Editor's Note: In 1809 she sent Walter Scott a translation from Gaelic. He arranged to have her first poems printed in a collection. Lived with her husband in Italy (1817-1818; 1820), where she died in childbirth in 1830. Her husband printed her poems in 1833.

Margaret Clephane, Lady Compton 

By Laura Mandell

Critical Essay

Margaret Maclean Clephane, the close friend and ultimately ward of Sir Walter Scott, was born and raised in Torloisk, and, as would be befitting the progeny of the Highland clan the Macleans, was well-versed in "the music and poetry of the Celtic tradition" (MacCunn 99). A Scottish aristocrat, she and her two sisters represented "the fine fleur of Highland breeding and hospitality" (MacCunn 99). Scott introduced Margaret to her husband, sending the future English Earl of Northampton, Lord Compton, to Torloisk with a letter of introduction and a book that Scott wanted to give to her, "contain[ing] a very pretty panegyric on your father which is the chief reason for sending it" (Letters, 11 July 1813, iii.299). After the two fell in love, Scott negotiated the marriage settlement with the Compton family's lawyer (1815), making certain to get the highest annuity possible ("it is morally impossible that you two great folks can start with 2000 pounds a year only") from what he considered to be a rather stingy family and effectively securing her an ample dower of between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds per year (Letters, April-June, 1815, iv.43, 62). She wrote to a friend about the marriage negotiations: "Do you know, through it all, who has been father, brother, everything to me? - Mr. Scott" (qtd. in Johnson 493). After becoming a countess, Margaret received the title Marchioness in 1828, dying a scant two years later in Rome. A letter from Scott to Lady Compton advises her not to leave England for Italy immediately after her marriage, since it might offend her new family (Letters, 16 November 1816, iv.211). Margaret probably wanted to travel to Italy for her health but also had intellectual reasons: "How does the Italian advance?" Scott inquires in 1809. Her aristocratic education made Italy feel like home to her intellectually as well as physically.

There is a story about Lady Compton circulated among Scott scholars. While Compton and her "bairns" were visiting Scott at Abbotsford, a friend of his arrived, a Mrs. Coutts, who had become extremely rich from poor beginnings by marrying a London banker (scandalously "a bare fortnight after the death of his first wife, Johnson 875) and later, after visiting Scott, married a Duke. In a letter to Maria Edgeworth, who could have written such a scene for insertion into Belinda, Scott says,

We have been inundated by friends . . . . , my friend and ward Lady Compton with her mother sisters and children. On the back of this came the Mistress of millions Mrs. Thomas Coutts whom I could gladly have seen at some other time . . . for her [deceased] husband . . . had been at all times kind and liberal to me . . . . However I could not help the matter so I een let rank and wealth fight it out their own way. (Letters, October 1824, viii.383-4)

Edgeworth replied: "I wish I had been by to see 'Rank and Wealth' fighting it out, and you sitting by, . . . -- with your innocent look, which I could never see without laughing . . ."[1] Yet the story among Scott scholars is that Scott, unable to bear the snobbery with which the Clephanes and Lady Compton treated Mrs. Coutts, pulled Lady Compton aside, telling her of the "shabby" treatment Coutts habitually received among the English aristocracy in London: "I am sure you would not for the world [behave as they do]; but you must permit me to take the great liberty of saying, that I think the style you have all received my guest Mrs. Coutts in, this evening, is, to a certain extent, a sin of the same order" (Lockhart vii.56, Johnson 874). Lady Compton allegedly replied: "I thank you, Sir Walter; -- you have done me the great honor to speak as if I had been your daughter, and depend upon it you shall be obeyed with heart and good-will" (Lockhart viii.56). Whether the story is true or not, it reveals something, I believe, about Compton's character as visible in her poems and perhaps captured best in her relationship with Scott as it unfolds in their letters to each other: they shared an idealistic desire for truly moral nobility among the higher ranks.

In Compton, in short, we have an aristocratic woman, intent on fulfilling the exigencies of her station, proud of her heritage, and so well educated that she is as comfortable translating Jacobite songs from the Gaelic as she is translating odes by Goethe and Petrarch. She and Scott shared a passion for Gaelic balladry and Jacobitism (both advocating it emotionally but not politically, a taste they shared with the Prince Regent[2]) as can be seen by some of the songs collected in Irene [and] Miscellaneous Poems (1832), published only privately "for her friends" after her death. She is "skilled in legendary lore," Scott writes to Byron in 1816 (Letters, iv.163), so much so that she clearly influenced Waverley, as her letter to Scott on the occasion of its anonymous publication shows:

Is it possible that Mr. Erskine can have written it? The poetry, I think, would prove a different descent in any court in Christendom. The turn of the phrases in many places is so peculiarly yours, that I fancy I hear your voice repeating them; and there wants but verse to make all Waverley an enchanting poem - varying to be sure from grave to gay, but with so deepening an interest as to leave an impression on the mind that few - very few poems - could awaken. But why did not the author allow me to be his Gaelic Dragoman? Oh! Mr. ---, whoever you are, you might have safely trusted - M.M.C. (Lockhart iv.256-7)

Most clear from this letter is that she was Scott's Gaelic "guide and interpreter" in the Scottish Highlands, and she sounds hurt that he didn't trust her by confiding in her his authorship. "Interpreter" might be meant literally: Scott writes to her in 1809, "I have strong hopes of putting myself to school to you in the Gaelic though I fear I should but disgrace my teacher" (27 October 1809, ii.263). But it may be meant more than literally as well. [3] translating Gaelic songs that celebrate Bonnie Prince Charlie ("He comes, he comes from climes afar!" 168-9). The harp-playing Miss Clephane may resemble the harp-playing Flora of Waverley; Compton perhaps "sat" for Flora's portrait. But Compton's letter about Waverley shows more than her keen literary taste and sense of authorial voice.

