Sisters in the Wilderness by Charlotte Gray Page B

exhilarating months in 1832, Susanna lived the life of a bluestocking in Middleton Square, London.
    At first, Susanna found her independence stimulating. “All my friends promise to call upon me in my new home!” She reeled off to her Suffolk friends James and Emma Bird a catalogue of the distinguished writers she had met, and the invitations to “grand converzationes” she had received. She watched a ragtag political demonstration in the streets of Islington, which she told James Bird would have made him laugh himself “into pleurisy.” Finsbury was a neighbourhood peopled with literary and artistic types, such as the cartoonist William Cruikshank. “We often met and had a chat about things,” she would recall in later years. “He was a wonderful man in his way.” One of her neighbours was Edward Irving, a prominent preacherwho ranted from the pulpit in a strong Scottish accent about the need for more ritual in church services. Susanna fought through his crowds of admirers to hear him perform. “It was worth enduring a state of suffocation to see and hear him. …I never took my eyes from off this strange apparition… . Imagine a tall man with high aquiline features and a complexion darkly brilliant with long raven love locks hanging down to his waist, his sleeves so short as to show part of his naked arms and his person arrayed in the costume of old reformers.” In addition to lively letters to friends, she turned out an amazing volume of work—book reviews, stories, songs, poems. Her self-doubt, and her ambivalence about success vanished. At the Pringles’ weekly receptions, Susanna glowed as distinguished editors pointed her out to each other as one of the brightest among the new women writers.
    Susanna was particularly entertained by the egos and behaviour of those—like Irving, Pringle and the editors of the various annuals—who made their living by their wits. She observed the affectations of the young member of Parliament Edward Lytton, her exact contemporary but already an established dandy and the successful author (under his pen name Bulwer-Lytton) of two successful novels. She never forgot her first glimpse of the historian Thomas Carlyle, “but he was such a crabbed looking man that I did not care to make his acquaintance,” she told an interviewer years later. She had felt on the margins of family life as a child, while sweet-tempered Catharine got all the attention. Now, as a woman, and as someone uncertain about her own social status, she once again felt like an outsider in London’s beau monde . Nobody observes her fellow human beings with a more acid clarity than someone who feels she doesn’t really belong in the magic circle, and Susanna’s whole life had prepared her for this role. In letters she polished a style of cool amusement that echoes Jane Austen’s delicious sense of irony. “There is to me a charm in literary society which none other can give,” Susanna wrote to a friend, “were it only for the sake of studying more closely the imperfections of temper and the curious manner in which vanity displays itself in persons of superior mind and intellect.”
    After a few weeks of trying to support herself, however, the pressure to produce and the battles to secure adequate payment began to erode Susanna’s confidence. “A single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else,” Jane Austen had written in Emma , a few years earlier. “But a single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls!” When Susanna was in a good mood, she believed she could conquer the world. But when her spirits sank, nightmares of penury, spinsterhood and emotional starvation shrank her horizons. She had only to look at her three eldest sisters for a vision of a bluestocking future.