchess of Portsmouth, and Anne Palmer, Countess of Sussex; and Vertue had done George I, Frederick, Prince of Wales, and many deceased kings, noblemen, and great writers after Van Dyck, Godfrey Kneller, and others. Peter Lely assisted Beale, Kneller abetted Rosse and Vertue.

Fig. 4. Engraving of Rowe by George Vertue, ca. 1725, allegedly done from life, and the most commonly reproduced image of her. Published posthumously in Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse (1739). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

It is intriguing to speculate on the way Vertue came to do Rowe’s portrait, which, allegedly, he did from the life. He did more than 120 frontispiece portraits between 1709 and 1756, including Matthew Prior, Eliza Haywood, and Alexander Pope, and almost every engraving for the Society of Antiquaries after his appointment as its official engraver in 1717.⁷⁰ Heneage Finch, Earl of Winchilsea, was president in 1725. When he died two years later, Lord Hertford paid him. Rowe had continued to see Finch with the family, and Grace Thynne wrote in 1722 that they had flirted and Rowe “coquetted much” with him and that he said he would “buy a pillion and fetch her to Leweston … if he did not find her there when he came.”⁷¹ Around that time, Vertue did a portrait and engraving of William Seymour, Duke of Somerset; of Heneage Finch “by his own hand from the life”; and of Henry Grove, a Rowe cousin and coeditor of Miscellaneous Works and author of the first part of the “Life” in it.⁷² Notably, he had done “Lady Jane Grey, with emblematic devices” and “Henry VII. and his Queen, Henry VIII, and Jane Seymour,” historical relatives of the Hertford family.⁷³ He had made line engraving fashionable again, and, because of the number and varied subjects of his engravings, he made the art familiar to the public. He included “ ‘all sorts and conditions of men,’ both contemporary and of past times,” and he valued accuracy.⁷⁴

Vertue’s work with the Finch and Hertford families contributes to understanding the importance of Rowe’s relationships with them. As the volumes of Letters grew, Rowe continued to draw from her experiences with them, and I will treat in some detail one example that reveals evidence about Rowe’s inspirations and compositional practices, specifically regarding her verse epistles between Lady Jane Grey and Lord “Guilford” Dudley. A painting of Lady Jane Grey, titled “Queen Jane” and perhaps the only surviving image of her, belonged to the Hertford family, and Frances had inherited it and one of Lady Jane Grey’s younger sister Katherine. She had secretly married Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and had two sons; the marriage and the sons were finally legitimated in 1601. Lady Jane, who was known from her youth as brilliant, carefully educated, and pious, was a cousin of Edward VI and, therefore, fourth in line to the throne. Her father forced her to marry Guildford Dudley in an attempt to hold and increase his power. She believed she was contracted to the Earl of Hertford, but her father beat her into compliance. When Edward died, she was crowned queen and shortly afterward executed to provide for the Catholic Mary’s accession. At age sixteen, she faced the block bravely and recited the 51st Psalm before being beheaded. Over the years she became gentle Jane, a Protestant heroine and martyr (ODNB). The painting was the property of the Somersets at Marlborough House and passed to Algernon Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and therefore to Frances when they settled there. Vertue selected it as one of the four historical paintings he described in a short publication and made an engraving of it (fig. 5). He says that the Earl of Hertford sent it to London for him to copy. In Rowe’s lifetime, the painting would have been displayed at Marlborough, where Rowe spent months in 1725.⁷⁵

The painting, known as the Syon Portrait, belongs to the current Duke of Northumberland. In a typical Elizabethan pose and costume, Jane is painted in half length in a black dress or coat with her auburn hair pulled back severely below a black cap. As befitting royalty, there are symbolic ornaments, an ermine lining and pearls, and signs of wealth, such as a ruff trimmed in gold cording. She is unsmiling, lips pursed, and eyes rather glazed and with the irises and pupils not in the same location (the right eye appears to wander from center). The painting is in an oval within an ornamented frame and has none of the symbolic backgrounds that we see in Elizabethan paintings of royalty and nobility. J. Stephan Edwards remarks on how flat and “monochromatically black, without shadows or highlights” it is,⁷⁶ and one explanation for many of its features and its shape is that it was painted from a miniature done in Jane’s last days.

In any event, the subject, not the execution, must have been the attraction for Rowe and Hertford. Vertue reproduces it accurately in his engraving, although he changes the frame and adds pearls to the central ornament at her neckline. Vertue identifies it as “from an Original in the possession of his Grace” and frames it within Corinthian columns, obelisks holding lanterns in which the flames come from hearts, and drapes. Above the portrait is a crown with five gleaming stars, the symbol of martyrdom, and a garland of flowers. The crown, globe, scepter, and sword, as well as an ermine robe, are below the portrait, and Britannia, who is leaning on the great seal of Britain, sits slightly to the right and weeps. The British lion appears in several places. Vertue has captured the martyr and propagandizes what her loss meant for the nation.

In the highly collaborative first part of Letters, Rowe includes the verse epistles Lady Jane Gray, to Lord Guilford Dudley and Lord Guilford Dudley to Lady Jane Gray (Letters, 1:82–86). Vertue produced a set of historical engravings, and Lady Jane was the fourth. The first was of Henry VII’s three oldest children, Arthur, Margaret, and Henry; the second was of Queen Mary of France with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; and the third was of the Duchess of Suffolk. Rowe also wrote Mary Queen of France to Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk (Letters, 3:213–17), and Hertford wrote a heroic epistle from Yarico to Inkle. These activities seem related and suggest dating of Vertue’s engraving of Lady Jane earlier than the customary 1740s. This date is probably based on the publication of Vertue’s A Description of Four Ancient Paintings, Being Historical Portraitures of Royal Branches of the Crown of England, but the Description is really a sale catalog and would have required permission from owners of the paintings. The time during which Rowe was with Hertford and Vertue working with the family for the Antiquarian Society seems more likely. In 1748 to commemorate Algernon Seymour’s inheriting the title of Duke of Somerset, Vertue produced a second, slightly more ornamented engraving of Lady Jane. I have reproduced the original, which is in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings; the 1748 one is in the National Portrait Gallery.

