Editors Note: Much of CB's early
life was spent in France and Italy. Knew Walter Scott and Matthew
"Monk" Lewis, who called her "Divinity." Worked as Lady in
Waiting to Princess Caroline (1810 to 1815). Known primarily as a popular
novelist.
Bury, Lady Charlotte Susan Maria Campbell, 1775-1861
By Pam Perkins
Critical Essay
Lady Charlotte Susan Maria Campbell (later Bury), daughter of the fifth Duke of Argyll, sister of the sixth and seventh dukes, and half-sister of two Dukes of Hamilton, was more closely connected to the high Scottish aristocracy than any other woman writer of her era. Yet her two volumes of poetry have only the most tenuous connections to her Scottish heritage; unlike Scottish women writers of an earlier generation, such as Lady Grizel Baillie, Lady Charlotte Bury was very much a British aristocrat, part of a generation that was shaped as much by London and continental tastes as by any specifically Scottish culture. Her privileged upbringing took place not only in Inverary and London but also involved two lengthy sojourns in France and Italy in the years before the French Revolution closed the Continent to English travellers. When, in the post-Napoleonic era, she returned to Italy, she was thus able to do so with the confidence of someone who had known the country from childhood. This cosmopolitanism influenced her poetry, which ranges from sentimental reflections on a Scottish peasant, in her anonymous 1797 volume, to extensively researched meditations on medieval Italian monasteries in the later book. Such variety of subject matter gives Bury's work considerable interest in the history of British women's writing. Her two volumes of poetry, written at the beginning and near the end of her literary career, exemplify the feminine tastes of the eras in which they appeared, providing insights into some of the shifts in fashionable literature that took place during the generation between the troubled 1790s and the immediate pre-Victorian years.
Bury herself, throughout her literary career, seemed prepared to experiment with tone and style. In moving among her works, one finds matter-of-factly aristocratic raciness jostling with langourously melancholy expressions of sensibility or with stern anticipations of Victorian piety. If both volumes of poetry incline to the melancholy and reflective, that might be at least in part a function of genre. Her Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, the book for which she became best known (it was published anonymously, but nobody ever seemed in any doubt as to the identity of the author) is full of scandalously gossipy insights into late Georgian court life. This delight in titillating detail carries over into more private writing as well. In an unpublished 1799 journal addressed to a then infant daughter, Bury veers between conventional moral reflections and accounts of her family that might have been lifted from a mildly racy sentimental novel. When, for example, Bury relates the story of her half-sister Lady Derby, who was abandoned by both husband and lover after a flamboyantly scandalous affair, she can at times lapse into a sort of melodramatic primness. "Here I must pause," she writes at one point, evidently remembering the daughter who is her intended audience,
to Observe that had she [Lady Derby] made my mother the Depositary of Her Secrets, every Misery which afterwards led Her by rapid Strides to a premature and Unlamented Death might have, nay in all Human probability would Undoubtedly Have been Avoided.[1] Likewise, in terms that could have been lifted from sentimental fiction, she observes that Lady Derby's "natural want of Solidity of Character joined to an Artless & Tender Disposition left her an easy Prey to Folly and to Vice" (21). Yet at other points in her narrative, Bury reports the unhappy outcome of Lady Derby's marriageand love affair, and the Duchess of Argyll's continued, vigorous support of her daughter, in a strikingly non-judgmental manner.
For all the expressions of delicate sensibility in both her novels and her poems, Bury was thus not inclined only towards the sort of intellectually and morally narrow modesty now associated with early nineteenth-century femininity. Her easy-going attitude comes across even more clearly in others' accounts of her than in her own writing - especially as friends could find Bury's private conversation sharply at odds with the published writing. According to the shocked report of her long-time acquaintance Elizabeth Mure,[2] for example, Bury's reaction on hearing that one of her daughters was unhappy with her husband and wanted a separation was to tell the young woman to find a lover as quickly as possible so that she could get a divorce. As Mure indignantly asked Bury's sister-in-law, Lady John Campbell, "was there ever such advice from a Mother to a daughter - Especially a Mother who is publishing prayers for every day of the year."[3] The prayers in question were published in Suspirum Sanctorum or Holy Breathings (1826), a devotional book that Bury was at that time preparing for the press, much to Mure's apparent vexation. Sceptical about the likelihood its finding any readers, Mure added, in a sardonic allusion to an earlier complaint she had made about Bury's new and eye-catching pink bonnet, that people "would chuse some other divine than one with a Pink Satin Mitre." Worldly advice, worldly dress, and pious writing were apparently, in Mure's mind, entirely irreconcilable.
The poems Bury wrote might initially seem just
as unlikely a work, coming from the woman described by Mure, as were the
prayers. In content and tone, Bury's poetry lies somewhere between the solemn
piety of expected of religious writers and the worldly detachment implicit in
maternal advice to commit adultery. What the
Granted, Bury would not have seen herself as
merely following fashion. In her journal, she presents herself as an intense
lover of literature from the earliest years of her childhood, reporting that as
soon as she learned to read, "Poetry & Plays Engross'd my whole
Attention" (51). Likewise, she was confident that she possessed the
sensibility necessary to a become a poet herself, observing with some
complacency that "that intuitive Sensation of what was Great or fair, I
must Say even in Infancy was an Inmate of my Breast" (38). Yet this
"intuitive Sensation" expressed itself mainly in appreciation of the
most fashionable of eighteenth-century manifestations of the sublime. Images of
evening, the ocean, rocky coastlines, and the moon, recur in her poems; she
might also have written on Mount Blanc and a shipwreck, other popular subjects
for late-eighteenth century meditative verse.[4] Bury was no less representative
of her time in more abstract matters. She was, for example, clearly intrigued by
the popular debate about sensibility, and when she writes dismissively at the
end of "Evening" about those who "fond extremes would fain
resign," she might almost be answering Frances Greville's very popular
"Prayer for Indifference." As Bury's narrator expresses her
determination not to settle for "the calm of apathy" but instead to
seek "refined enjoyments," even if they cost a "pleasing
pang" (10), she encapsulates the main contemporary arguments for and
Indeed, the book is steeped in melancholy, and
perhaps in part because of that, as well as because the attitudes expressed are
all fairly conventional, there is a reasonably consistent narrative perspective
that links the individual poems. Even a poem that explicitly assumes a dramatic
voice, such as "Answer. To 'Say, Nancy, will you go with Me?,'" shares
assumptions underlying a number of other pieces in the volume. In this case,
Nancy proclaims that the transcendent powers of love will make a "russet
gown and frugal board" more satisfying than any pleasures offered by
"the busy glitt'ring" city (20). Likewise, the speaker in another
poem, after being accused of insensibility, retorts that it is only because the
unspecified memories awakened by "woods, and lawns, and streams" are
so painful that she throws herself into the busy whirl of fashionable life (36).
The most striking example of this consistency of narrative voice occurs in
"To the Shepherd of the Glen," a poem that might initially seem to
offer Bury's one direct nod towards her own cultural heritage. In years
immediately following Burns' career, a tribute to the simple virtues of Scottish
peasants was almost unavoidable in any collection of Scots poetry, and at first
glance, that might seem to be what Bury is offering here. Yet the poem rapidly
shifts focus away from the shepherd and back to the narrator. When we are told
that the shepherd "neither rapt'rous pleasure kens / Nor sorrows hath"
(30), the effect of the Scots "ken" - Bury's one use of Scots -- is
almost effaced by the formal English poetic language
Saying that is not the same, at all, as saying that these are naïve poems in which Bury artlessly reveals her own misery. On the contrary, the smooth technical polish and controlled (if often conventional) imagery undercuts the unrelenting melancholy of the verse. Moreover, the poems' debts to earlier writers at times make the narrators seem more mannered than miserable. For example, in "Ode to Evening," the narrator, looking around a lovely, tranquil landscape, sees some old tombstones and reflects:
Not e'en what costly marble can proclaim,
Will from oblivion snatch the hero's fame:
For, like this humble stone, it owns the sway
Of ruthless Time, and moulders in decay,
Or soon or late is pass'd unheeded by. (3)
Few readers, then or now, could read this passage without thinking as much of
Gray's country churchyard as of Bury's narrator, and so the melancholy tone
seems more an act of literary tribute than anything approaching lyric
self-expression. As figures such as Gray, Greville and Burns hover behind Bury's
poems, the sombre laments that recur throughout the volume are mediated through
implicit, understated reminders
The smooth control of the poems in this volume is further emphasised by contrasting the voice used in it with that in one of Bury's unpublished poems, a lament for the death of a young daughter by her second marriage, which she told her sister-in-law she wrote "without taking My Pen off the Paper three days after" the little girl's death (NLS Acc. 8508, folder 35; 11 Feb. 1822). It is a striking poem, moving abruptly from a mournful description of the dead child, who at first looks almost as if she is asleep, to a sharp horror at the "awful change" that "in little space had passed," removing all traces of life. There are, admittedly, literary allusions even here; even in violent distress, Bury represents her emotions through other writing, as she takes care to demonstrate by adding a note to a phrase that she has absorbed from her reading.[5] Yet this is no controlled literary meditation on death; the poem's description of a loved child suddenly transformed into an object of horror overwhelms the retreat to religious consolation in the last few stanzas. This inconsistency of tone in this work is unsurprising, given its subject matter, but it also helps us to see the technical skill of Bury's published verse. The raw edge of the unpublished poem might make it more striking and memorable to twenty-first century tastes than are the polite verses in Poems on Several Occasions, but the latter work is of interest precisely because it offers a smoothly public version of the refined, suffering femininity so fashionable in the 1790s. In doing so, this volume demonstrates the skill with which Bury was able to create an artful, sophisticated representation of artlessness.
