The Writings of an English Sappho (review)

An indication that we need Phillippy’s edition of the works of Elizabeth Russell is that, in Russell’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the article draws on sources exclusively about her male associates—men ranging from her husband the translator Thomas Hoby to King James I. The structure of the book, which reflects some interesting choices on the part of the editor, has four sections, each representing what Phillippy considers to be a stage in Russell’s life: her first marriage and widowhood, her second marriage, her long widowhood, and the last years. In each of the first three stages, there are four main divisions: verse, letters, documents, and monuments, poetry-composition and monument-design being the artistic endeavors in which Russell distinguished herself; letters and documents providing vital clues into her role as mother, courtier, wife, administrator, and of course artist. The fourth section contains no verse, but included among the documents is Russell’s only publication: a translation of a religious tract, drafted and circulated forty years before she finally decided to publish it. Also interspersed throughout this edition are images printed on thick, matte paper that depict her monuments, both the figures she designed and the writings she contributed.

The decision to print the works of art and business side by side may justly be seen as following indirectly from the intended argument of the edition, namely, to rehabilitate the career of an English poet by focusing on the forms of publication and publicity less recognized now than in the author’s own time. Russell’s art is the product and the victim of the circumstances in which she produced it. Phillippy chose to show the social and financial circumstances alongside the artistic ones.

The warts-and-all portrait that emerges is by turns fascinating and disturbing. At her worst, Russell comes off as a sixteenth-century forerunner to Mrs. Bennett, querelously and ineffectually working to protect her daughters’ inheritances and further their marital prospects. But Mrs. Bennett was not a poet in Greek or Latin, and there was no question of whether she preferred the life of the mind or the life of the professional gossip (letters 20–22), self-appointed lawyer (pp 417–428), and matchmaker (letters 19, 25, etc.). When Russell signs her innumerable letters to nephew Robert Cecil “Your desolate Aunt” (letters 27–29), “your aunt that ever deserved the best” (letter 30), “Your poor aunt” (letter 31), there is something grating about such complaining, but something sympathetic, too, about a woman given the gift of a man’s education and the curse of a woman’s social and political limitations. The poetry is of a piece with the letters, but what falls flat in her letters moves with great power in her poetry. Her Latin epitaph for her second husband, Lord Russell, is a good example, its anger movingly translated into English by Goodrich: “My wounded mind is lacerated with cruel pain / When the thought of your death, having appeared, occurs. / Truly of late, heir of an earl, you [were] like a flower, / until falling dead, you made me and my [daughters] wretched. / Certainly, grace, looks, speech, and good habits, / Also learning, pass away, but bountiful faith flourishes” (175). One cannot help but notice the very quality that makes the letters feel at times strained fits so comfortably in this gorgeous short poem.

Note the emphasis on the birth of her husband, one of his only qualities described in any specificity. Her reliance on titles did not stop there, nor at the self-pitying designations with which she ended her letters—”poor,” “dowager,” desolate.” She fought hard for the right to call herself countess, a right that was in question since her second husband predeceased his father, and so never became 3rd Earl of Bedford. She was nevertheless a countess in the memorial monument she designed for herself (p 443). When Lord Russell died, she had her daughters march in...