Fig. 5. George Vertue’s engraving from the portrait “Queen Jane” that belonged to the Hertford family and helped inspire Rowe’s heroic epistle between Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford Dudley. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Sharing observations on the portrait, giving pleasure to each other, creating conversational opportunities, and reinforcing values, at intervals long before this, Rowe and Hertford had brought Lady Jane into their correspondence, and these references are often profoundly meaningful. In 1716, Rowe was continuing to grieve for her husband, who died in 1715, and she quoted “melancholy lines” from Nicholas Rowe’s recently published Tragedy of the Lady Jane Gray (1715), “My soul grows out of tune, … / … / And I could sit me down in some dull shade, / Where lonely contemplation keeps her cave, / … / And muse away an age in deepest melancholy” (Misc. Works, 2:37–38). In 1719, she wrote, “There is not in the English history a more beautiful character than that of Lady Jane Grey; and I am not surpriz’d to find you charm’d with the shining figure she makes in Mr. Rowe’s tragedy. You seem to have an equal softness of temper, and a resembling delicacy in your way of thinking. Your sentiments had certainly been the same with the young heroine’s, if you had the same part to act, that of a martyr, which I hope you never will” (Misc. Works, 2:38). Hertford had, of course, been with the court during the Jacobite Rebellion, and the women’s letters reflect the fact that those at court and their friends knew they were living in dangerous times. Rowe’s poems are celebrations of Protestant martyrdom, and, beyond the piety, love of learning, and gentleness, Rowe’s comparison of Jane to Hertford is an easily overlooked acknowledgment that Hertford was indeed at some risk. The family’s closeness to Thomas Ken and the Finch’s experiences when King James was deposed also reinforced the sense of the uncertainty of court life, and Rowe’s letters include many hopes for the Hertfords’ safety in political life.

Vertue’s portrait of Rowe replicates the shape of eyes and mouth in the miniature by Rosse, whom he knew and writes about in his notebooks. Earlier images of women writers carried more class markers, and dress, drape, and hair were more elaborate and ornamented, as are those of Anne Killigrew (painted by herself) and Michael Vandergucht’s of Aphra Behn. A frontispiece portrait is an important signifier of authorial agency and gestures toward a cultured audience. The ornaments around and below the portrait, as well as the sitter’s pose, speak eloquently to the reader-viewer. They are far more common in books by men than by women. Because of its wide circulation after 1739, Vertue’s of Rowe surely influenced the representation of women writers and contributed to the ubiquity of the woman-poet pose. Rowe is wearing a very low cut drape with a white ruffle from her shift. Like so many women writers after her, her hair is swept up and back, her forehead is high, and her eyes are dark, prominent, and striking.

Portraits of women poets before Rowe suggest the movement toward a convention. An engraving of a bust of Katherine Philips, “the matchless Orinda,” which was used as a frontispiece for Poems of the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips (1667), is composed to make her look like a Roman matron with appropriate drape and hair style (fig. 6). A mezzotint of her in the popular style of showing the smock made of rich fabrics as bodice and sleeves for a gown or drape by Isaac Beckett is in the National Portrait Gallery. This was the style of an aristocratic lady, one that Anne Killigrew painted in her self-portrait that became the frontispiece for Poems by Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686). The engraving, figure 7, was by Isaac Beckett. The first woman whose texts were frequently published with portrait frontispieces was Aphra Behn, and Vertue’s Rowe is very much like the pose in figure 8 of Behn by Robert White for Poems upon Several Occasions; with a Voyage to the Island of Love (1684). Although draping, the heavy satin garment on both women is not a true drape, as it is for Katherine Philips, Eliza Haywood, and Elizabeth Thomas. Other prominent printed portraits of Behn were in succeeding editions of Plays written by the late ingenious Mrs. Behn. In the first edition (1702) is the aristocratic pose with smock and a heavy satin gown with the sleeve caught up to show the rich fabric of the smock. The second edition is a prestigious Vandergucht engraving that is more romantic. Behn is sitting in near profile, turning her head to the viewer. Her hair is full and curly, and the sleeve of her gown is tied up with a satin bow (1716). By the third edition in 1724, the portrait is much like the Rowe and Haywood portraits from the same two-year period. By now conventional, in the B. Cole engraving, she is in an oval frame on a bust stand and the white ruffle shows above the heavy, draping gown.

Fig. 6. Frontispiece for Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips (London, 1667). Engraving by William Faithorne after a bust by Michael Vandergucht.

Fig. 7. Frontispiece for Poems by Mrs. Anne Killigrew (London, 1686). Engraving by Isaac Beckett from a painting by herself.

Fig. 8. Frontispiece for Poems upon Several Occasions; with a Voyage to the Island of Love by Aphra Behn (London: R. Tonson and J. Tonson, 1684). Engraving by Robert White.

Fig. 9. Frontispiece for Eliza Haywood’s Secret Histories, Novels and Poems. In four volumes. (2nd ed.; London, 1725). Engraving by George Vertue.

Fig. 10. Frontispiece for Elizabeth Thomas’s Pylades and Corinna, vol. 1 (London, 1731). Engraving by Giles King.