The book itself appears almost as modestly
ladylike and unassuming as the voice of the speaker. It is a slim volume, only
forty-eight pages, and it provides no
**** **** **** ****
Bury's second volume of poems is very different
from the first. Such differences are unsurprising: after all, it was published
more than thirty-five years later, after Bury had made a moderately successful
career for herself as a novelist. She had turned to writing fiction at least in
part for financial reasons; although a duke's daughter, Bury was in relatively
precarious financial straits for much of her adult life. An early and apparently
unhappy marriage left her a widow with a large family of children, and her
second marriage, to a much younger man, led to hot disputes with her family,
including the children of her first marriage. According to Bury, who describes
her grievances in terms that recall the fate of the Dashwood women in Sense
and Sensibility, her eldest son refused to give her a proper allowance
As Bury let Elizabeth Mure read the novel in manuscript, this non-admission of authorship can't be taken too seriously, but even so, she seems to have been ambivalent, at best, about being known for her fiction. The only book she ever published under her own name, and hence, presumably, the book for which she was most willing to claim authorship, was her second volume of poetry, The Three Great Sanctuaries of Tuscany, Valombrosa, Calmaldi, Laverna (1834). It is an imposing book: if Poems on Several Occasions is unassuming in both content and appearance, The Three Great Sanctuaries is designed to make an impression. The poetry is more ambitious, and book itself, heavy, oversized, and filled with lavish engravings, is clearly intended more for display than for comfortable reading. Where the unassuming format of Poems on Several Occasions reinforces the modest, ladylike sensibility of the contents, The Three Great Sanctuaries is a book that turns poetry into a means of displaying fashionable, expensive taste.
In The Three Great Sanctuaries, the
melancholia of Bury's first volume of poetry is both reinforced and complicated
by the commercial aesthetics of the gift
What readers were getting in this weighty, handsomely designed, and royally endorsed volume, were accounts of Italian monasteries in poems that combined sentimental reflection, descriptions of landscape, and art historical commentary. It is, by any standards, an ambitious book, and Bury does not wear her learning lightly. While readers of Poems on Several Occasions are left to infer the literary models influencing the author, Bury provides detailed notes in the essays with which she introduces the poems in The Three Great Sanctuaries, citing French and Italian sources in the original languages as well as British literature ranging from the familiar poetic canon - Milton, Scott, and Byron - to relatively obscure antiquarian sources. The combination of scholarship, sentiment, and travel writing might seem unusual today, but Bury could have had some prose models for this sort of work. She would, for example, almost certainly have been familiar with the books by John Moore describing his continental travels in the 1770s as tutor to the young Duke of Hamilton, Bury's half-brother. Indeed, Bury's record of her 1789 Italian tour, transcribed at the end of her 1799 memoir, seems to have been influenced by Moore's combination of topographical, antiquarian, and social commentary, although both Bury's early journal and later poems lack entirely the amused urbanity of Moore's work.
