Julia Markus - Across an Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time

NOVELS

Uncle
American Rose
Friends Along the Way
A Change of Luck
Patron of the Arts: A Novella

BIOGRAPHY

Dared and Done:
The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

EDITIONS

Casa Guidi Windows by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets from the Portuguese:
Illuminated by the Brownings Love Letters (coeditor)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2000 by Julia Markus

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-307-83298-6
Library of Congress Card Number: 00-108133

v3.1

Dedicated to the memory of Diane Cleaver

Get leave to work
In this worldtis the best you get at all.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Aurora Leigh

T HE AUTHOR is grateful to so many libraries in the United States and Great Britain that she consulted and read at as she worked on this biography, most particularly: the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the National Library of Scotland, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Carlyle House in London, the Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Theatre Collection of Harvard University, the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum Collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, the Alexander Turnbull Library of New Zealand, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The staffs of these libraries have been so kind and helpful. It is a pleasure to thank Fred Bauman at the Library of Congress and Carol Johnson, curator of photography there, Iain Maciver and the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Helene Gold and Jacalyn Blume at the Schlesinger Library, Georgina Ziegler at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Jean Ashton, director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. I would like to thank, as well, the Marquess of Northampton, who graciously gave me access to Harriet Hosmers letters to Louisa Lady Ashburton, the editors of the invaluable and ongoing Duke/Edinburgh edition of the letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and the very helpful Timothy Lovett-Smith of the Alexander Turnbull Library of New Zealand, who enthusiastically e-mailed me with so much information concerning the JewsburyMantell correspondence.

A months grant at the International Writers retreat at Hawthornden Castle outside of Edinburgh gave me the time to consult the National Library of Scotland daily and to come to some knowledge of the Carlyles Scotland as well. I cannot thank the staff and the beneficent Drue Heinz adequately for true hospitality and kindness which added so much to this biography. The Scottish experience was further enriched by a week in Dumfries, where I consulted the city records and library, as well as visiting more of Carlyle CountryTempland, Craigenputtock, and Ecclefechanfrom my perch on the River Nith.

Many thanks to Virginia Surtees, Louisa Lady Ashburtons biographer, and to Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmers biographer, for conversations and support, as well as to both Fred Kaplan and Ian Campbell for conversations on matters pertaining to Thomas Carlyle, to Elizabeth Milroy for the photograph of her great-aunt Emma Stebbins with Charlotte Cushman, and to Gilles Rousseau for his generous help with the photographs. To Hof-stra University for research and materials grants, as well as for a special leave to initiate this book, I am, as always, quite grateful.

To all my enthusiastic friends who encouraged this project, warm thanks. To my literary representative Harriet Wasserman and to my editor Victoria Wilson, for support, wisdom, and constant inspirationmore than words can say.

ROME, LONDON
18521857

S OMETHING NEW under the Roman sun: a household of unmarried women. Independent women they were called in 1852. The famous American actress Charlotte Cushman, always paterfamilias, leased the house on the Corso and filled it with her friends. The actress was thirty-six years old at the time. Having raised herself and her family from poverty to riches, Charlotte was retiring from the stage. She came to the Eternal City with her companion, Matilda M. Hays, British translator of George Sand. Matilda was a few years younger and more feminine in appearance than Charlotte, though they both dressed like men from the waist up, wearing tight, lapeled bodices, handsome waistcoats, and elegant bow ties.

A third person in this party of jolly bachelors, as they called themselves, was a young woman of twenty-two, short, chubby, and daring, who soon dressed like a man from the waist down as well as up. She rode her horse, scrambling about, going anywhere in Rome and its countryside that she desiredalone.

Harriet Hosmer was her name; Hattie she was called. Hatties hair was cropped, and when she joked around or talked seriously about the art of sculpture, she pushed her fingers through it like a boy. The popular British actress Fanny Kemble, who knew Hattie since she was a child, worried that Hatties peculiarities, as she phrased it, might be held against her genius. But not in Rome. Or in Florence, where residents such as the Brownings fell in love with that fun-loving, free-spirited American. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who found Hattie strange at first, soon found her pure, pure, pure.

Three other independent women joined them on the Corso, justifying Charlottes friends joking remark that the actress was never seen with fewer than six people in tow.

Charlotte took care of the household expenses, her fortune recently increased by a long and profitable farewell tour in America. She had been absent from her homeland for five years, during which time her spectacular success on the British stage turned her into a legend. Cushmania marked her return. In New York and Philadelphia the actress had trouble wending her way into her dressing room through the crowds that lined the streets to greet her, to touch her. She was escorted through the throng by Sallie Mercer. Sallie, part of the Cushman mystique, was with her in Rome. She was Charlottes prompter, her skilled dresser, her housekeeperher right hand, Charlotte called her.

Charlotte had hired the bright, outspoken, literate Sallie in Philadelphia when Sallie was only fourteen and Charlotte at twenty-eight was about to try her luck abroad for the first time. Charlotte always had an instinct for the right people. She saw Sallies intelligence and determination in the high cast of her forehead, in the brown sheen of her skin.

Sallie, shed write, and then list a complicated set of instructions for the girlpeoples houses to go to, what to say, messages to deliver and returnsigned Charlotte. Though Sallies mother objected, Sallie was eager to accompany Charlotte to Londonand since then hardly ever left her side.