By 1725, the woman-poet portrait was formulaic. As the years passed, a drape rather than a gown became conventional. As Aileen Ribeiro explains, “some idealization, either in dress or drapery, would elevate the image, making it more timeless and thus with greater appeal for posterity.” The glimpse of the shift also remained and “was also ‘timeless’—literally so, for the shape had hardly changed for hundreds of years. Such a garment had been used by van Dyck to depict allegorical characters and the ‘careless Romance’ ascribed to [the painter].”⁷⁷ Robert White’s 1684 engraving of Behn served as a trend-setting model in its rather simple drape, simple hair ornament, and the single curl across her shoulder. Vertue’s engraving of Eliza Haywood (fig. 9) shows his signature style but the fashion for a much lower cut dress with the same hair style. The Haywood engraving shows the style of lower cut dress and quite rounded breasts also seen in other women writers’ frontispieces and in the engraving of Rowe published in the London Magazine in 1754. In spite of the similar pose and dress, some individual physical characteristics of the women are depicted. In general, hats and clothing came to be individualized features, not face and expression. Later in the century, a scarf was sometimes draped over the head in imitation of representations of Roman matrons and Christian saints. The 1730 engraving of Rowe’s exact contemporary Elizabeth Thomas for the first volume of Pylades and Corinna (1731; fig. 10) shows the trend in hair styles and in portraying the woman from the waist up rather than in an oval bisecting the breasts and following the cut of the dress.⁷⁸ Vertue’s was already a somewhat longer portrait of Rowe and Haywood, and the very large number of duplications of his engraving of Rowe contributed to the establishment of the woman-poet pose that reigned throughout the century. As time passed, Vertue’s engraving would be modified by other engravers to follow the small variations in the pose, some of which are apparent in later representations of Rowe.

Becoming Pious

How Rowe fell from being the multidimensional woman and writer of many kinds of poetry and fiction to being dismissed as the unreadable, eccentric “pious Mrs. Rowe” who wrote On the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe and spent the last twenty-two years of her life panting for death is a fascinating story.⁷⁹ One way to tell this story is through those multiple portraits and editions of her texts. Even now the life and conduct of a woman writer is news, reported along with her publications, and in the eighteenth century as women joined the republic of letters it was especially true. Just as women had a signature work, they were often assigned a signature character, as was “the great arbitress of passion” Eliza Haywood, the pudding-making Elizabeth Carter, and the Muse of Britannia Anna Seward.

By 1752, Thomas Phinn, another engraver, had reworked Vertue’s portrait for a new edition of Letters, and Rowe was a fatter, more complacent person. Although the ornaments above and below the frame remain, with her growing reputation, the crown and manuscript now seem more appropriate. Influentially, the London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer printed “A Concise Account of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe. With her Effigy” in February 1754. Her continued appeal is affirmed on the cover, as it promises that that issue has “a Beautiful Head of the celebrated Mrs. Rowe.” Collections of effigies were popular, and individuals cut them out of books and periodicals and bought them in printed books. Rowe is a somewhat sterner, thinner, more dignified woman in the London Magazine portrait by an unknown engraver than in the Vertue engraving (fig. 11). The hint of a smile is gone, but the drape is more prominent and the dress is very low cut, showing extremely round breasts, the fashion for women-writer engravings at that time. The text concentrates on her as a writer although it weaves salient facts throughout the one-and-a-half-column narrative. Like the early, abbreviated lives, it emphasizes her fiction over her poetry; Friendship in Death is identified as her “most celebrated” work. “Even her prose has all the charms of verse without the fetters, the same fire and elevation, the same richness of imagery, bold figures and flowing diction,” it says. These strong, specific terms for her style set her apart from the mass of writers and are not common descriptions of women’s work. Her husband is described as “a very ingenious and learned gentleman, and a poet of no inconsiderable rank,” and her spending time with Thynne and Hertford after family deaths is mentioned.⁸⁰ These glimpses of her follow the portrayal that begins the second installment of “Memoirs of the Life and Character of Mrs. Rowe” in the Gentleman’s Magazine: “What is said of Mr. Cowley, that no one had reason to wish his Wit less, was equally true of Mrs. Rowe. For with the most manly Genius, she possess’d all that Gentleness … of Disposition, which give her Sex such irresistible Charms.”⁸¹

Fig. 11. Engraving for “A Concise Account of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe. With her Effigy” in the London Magazine (February 1754). Unknown engraver. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Fig. 12. Engraving by Thomas Kitchin for Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women, vol. 2 (London, 1777), between pages 446 and 447. Courtesy of the Guildhall Library, Corporation of the City of London.

Fig. 13. Engraving by W. Ridley for Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Sacred Classics, Devout Exercises of the Heart (London: C. Cooke, 1796). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 14. Engraving by Francis Barlow for Lane’s Edition of Devout Exercises of the Heart (London, 1795).

Also following Vertue’s iconic image is a simple, elegant engraving (fig. 12) by Thomas Kitchin that appeared in such places as the 1772 London edition of Miscellaneous Works, Thomas Gibbons’s Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women (1777), and Collectanea Biographica, being An Historical and Pictorial Biography of Illustrious, Celebrated and Remarkable Persons (1853). Kitchin is best known as a distinguished engraver of maps, and he did 170 for the London Magazine alone between 1747 and 1783. He had extraordinary technical skills and an assured manner that produced clean lines, as this portrait shows. He did many portraits and even caricatures and may, in fact, have done the engraving for the London Magazine above.⁸² In Boston in 1782, the respected engraver John Norman copied Vertue’s portrait and ornamental frame for an edition of Friendship in Death. It is described as having “some charm, presenting the author in dishabille, with a pleasant smile, and a long curling lock of hair.”⁸³ Into the 1770s, then, Rowe’s prestige was maintained by the distinguished engravers chosen to immortalize her writings. As portraits of later poets, including Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, show, romantic masses of curls rather than the single ringlet over one shoulder shifted attention from forehead and eyes to feminine hair. Even late-life frontispieces of Elizabeth Carter by John Raphael Smith and by MacKenzie emphasize elaborately curled hair, and Angelica Kauffman’s dramatization of Mary Robinson as the British Sappho had masses of hair and the Roman matron mantua. Ubiquitous copies and knock-off representations of Rowe with varying quality, often quite poor, and faddish touches show Rowe moving into the realm of popular culture.

In the last quarter of the century, a set of images and publications diverge from the writerly image of the woman described as a strong intellect with a distinctive, image-rich style. Editions of Devout Exercises caught up with and slightly surpassed editions of the collected Letters, especially in America. In the 1740s, there were eight editions of Letters and three of Devout Exercises; in the 1780s, there were eight of Letters and seven of Devout Exercises; and in the 1790s, there were another eight of Letters and a startling thirty-two of Devout Exercises. Rowe was surely one of the most popular writers of the entire century in several genres, but the trend toward categorizing her as a devotional writer began to prevail. Wide availability of her Devout Exercises of the Heart and her religious poetry began to revise the evidence that she was most appreciated as a prose fiction writer. For example, Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Sacred Classics published figure 13 in Devout Exercises of the Heart in 1796 with a rather unattractive image of her in shift and drape with masses of curly hair cascading over one shoulder by W. Ridley. Francis Barlow did a more poetic, romantic Rowe for Devout Exercises of the Heart in 1795 for Lane’s edition (fig. 14). In the Barlow, her hair is curling and more clearly defined, the dress is nineteenth-century, and the oval is oddly on the kind of stand featured for busts of writers. The later one increases the abundance of wavy hair.

These editions are notable because they were produced by astute entrepreneurs who advanced the book trade just as were Dunton, Tonson, Lintot, and others who printed and sold Rowe’s works during her lifetime. Both Lane and Cooke made fortunes and, unlike the earlier booksellers, concentrated on mass, not elite, publications. In 1773, William Lane inaugurated the Ladies Museum, which carried stories on Rowe. He founded a system of circulating libraries and in 1790 created the Minerva Press as an imprint for his publications of romantic and gothic novels. Publications such as devotional literature were also branded, as this illustration is, as “Lane’s Edition,” an advertisement for affordable, desirable books. Charles Cooke was at least as enterprising and opportunistic. He refined and expanded serial publication; his books were often advertised as “superbly embellished,” and illustrations became a signature of his series. He developed genre-specific series that included poets, novelists, essayists—and devotional authors. Some were pocket editions, and others were expensive vellum paper with hand-colored stipple engravings, and they ranged from 6p. to 1s. (ODNB).

In the nineteenth century, the images move farther away from the Vertue engraving. A Francis Engleheart engraving for an 1820 edition could be almost any woman, but imagination began to reign. The T. Wallis engraving for Friendship in Death with Letters Moral and Entertaining (1827) is the apotheosis of this movement (fig. 15). With the halo, the twigs (symbol of the nightingale’s nest and eternal watchfulness), and the addition of the willow tree and urn, the print surrounds Rowe with symbols appropriate to her individual image and to Christian themes. The urn may represent her husband, with whom she was supposedly obsessed and wished to follow to Heaven. Wallis does, however, return to Vertue’s image (albeit probably one of the 1750 modifications). Perhaps the most astonishing “likeness” is in the 1827 edition of Friendship in Death with Letters in Prose and Verse to which is added Devout Exercises of the Heart (compare fig. 16 to fig. 7 above). It places Rowe’s name below Anne Killigrew’s image. Killigrew is only slightly modified. The earrings are gone, and this “Rowe” is very slightly older and thinner. The effect of the dress is to make Rowe seem more regal, aristocratic—but also from a historically distant time.

Fig. 15. Engraving by T. Wallis for Friendship in Death with Letters Moral and Entertaining (London, 1827). Although the portrait is based on a 1750s engraving of Rowe, she has been transformed by the surrounding iconography into the pious Rowe who longed to follow her husband to Heaven. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Fig. 16. Engraving modified from likeness of Anne Killigrew (see figure on p. 23). With only minor changes, such as the elimination of the earrings, this portrait of Killigrew became the frontispiece with Rowe’s name substituted for the 1827 Friendship in Death with Letters in Prose and Verse to which is added Devout Exercises of the Heart (London: Baynes for Thomas Kelly, 1827). © The British Library Board.

Fig. 17. Undated engraving collected by John Peaviour Johnson for the extra-illustrated copy of A Biographical History of England, by James Granger, continuations by Mark Noble. Courtesy of City of London Metropolitan Archives.

Fig. 18. Printed for Richard Baldwin, unidentified engraver. Undated image in the MacDonnell collection, now in the Heinz Archive. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Fig. 19. Front page of Rowe’s Exercises forming part of Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Sacred Classics (London, 1875). Engraving by W. Hawkins. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Few of the portraits retain the sense of the woman writer, but for collectors she was. An unidentified image preserved in John Peaviour Johnson’s extra-illustrated Biographical History of England by the Rev. James Granger, continuations by the Rev. Mark Noble in the London Metropolitan Archive shows a pensive woman with a book, but her quill and paper are ready (fig. 17). As was becoming fashionable, the state of undress was greater, as much more of the shift shows, and the breasts are round globes. The life of Rowe in the Biographical History lists Rowe with the poets Alexander Pope, Allan Ramsey, Aaron Hill, and Eustace Budgell, a former poet laureate, and treats her as such. In general, however, Christian symbolism increases. Another collector selected an image (fig. 18) that combines Renaissance hair ornaments with a dress suggesting angel-like wings and with pearls, the traditional symbol of purity and wisdom.⁸⁴

The illustrations for her books drastically modify her image. A Dublin edition of Devout Exercises (1771) uses emblematic imagery from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, including a winged, burning heart pierced by a cross, a serpent, and a nightingale with chicks resting on the cross while tearing her breast. Heavenly light streams down. Here the allusion is clearly to the bestiary tradition going back to the symbol painted in subterranean sanctuaries of Rome by persecuted Christians rather than to the sweet-singing night bird used by Petrarch and other Renaissance poets as the figure of the lyric poet. In the Christian tradition, the bird guarded its young from a serpent in an allegory of the bird pressing its breast against a thorn in order to stay vigilant against evil through the night.⁸⁵ The pedestal on which the construction stands reads, “The Christians [sic] Pattern or Imitation of Christ.”

