Sisters in the Wilderness by Charlotte Gray

settlement or promise of future legacy. He rushed up to Scotland to visit a smattering of elderly and, he hoped, benevolent uncles, but kept in touch with his beloved Susie in daily letters.
    The ardour in those letters burns as brightly today as it did when he sharpened his goose quill and dipped it into the ink: “Believe me you are indeed with me when I lie down and when I rise my thoughts are still with you—you still are present in my dreams with your smiles and the looks you wore when first I loved you.” In page after page, John described tohis fiancée the tortuous process of chasing family money from elderly relatives. They all seemed to be ensnared by debts, complicated entails on their properties and lawsuits. But John was never one to let setbacks lower his spirits; he quickly moved on to exuberant, thigh-slapping descriptions of various adventures. “My old craze for boat sailing seized me one day,” began a five-page account of a terrifying sail, in which John was nearly shipwrecked in the Pentland Firth. Despite a savage storm, and the inexperience of his young companion, John managed to haul his dinghy off the rocks. He then took refuge in the harbour at Hoy, his birthplace. The locals greeted him rapturously, to his delight. “A poor old woman near a hundred years of age, who had been a servant of my grandfather’s, sent her grand-daughter to me with a pair of worsted stockings….Ah! my Susie had you been with me this would indeed have been one of the happiest moments of my life.”
    John’s inclination to revel in danger and regale listeners with his adventures was a mixed blessing. His intention had been to sweep his bride off her feet. He wanted to take her back to his property in South Africa immediately after they were married and he had wangled some capital out of his family. At first, Susanna fell in with these plans and worked harder than ever to churn out stories for the annuals. “I must depend on my wits to buy my wedding clothes,” she explained to friends. But although John’s braggadocio about shooting elephants and leopards at the Cape, not to mention his spine-tingling descriptions of snakes, amused the habitués of London drawing rooms, they started to unnerve Susanna. While John was scouring Scotland for rich relatives, she got cold feet. She began to wonder whether the literary lions of London weren’t more her style than the tawny-maned lions of South Africa. She asked herself why she would move to a colony in which slavery was still permitted, when the Mary Prince story had made her a fervent abolitionist. In January 1831, while John was still in Scotland, she abruptly broke off the engagement: “I have changed my mind. You may call me a jilt or a flirt or what you please.…I will neither marry a soldier nor leave my country for ever …”
    What happened to the great love affair? Susanna, it seems, had found herself in a very modern dilemma. She had recognized that if she followed her heart, she would probably be abandoning her ambitions. “[I] feel happy that I am once more my own mistress,” she admitted to a confidant. Her writing career had taken off: that year she had managed to place stories in several publications, including Harral’s monthly, La Belle Assemblée , the weekly Athenaeum and the annuals The Amulet, Friendship’s Offering and Juvenile Forget-Me-Not . She was meeting or corresponding with kindred spirits such as Mary Russell Mitford, a single woman sixteen years her senior who was supporting herself as a professional writer. And the more Susanna heard about the empty, arid grasslands of the Cape, the less attractive they sounded—especially when she compared them to the streets of London.
    It is not difficult to imagine the appeal to Susanna Strickland of the London of the early nineteenth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the capital had been transformed