Closer to both the time and the tone of The
Three Great Sanctuaries is an account of life in Italy by another Scottish
woman, Charlotte (Waldie) Eaton, published anonymously in 1820. While there is
no way of knowing whether or not Bury actually read this book, it seems to have
been moderately popular, and it is at least very possible that she would have
been attracted by another woman's account of a country she knew well. (While
there is nothing on Eaton's title page to indicate the sex of the author or
anything else about her identity, the book itself makes clear that the writer
was a woman and the authorship, as seems to have been so often the case,
A dash of scholarship is admittedly all that
one gets in the essays on the history and architecture of the sanctuaries in
question, despite Bury's careful and detailed annotation. Bury's historical
judgment never strays much beyond the commonplaces of the day. Of St. Francis,
for example, she writes severely that in later, more enlightened times, he
"might have proved the honour of his country and the benefactor of
mankind," but as things were, "he perverted the intentions of
Providence, and encouraged thousands, less sincere perhaps than himself, in the
maintenance of the most abject and bigoted superstition" (107). Much as, on
the evidence of other passages, Bury was inclined to admire aspects of St.
Francis' life and character, she cannot avoid the conventional anti-monasticism
of so many of her British contemporaries. The point in stressing Bury's
exploration of the historical
The central difference between the two works is not, however, the quality of the historical research but is both more significant and more obvious. Bury was writing poetry, not prose, and, by doing so, inviting a different sort of reading than that which Eaton would receive. Where Eaton, for example, merely notes that Valombrosa is firmly associated in British minds with Milton and therefore much loved by Britons (1: 32), Bury makes the altogether more daring attempt to evoke Milton in her own poetic account of the area. She does so, it is true, with predictably self-deprecating modesty, asking rhetorically,
May not a streamlet sparkle on its way,
Although the ocean with its puissant sound
Proclaims a proud pre-eminence around?
May not a flow'ret decorate the plain
Because the cedar's branch doth more astound? (11)
The answer, however, seems to be an unequivocal
yes: even if she is only a "flow'ret" when compared to Milton's cedar,
she still has a flower's ability to please,
Indeed, while Bury is careful to demonstrate her knowledge of European historical and antiquarian literature, the dominant context that she constructs around her own work is that of British and Italian poetry — even though she scrupulously avoids any suggestion that she is working on the level of the male poets she names. She is very conscious of poetic technique, even though she emphasises this concern only by writing modestly that she has varied rhythms - from the dominant Spenserian stanza to rhymed tetrameter couplets - simply in order to "lighten the monotony of the composition" (xi). The artless modesty of this admission is, of course, slightly at odds with the ambition that led her to write, in the first place, a book-length poem predominantly in Spenserian stanzas. Nor does the range of subject matter suggest a poet uncertain about her ability. Even leaving aside the historical framework that she provides in the essays introducing each of the three sections, she touches on an impressive range of subjects. In Valombrosa, for example, she includes a survey of the charms of music, verse, and painting, following which she moves onto a celebration of the delights of fragrance, organized by seasonal changes in the odours of the natural world. This simultaneous celebration of nature and the senses concludes with the lament of an exile reminded of his homeland by scents carried on a breeze (24-31), a passage that might recall, in tone if not in specific images, some of Byron's writing on the subject. As Bury began this long section by directly invoking Campbell's "Ode to Painting," she in effect places her survey of art, fragrance, and nature directly among the literary preoccupations of some of her most famous contemporaries.
Even though much of the poetry in this book recalls, in tone, the melancholia of the brief lyrics in Bury's first collection, the narrator is thus much more explicit in claiming a place for her work in the wider literary world. Nor is that place necessarily the one that we might tend to give it today. Especially given the debts that the volume owes in style and aesthetics to the predominantly feminine literary world of the gift book, the uniform maleness of the poetic culture Bury evokes is striking. Milton is unquestionably the presiding figure, but Dante also lies behind her poem, and so (naturally, for a Scottish writer of her generation) do Scott and Campbell. The one major poet omitted from this ambitious list of influences -- at least from a twenty-first century perspective -- is Shelley. While his reputation had still not been fully established by the time that Bury was writing, her language at times more closely resembles his than it does that of any of the other great poets she alludes to throughout the book. In particular, her use of fast-paced tetrameter couplets to explore depression recalls Shelley's despairing "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills"; even some of the imagery is similar. Shelley opens his poem, for example, by proclaiming that "Many a green isle needs must be / In the deep wide sea of Misery" (1-2). Bury's wanderer (in Calmaldoli), likewise compares himself to a "barren shore / Round which the waves of sorrow roar" and exclaims that any happy memories on which he could look back would be like "Green spots on sandy Araby!" (79, 78).