Another example of an influential publication that propagated this image is the cover art (fig. 19) for Rowe’s Exercises forming part of Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Sacred Classics, or Moralists Instructive Companion … Superbly Embellished (1796, 1875). The woman seems to be a blend of Rowe and biblical figures like Mary who anointed Jesus’s feet with oil. One hand gestures toward an hourglass, skull, and ringed serpent, symbols of mortality, while the other is an open palm receiving inspiration from Heaven as a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, flies overhead. Prints began to carry quotations from Rowe’s poem The Vision and labels that fixed her image as the “pious Mrs. Rowe” that we have inherited. For example, the text under an 1825 engraving by MacKenzie reads, “The devotional Elizabeth Rowe, whose writings all excite to the practice of the most generous benevolence and heroic virtue, was found dead on her knees.”⁸⁶

These portrayals had to sift through the “Life” in Miscellaneous Works, which had displayed considerable pride in Rowe as a poet and unwavering respect for her lifestyle, to find sections reinforcing their emphasis on her otherworldliness. The original “Life” and early tributes to her, like the image of the woman in the formulaic poet pose, had protected her art while keeping her religion in balance. Norma Clarke points out that “indeed, it is stressed by being utterly taken for granted in formulations like the following: ‘The love of solitude, which seems almost inseparable from a poetic genius, discovered itself very early in Mrs Rowe, and never forsook her but with life itself.’ ”⁸⁷ In fact, the rhetorical shift from “celebrated,” “polite,” “amiable,” “accomplished,” and even “virtuous” to “pious” in descriptions of her increases exponentially in the final decade of the century and largely erases the multidimensional, active woman and experimental writer. A damaging side effect is that, rather than seen as committed to rational religion, she began to be associated with evangelicals, enthusiasts, and mystics.

Yet evidence of Rowe’s sustained, wide popularity as a writer of diverse texts is abundant into the nineteenth century. In 1764 Caroline Attwater’s mother gave her the last volume of Letters Moral and Entertaining, and in 1788 Caroline passed it on to her daughter Mary Whitaker, who was fifteen years old at the time.⁸⁸ Frances Burney remarked that she had “heard a great deal of [Rowe’s Letters] before I saw them.”⁸⁹ Inscriptions from her poems appear on tombstones, as this one does in St. Vigeans Church-yard, Scotland:

Think, vain fond heart, when on the day
Of that tremendous awful deep
Eternity in sad suspense I stood;
How all my trifling hopes and fears
My senseless joys and idle tears
Vanish’d at prospect of the frightful flood.⁹⁰

In spite of her changing reputation, editions of her work in the last quarter of the century suggest growing demand for varied selections of her work, especially those giving a range of her writing. The four-volume Works of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (1796; Edinburgh and London editions) is an important example of the relative appeal of her writings. Volume one is Friendship in Death and the first two parts of Letters Moral and Entertaining; volume two is the final part of Letters and Devout Exercises; volume 3 contains poems, hymns, devout soliloquies, canticles, and History of Joseph; and the final volume has the dialogues, letters, and, finally, the life of the author followed by tributes and elegiac verses. The Poetical Works of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, including the History of Joseph in Ten Books (1820) has the dark, curly-haired engraving redone by Charles Heath and with the legend “E. Rowe—a bright etherial youth drew near, / Ineffable his motions and his air,” a quotation from her poem The Vision, printed on page 19. A small, easily portable book, the collection of poems begins rather surprisingly with her Canticles, the most erotic of her religious poetry, and then the Hymn on Heaven. An 1827 edition includes fourteen of her most pious poems along with the Letters and Devout Exercises.⁹¹

Even as cheap editions of Letters multiplied, Rowe’s Devout Exercises and other selected works came to be published in collections of pious works such as Lane’s and Cooke’s. “Harrison’s edition” of the complete Letters was a slim 156 pages (London, 1786). Thomas Gibbons in Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women who were ornaments to their Sex (1777) abridges the “Life,” inserts Pope’s entire Dying Christian to his Soul at a point at which Rowe was ill, and adds three of the selections from Devout Exercises. A 1778 edition of Poems on Several Occasions has forty-seven of the ninety-nine poems in Miscellaneous Works and History of Joseph; the poems selected give a wide range of subjects and forms, but the collection omits some of the most difficult, such as the soliloquies, but concludes with the poems on Thomas Rowe. Many collections include History of Joseph, and the increasing number of narrative, biblical paraphrases published by other poets indicates their continued appeal.

At the same time, the biography published in Miscellaneous Works was endlessly abridged to foreground her piety.⁹² Her On the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe was often printed at the end of whatever version of the life was included rather than in approximately chronological order among her poems as it had been in Miscellaneous Works. Many of the lives precede the poem by truncating the “Life” to conclude, “She was buried, according to her request, under the same stone with her father in the meeting-place at Frome” and with the poor pouring “blessings on her memory.”⁹³ In the “Life,” Rowe had conversed with a friend at 8:00 p.m. and was apparently in excellent health. About 10:00 p.m., her servant heard “some noise” and found Rowe, who had been reading, fallen from her chair dying from a stroke. She was treated by a physician and a surgeon but died “a few minutes before two” (Misc. Works, 1:xxxvii–xxxviii). This very detailed account was rather rapidly and imaginatively modified to depict Rowe in prayer on her knees and sinking gracefully and instantly into death.

The movement toward defining Rowe as an educational writer is also discernible. The edition of Cooke’s Friendship in Death (1797) presents distinctly middle-class country couples rather than the aristocratic men hailed by angel-like women in white Roman garb that had been included in earlier editions of Letters. The illustration of “Rosalinda adorning her little Companions with flowers” (Letters, 2:7; fig. 20) features children now in the genre of children’s book illustrations, such as those in Little Goody Two Shoes.

Fig. 20. Illustration for the story of Rosalinda by W. Hawkins from Friendship in Death in Cooke’s Sacred Library (London, 1797), between pages 144 and 145.