Compton sees Waverley as a long poem, and indeed, the "selection" of her poetry in Irene offers us primarily, with some significant exceptions, narrative poems driven by engaging plots very delicately devised. The poetical dedication of Irene to Compton's mother, appearing at the end of the poem, tells Mrs. Clephane that Compton has indeed focused on plot and exhorts her, if the poem is "dull," to "lodge it in the fire" (150). Though this line might seem to betoken feminine self-deprecation, given the narrative pace and, truthfully, the difficulty readers will have in setting this poem down between cantos, her exhortation is rather made with a sense of her own power: critics may find in her poem, she says, "Bad rhymes, bad lines" (150) as she struggles with the "nine-legg'd verse" form (113) or Spenserisan stanza, but no one will be bored. As poems such as "The Outlaw" attest, Compton excels at narrative.

The plot of Irene is both intricate and, especially in the latter half, fast-paced: "an hour, a [short] span" in a person's life, Compton says in Irene, "Will sometimes make strange work" (p. 76), and the hours she gives us of Florio's life are indeed strangely action-packed. The story takes place in Renaissance Italy, on the plains of Lombardy, in Naples, and in Palermo, and it may offer disguised political history of a particular set of wars, Compton's disavowals to the contrary. Irene, daughter of an overly liberal King, and Florio are raised together and fall absolutely in love. A Sylph attempts to lure Irene into becoming his queen of Heaven, and she harshly rejects him, avowing her eternal love for Florio. On her wedding day, after she and Florio are united, the Sylph steals her away, attempting to convince her that her faith in Florio's vows of constant love is misplaced. Florio valiantly attempts to find her, and nearly succeeds, but is imprisoned and almost killed by the Sylph, coming to safety in a foreign land. There Florio is amorously pursued by three women, becoming quite rich from one, an elder protectress who leaves him her wealth. He goes off to war, spurning the other two women, a princess and Theresa. Theresa dies for love of him while attempting to enter a convent, and Florio witnesses her death. The townspeople become convinced that he is responsible for her death through satanic means and decide to burn him at the stake, but the princess rescues him from their dungeon, only, however, in order to wreak her own vengeance on him. The Sylph rescues Florio from the princess's prison, having promised Irene that, if she still loves Florio alone after a certain amount of time has elapsed, the Sylph will reunite the two. He brings Florio to Irene to live on the plains of Palermo, enclosed by a glass wall. At first Florio is utterly happy to be once again with his wife, but later begins to despise her and asks her to do anything the Sylph requires in order to get the Sylph to destroy the glass wall: "By fair means or foul, I will get hence away" (141). Irene offers herself to the Sylph, on condition that he destroy the wall, but then, on the way to the Sylph's heaven, deliberately throws herself from his carriage and dies by falling into the ocean.

Since the story ends with what can be read as Irene's masochistic submission to Florio's commands, the poem will hardly be called "feminist." If not feminist, however, Irene is definitely gynocentric. Early in the poem, as a way of showing us her cards and revealing the focus of her sympathies, Compton offers a history of women's fashion as a pacifist tactic, to get men's minds away from each new technological invention in the art of war and seduce them "back to social life and truce": the corset, for instance, counters gunpowder (6). While the history of fashion may be tongue-in-cheek, Compton's focus on woman is not.

Compton's posthumous editor, perhaps her husband, includes in this collection as an appendix the story "Le Palais de la Vengeance" by the Comtesse de Murat which "suggested the story of Irene"; but Compton's plot is infinitely more complicated and, significantly, more gynocentric in a number of different ways. In Murat's story, as many men are carried away by evil fairies as are women (or more, perhaps); in Compton's, the plot begins with and turns on Irene's ravishment which is compared to Psyche's and Prosperine's. Moreover, whereas Murat's version is more what one would expect from Rochefocault, providing a worldly-wise moral, Compton's moral is less about humanity and more about women's noble idealism as the source both of unbearable emotional pain and of their artistry.

Murat's story proposes that two devoted lovers, if left alone together forever, will end by disgusting each other (and it won't take that long). In contrast, Compton specifically sets out to illustrate that women are the victim of "man's inconstancy" (148). Irene praises the allegorical figure "Disinganno" - the undeceiver or demystifier who teaches people to be realistic about passion and recognize that it is attenuated by gratification (123) -- but Compton puts that praise in the mouth of Florio (131-2), a character who is not held up as a model of how to live. Florio is plagued by sins that don't bring him much enjoyment (84) and by guilt that brings him a lot of pain (93-97). It's not that Compton doesn't scold Irene for her idealism; she does. Irene's love for Florio is culpable insofar as it "turn[s] idolatry" (120). But whether the fault lies in Irene loving too well, or Florio deserving her love too little, is left open by the poem. In a deliberate, structural way, Compton dissuades readers from sympathizing with Florio by telling us nothing of what happens to him after Irene dies: