Sisters in the Wilderness by Charlotte Gray Page A

from a conglomeration of villages, such as Westminster and Chelsea, linked by muddy lanes and narrow streets, into a magnificent city traversed by paved roads. Six new bridges across the Thames River, built between 1750 and 1827, had supplemented London Bridge, and by unclogging the city’s arteries had enormously increased commerce. The population had doubled in the previous fifty years: with two million citizens, it was now not only the largest city in the world but also its principal financial exchange, the “Rialto of the age” in James Morris’s phrase. Private developers had built grandiose terraces of large houses, like the Nash Terraces on the south side of Regent’s Park, and elegant rows of shops along Oxford Street and Bond Street. Men of business and letters congregated in the coffee houses, book shops and clubs of Piccadilly. Susanna could wander down busy thoroughfares, listening to the noisy cries of vendors selling lavender, cherries, hot loaves or gingerbread, as she admired shop windows full of the latest furniture designs or Paris fashions.
    Moreover, the world was opening up for talented young women like the Strickland sisters. The capital was exploding with the kind of culturalactivities in which, following the example set by Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Mary Russell Mitford, Susanna could envisage a future. Elizabeth was already editing her periodical; Agnes was frequently mentioned as a “poetess” in society columns; Catharine was a popular writer of children’s books. The booksellers, engravers and publishers who had offices in St. Paul’s Churchyard, Paternoster Row, Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street were eager for material. The introduction of steam printing after 1814 had lowered costs and multiplied the number of copies of a publication that could be printed in a short time. There were close to three hundred newspapers circulating through the United Kingdom. Did Susanna really want to exchange this buzz of literary activity for the isolation of a South African farm, surrounded by hostile “Kaffirs” and truculent Boers? Did she really want to leave a city in which women were playing an increasingly important public role to live in a country that still endorsed the inhumane practices that Mary Prince had described?
    It is clear that “Papa” Pringle influenced Susanna’s decision to forsake romance and devote herself to the literary life. Thomas and Margaret Pringle had lived in South Africa for seven years; that’s where they had met John Dunbar Moodie. But they had returned to England in 1826, sickened by the way the British government condoned slavery in the colony and exasperated by the way it blew hot and cold in its policies towards the Boer majority. Thomas attached more importance to his hopes for Susanna than to his friendship with Moodie. He painted a dispiriting picture of colonial life to his young protegée and encouraged her to reconsider her engagement. A young woman of her talent, he argued, would thrive in the publishing world—especially with himself as her mentor. “By the strong recommendation of my friends,” Susanna reported home, “I have been induced to board with a family for the next three months and to try my fortune in the world of letters….I hope to get on and prosper.” Her new London lodgings were in Middleton Square, in the district of Finsbury—a respectable but unassuming address. Like Islington to its north, and Bloomsbury to its west,Finsbury was a pleasant neighbourhood of spacious Georgian squares, filled with flower-beds, trees and lawns and surrounded by beautifully proportioned terraces of four- or five-storeyed houses. Susanna’s rooms overlooked the newly consecrated St. Mark’s, a fine stone church with a splendid tower. And she was just around the corner from “Papa” Pringle, in Claremont Square.

    For three