In 1969 in Popular Fiction before Richardson, John Richetti sketched how popular Rowe’s fictions had been through the beginning of the nineteenth century but observed, “Mrs. Rowe has long since passed into the darkest corners and remotest footnotes of literary histories.”⁹⁴ Shortly after Richetti’s book, Rowe was usually mentioned as part of the early history of the English novel in overviews of the form. Michael Shugrue published Letters in the “Foundations of the Novel” series (1972 edition, introduction by Josephine Grieder). Martin Battestin included her in the “British Novelists, 1660–1800” volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1985, entry written by Elizabeth Napier), and she continues to be mentioned irregularly, usually on no more than a page or two in reference and critical books on the novel. Almost none of the criticism takes seriously Richetti’s insistence that her fiction was extremely popular or breaks from Richetti’s assessment of its content. He says, rightly, that “it was a work which was widely read and apparently highly regarded.” He continues,

In fact, among the various scribbling ladies who contributed to the mass of prose fiction which precedes the florescence of the novel in Richardson and Fielding, Mrs. Rowe was probably the most highly respected and remembered during the eighteenth century itself. …

… It is hard to understand why. Her most popular work is a deadening book, written in ecstatic and inflated prose and full of the most explicit and tedious moralizing about the pains of a life of sin and the comforts of living virtuously.⁹⁵

His conclusion, that “Mrs. Rowe’s famous little book … is a literary polemic against unbelief,” is accepted as a summary of the text.

The consensus among those who have read her fictions is, in Kathryn King’s words, that Friendship in Death is “a work of unassailable piety,” and, as Norma Clarke says, “she was the well-known author of epistolary prose fictions that dwelt on the pleasures of a heavenly afterlife.”⁹⁶ Jonathan Pritchard, author of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, describes Friendship in Death as taking “sensual pleasure in the prospect of a Christian afterlife” and calls the three-volume Letters Moral and Entertaining “an improving, but single-minded, miscellany.” Also following Richetti’s assessment are those who credit her with contributing to the “moralizing of the novel,” as Jane Spencer does in her important The Rise of the Woman Novelist. In explaining Rowe’s contribution to the development of prose fiction, Cheryl Turner quotes Richetti’s sources and develops some of his ideas, including applying the relationship between her popularity and the growth of a market for moral fiction.⁹⁷ Ros Ballaster categorizes Rowe as Richetti does and mentions her on two pages in Seductive Forms. Perhaps most telling, Richetti mentions her on a single page in The English Novel in History (1999).⁹⁸ These references tend to be redundant and largely unanalytical. In fact, I disagree with most of them in this book.

Unsettlingly, mentions of her are disappearing from books on the novel. She is not included in Doreen Saar and Mary Anne Schofield’s Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Women Novelists: A Critical Reference Guide (1996) and is not treated in books whose foci make her work a logical subject such as Ruth Yeazell’s Fictions of Modesty (1991), Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity (2005), or Elizabeth Kraft’s Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers (2008). Susan Staves breaks new ground by emphasizing Rowe’s “intellectual ambitiousness,” and it is helpful to demonstrate that Rowe is engaged with some of the most pressing philosophical and theological questions of her time.⁹⁹ Because Staves’s book covers so many writers, however, there are teasing hints of, for instance, the ways Rowe may have been influenced by Tasso, but no real discussion of the variety of Rowe’s styles and strategies. In her brief treatment of the prose fiction, she suggestively and usefully finds Rowe’s to have “perhaps more kinship with the periodical essay than with the novel proper,” although she recognizes the novelistic situations and links them to romance.

The wide practice of cultural criticism has led a few critics, many of them experts on Rowe’s poetry, to hypothesize the need to reconsider her fiction. Some expand on John Richetti’s observation in fruitful ways. In 1995, for instance, Marlene Hansen wrote, “Truly, if we are to understand the cultural climate of the years immediately preceding the appearance of Richardson’s novels we cannot afford to ignore Mrs. Rowe.”¹⁰⁰ As part of their own original historical and critical inquiries, Kathryn King and Sarah Prescott have pointed out how Rowe’s career can “broaden out the accepted paradigms of female authorship” and publication.¹⁰¹ Susan Staves sees “Rowe’s success in developing cultural authority as a pious Christian laywoman [providing] a powerful model for later women writers and reformers like Hannah More and [pointing] forward to the ways in which nineteenth-century women in England and America claimed moral authority and justified their interventions in the public sphere by invoking the imperatives of Christian duty.”¹⁰² The project of expanding our understanding of women’s compositional and publication practices and their access to print is important, and Rowe is indeed a useful and somewhat unusual model, especially as she is presented in King’s “Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Tactical Use of Print and Manuscript.” In most of these recent essays there is a marked shift away from treating Rowe as part of a group of moral, even pious, women writers who are in contrast to, or even in opposition to, the unholy triumvirate of Behn, Manley, and Haywood. There seems to be a trend, usually stated rather than argued, to identify her with characteristics of the novels of Samuel Richardson’s period. Her Letters, of course, appeared eight years before Pamela.

In fact, Rowe exhibits the kinds of energetic experimentation with prose fiction characteristic of her own generation, the earliest shapers of the Anglo-American novel.¹⁰³ She clearly knew fiction well and was able to draw upon and adapt its major conventions and strategies while introducing some of her own. In fact, her writings are better described as “pivotal,” more dramatically different than transitional texts. The distinctive elements and absorption of major social movements in her fiction determined that her writing would deeply influence a group of novels written between her death in 1737 and the end of the century.

Plan of the Book

This book integrates Rowe into the history of the English novel. In every chapter, I contextualize Rowe and her fiction within major literary and social movements and finally identify the distinctive, revisionary contributions she made that shaped a line of novels extending into our own time. My first chapter positions Rowe’s fiction among the kinds of fiction being written by earlier writers and her contemporaries. While some, such as amatory and epistolary fiction, are familiar, others such as apparition and “patchwork” literature have not been used to contextualize her work and are not understood by twenty-first-century critics. This chapter demonstrates the extent to which Rowe’s Letters draw upon fictional kinds written by Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Charles Gildon, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, and others. It also points out that her Letters would have been recognized by her contemporaries as a common kind of prose fiction even as it set new directions.

Within these familiar forms, Rowe is innovative in the creation of plots, characters, and style. For example, she transforms the conflict in amatory fiction between desire and resistance born in gender education into a rational seeking of a compatible mind and sensibility that is “beautiful.” Novels before her were often the means of constructing social commentary driven by moral judgment, as John Richetti illustrates in The English Novel in History; although there is social commentary and moral judgment, prose fiction for Rowe was a means of self-discovery and construction and therefore inward directed. This chapter lays the groundwork for my argument that Rowe reworked the amatory tale and the female bildungsroman into the plot of hundreds of novels that followed hers and continue today. Women are still besieged but threatened not by seduction and rape but by oppressive situations and misfortune, and they wage a fierce battle to establish peace of mind and the ability to maintain it.

In chapter two, I take up an even older form, an influence identified in Rowe’s preface that has been, I believe, completely ignored: French women’s fairy tales, especially those of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. As is well recognized, lightly disguised forms of fairy tales continue to be used to transmit important kinds of romantic and feminist stories,¹⁰⁴ and Rowe was a pioneer in adapting them in these modern ways that are withstanding the tests of time. I am categorizing fairy tale in this popular culture way and with awareness that specialists identify them as “wonder tales” defined by their plot trajectory rather than by the inclusion of fairies. This inquiry opens a new avenue for beginning to place Rowe (and d’Aulnoy) in the history of the English novel and contributes to our understanding of the formative influences on the early English novel. My chapter brings together many English women’s original fairy tales, an exercise that contradicts much current scholarship that denies the existence of a British fairy tale tradition. Unlike the forms in chapter one, the women’s fairy tales include extended sections in which the protagonists revealed their feelings, thoughts, and aspirations, thus shifting emphasis from action to interior life.

In one of D’Aulnoy’s tales, Zephyrus tells the Prince that everyone goes in quest of felicity “where they enjoy the Fruits of a Calm and Tranquillity.”¹⁰⁵ This is the quest that Rowe puts at the heart of her stories. Moreover, imagining other kinds of worlds as well as creating an “elsewhere,” a place of freedom from the limitations of imposed gender identity, conduct, and even thought, became increasingly common in eighteenth-century women’s fiction, and the fairy tale was a starting point. It was a land of possibilities for alternative lifestyles and domestic situations and even, in Nancy K. Miller’s formulation, a figuring of “the existence of other subjective economies, other styles of identity.”¹⁰⁶ As my chapters cumulatively reveal, this was one of Rowe’s major techniques. This chapter is especially important for understanding Rowe’s distinctive style and her development of aesthetic aspects of the novel.

These chapters and each subsequent chapter are built around analyses of an aspect of form and style in Letters, especially as they develop a specific register that became exceptionally influential. It is important to recognize that the forms on which Rowe drew put a single, independent woman alone on center stage. The character writing a letter, the seer of an apparition, and the authorial stance of writers of patchworks are often such women. D’Aulnoy and Rowe were for most of their lives single, successful, admired women. These facts subtly broke down the power of heteronormativity with marriage as the measure of adulthood and success. Therefore, as I will do throughout the book, I will consider literary as well as lifestyle aspects that influenced her contemporaries and turned Rowe’s life into a text to be read and interpreted by them.

It would be possible to see the first two chapters as forward looking because of Rowe’s revisionary adaptations, and chapter three uses the forms discussed in them as the foundation for exploration of Rowe’s contributions to the development of a distinct novelistic register. I use register rather than discourse or style, because the term simultaneously encompasses awareness of context (“field of activity/situation,” in linguistic terms), tenor (an important gauge of status and highly pertinent to the development of the novel), and mode. Tenor, a sustained range (as for a singing voice), is an important determinant of status and, therefore, highly pertinent to the development of the novel. It gives access to the status, social roles, and relationships of participants. It was a meaningful concept to her contemporaries; Thomas Gray, for instance, wrote the famous lines “Along the cool sequestered vale of life / They kept the noiseless tenor of their way” in Elegy in a Country Church-Yard. Thus, he encompasses both class and parameters of lifestyle. Mode includes both rhetorical modes (persuasive, expository) and channels of communication (visual signals, spoken, written, monologic). Eighteenth-century writers consistently deployed mode, an identifiable method, mood, or manner such as pastoral or satiric, with telling results, and Rowe created a distinctive novelistic discourse from the parameters of field of activity, tenor, and the broader understanding of mode.¹⁰⁷ Content and ideology are inseparable in register, and Rowe carefully maintained one that created an authorial stance and perspective.

In this chapter, too, is the fullest treatment of poetic practices relevant to Rowe’s fiction writing. Her poetry is highly, even wildly experimental, and Letters gave her another laboratory in which she could experiment with its aesthetics and functions. Many of the themes and language types are in the prose, but Letters also includes many original and quoted poems. The chapter looks at the influences and similarities between her poetry and prose, but it also points out how Rowe uses poetry for a wide variety of purposes in her stories. A little analyzed aspect of later eighteenth-century fiction is the function of poetry in novels, and Rowe, again, provided models. She released its power to allow characters to express emotions and thoughts not appropriate in prose, its ability to shift thought and experience from one realm to another, and its potential to raise the cultural capital of a text. From her poetic career she learned to domesticate both style and content, thereby creating a modern novelistic style that is still widely accepted and respected. I draw on theorists of the reading revolution such as Roger Chartier, Cheryl Nixon, Eric Rothstein, and Elspeth Jajdelska to demonstrate how Rowe assumes modern reading practices and takes advantage of them to increase her authority as a writer and interpreter. Significantly, she raises the status of the novel by creating an aesthetics of production that her readers meet with an aesthetics of reception, and character, author, and reader are drawn together into a dynamic triad. Specifically, the reader is led to construct herself from what she has experienced in the construction of author and character within the text, a strategy that would become popular in self-consciously artistic novels.

Chapter four returns to epistolarity, this time not as an inherited genre but as a technology of the politeness movement, and, as I brought her poetry into an earlier chapter, I bring her published personal letters into this one. I argue that the ideology and sensibility of this movement are woven into her fictions, and this advanced the development and status of the novel. The movement was in itself a technology of social production, and as Michel Foucault demonstrates, its everyday practices and institutionalized discourses and epistemologies are always accompanied by acceptance, adaptation, and resistance—technologies of the self. Rowe once wrote that places of retirement were where “you fortify yourself against the tyranny of custom, and the impositions of persons” and have “the most exact and impartial notions” (Misc. Works, 2:27–28). She seems to be particularly interested in the formation of what Ulric Neisser calls the conceptual self, that sense of self that comes from a network of assumptions and theories. She also seems to take for granted that the person is tied to her own identity by conscience and self-knowledge.

Thus, this chapter takes up how Rowe incorporates into her Letters some of the emergent technologies in her culture. I use technologies as Michel Foucault does and will concentrate on technologies of the self, the devices and techniques that make possible the social construction of personal identity. In other words, these technologies produce the knowledge of what human beings should do and who they believe they are, the conceptual self. Built in, then, are the pressures that produce a social product who knows how to act and also the need to counteract, rebel, or adapt selectively. Eric Rothstein has identified the reading revolution with the creation of “modernity” and with readers “[welcoming] continuous, directed, self-modification.” As I do, he imagines readers imagining possibilities. He postulates “a sense of self that centers one’s reality, that incorporates an ‘enriched’ personality, and that gains its stability by its agency in choosing.”¹⁰⁸ He does not mention Rowe, but she was the pivotal figure in creating such characters and readers.

I will highlight, first, the already established politeness movement and, second, Rowe’s model of a technology of the self that became a disciplining, social technology carried out through institutionalized discourses and epistemologies. The emphasis in both is on gendered self-mastery, and the second is so important because it met emergent pressures to constrict and restrict women’s behavior. In Rowe’s hands the quest for a satisfying lifestyle becomes dramatized technologies of the self. She created for writers who followed her novels of steadfastness in contrast to the line of novels of resignation, submission, or stoicism. The chapter concludes by tracing Rowe’s influence into a few texts published very soon after hers that also create novels focused on lifestyle creation and technologies of self-mastery. I give special attention to Mary Collyer, who styled Felicia to Charlotte as “a pastoral adventure,” and to Sarah Fielding, who called David Simple a moral romance, thus specifying genre and mode names that would be useful today. These novels are often associated with the gentility or politeness movement. Especially important are themes of “dear liberty” and the possibility for a code of politeness different from and parallel to the masculine one associated most strongly with the Earl of Shaftesbury. It was, as Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen observe, “the main technique of male self-fashioning in the eighteenth century.” Philip Carter illustrates how the politeness movement was deeply concerned with constructing and establishing a normalized understanding of masculinity, one that used women in a variety of ways.¹⁰⁹ Rowe and the women who followed her recognized the usefulness of a parallel politeness movement for women, one that came to produce a subaltern counterpublic. They “invent[ed] and circulate[d] counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs.”¹¹⁰

The conclusion extends the study of these technologies and continues the dual emphasis on prose fiction and life as text by linking Rowe’s life and work to the Bluestockings. It argues that the legacy of her lifestyle may be almost as important as her influence on the English novel. The Bluestocking society was a paradigm shift that recast the terms and perceptions that had defined, marginalized, and circumscribed intellectual women and their work, and Rowe was a major empowering example for them and for women writers who followed her and wrote fiction with heroines similar to hers. In spite of the fact that the Bluestockings wrote about Rowe, referred to her frequently, and traveled to read the Green Book of her manuscript letters, even the most distinguished experts on the Bluestockings do not figure Rowe into any history of the movement. Rowe modeled a lifestyle ahead of its time, asserting values and a quest that now have been naturalized and need to be re-historicized to appreciate her accomplishments.

The conclusion then turns back to fiction and to the fact that she set a course that hundreds of novels followed and by which others were influenced. Rowe’s major theme was how women might achieve a satisfying life without yielding to social pressures, and she created characters who were rational and had important interior lives. She set a course for other fiction writers that they expanded—“dilated,” as critics say about Richardson’s fiction—into the long novels that are familiar to us. She provided a pattern that a very large number of novels followed and then tested, critiqued, or continued to imitate. The story of her influence on women’s publications remains to be traced. After her Miscellaneous Works, some of the best women writers of the century were empowered to collect not only their literary works but also personal letters. Examples are Mary Jones’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1750), which includes letters, and Mary Masters’s Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions (1755).

These chapters demonstrate that Rowe can be seen as a pivotal figure in important ways. Just as she metamorphosed in her readers’ minds from the Pindarick Lady to Philomela to “the author of Friendship in Death,” she drew upon the racy fiction of earlier and contemporary women writers even as she laid the groundwork for the “polite” fiction and novels of manners published after her death. Her fictions exhibit rapid, dynamic experimentation with all of her contemporaries’ signature techniques and plotlines. Decades ago, Jerry Beasley pointed out that she and Penelope Aubin were “conscious innovators” who “confirmed new possibilities of form, range, and seriousness in contemporary novelistic fiction.”¹¹¹ As Kathryn King says, “Letters from the Dead to the Living is in effect a strong acknowledgment of the new cultural authority of print.”¹¹² It is finally time to give substance to these statements.

Rowe is also a site strongly marked by the transition to modern multivariant literary and popular culture. Bringing highly successful strategies from coterie composition and critique into a text that would appeal to a broad spectrum of what King calls “an unknown and impersonal audience,” Rowe, as we shall see, skillfully combined material from what we recognize today as popular culture with what her contemporaries identified as aristocratic aesthetic practices. Most significantly perhaps, she created a conception of a lifestyle from these often opposed artistic modes, one that impelled novels of the next decades and inspired lived practices as well. My book, then, illustrates the pivotal nature of Rowe’s highly influential, long-ignored prose fiction and suggests new ways that she and her writing are more significant for literary history, for the development of the novel, for the rise of modern sensibility, and for women’s studies than we have recognized.