The comparison cannot be pushed too far, as
Bury does not share the intense political and philosophical concerns underlying
many of Shelley's most famous poems. The intellectual grounding of The Three
Great Sanctuaries is historical: when she moves away from lyric bursts of
emotion, Bury is primarily concerned with what once had been, rather than, like
Shelley in so many of his poems, what might or ought to be. Yet that such a
comparison can be made at all suggests that, detailed,
In a volume that is so clearly designed as an expensive luxury item, this intellectual ambition might, at least initially, seem odd or out of place. Yet the touch of intellectual seriousness in the book might in fact have been as much a selling point as the expensive binding and eye-catching engravings. Rather than seeing Bury as daringly resisting conventional models of ladylike femininity in her later volume of poetry, we might wonder if the improving content was in fact part of what Bury might have hoped would make the book appealing to the fashionable readership she was obviously aiming to attract. More generally, at a time when women's writing was supposed to be improving as well as modest and decorous, dressing up the sentimental reflections that run throughout the poems themselves with a dash of history could well have made the work appear all the more attractive. Likewise, invoking "serious" male poets (even if carefully avoiding direct comparisons to them) could well be read as a means of asserting a difference from conventional "feminine" escapism. Bury, whose entire career gives evidence of her being attuned to shifting tastes, is thus demonstrating not just her intellectual interests but also her attention to the literary marketplace in this focus on both poetic tradition and historical detail.
Perhaps because her poetry exemplifies so well the literary tastes of its own era, Bury was little read or studied in the twentieth century, or even in the second half of the nineteenth. Now in the twenty-first century, as readers begin paying more attention to the history of the reception of women's writing and the historical place of women in the literary marketplace, Bury deserves some renewed attention. Like her younger - and at the moment much better-known - contemporaries Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Bury wrote in the fashionable modes of the day and achieved some success (if less than theirs) by doing so. The early part of the nineteenth century might seem a relatively flat era in the history of women's writing, coming as it does between the agitation of the radical 1790s and the resurgence of feminism in Victorian England. Yet there was a strong market for women's poetry at that time, and Bury's writing, reflecting as it does the tastes of that generation, might well be of more interest now than at any other point since its original publication.
Notes
1. National Library of Scotland, Acc. 8110, p. 22. The manuscript is bound and nonpaginated; I have provided page numbers in my references to the journal, even though they do no appear in the book.
2. Elizabeth Mure was one of the Mures of Caldwell, distinguished members of the Scottish gentry. (For details, see the DNB entries on the two William Mures, father and son.) She seems, on the evidence of her letters, to have been entirely humourless, and it is more likely that Mure misunderstood a comment meant ironically or made in a moment of irritation than that Bury seriously advised her daughter to take a lover, especially as Bury's comments about her sister suggest a more conventionally moral outlook. Yet however it might have been intended, the comment suggests a certain robust outspokenness on Bury's part.
3. Elizabeth Mure's letters to Bury's brother and sister-in-law, Lord and Lady John Campbell, are held by the National Library of Scotland, Acc. 8508. The letters have not been given folio numbers; I will be citing them by both the date and the number of the folder in which they are kept. This comment, and the others quoted in this paragraph, appear in a 20 October 1825 letter to Lady John Campbell, which is in folder 35.
4. There are poems on these topics in a small collection of manuscript poetry preserved by Bury's sister-in-law Lady John Campbell. They are initialled Ch. C.-- they predate the second marriage -- even though they are not in Bury's handwriting. While the initials might also indicate her niece, Charlotte Clavering (who was also an aspiring writer), one of the poems is identified as being by Sir Walter Cumming, Bury's son-in-law, suggesting a closer link between the collection and Bury than Clavering.
5. Bury is unsure about the source of the image, saying only that she thinks it is from Milton.
6. A quick search of the British Library catalogue indicates that Poems on Several Occasions was a title that was used repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century, by both obscure and well-known writers.
7. Bury might in fact have intended the poems mainly or entirely for private circulation. A note in her handwriting in the British Library copy states that the volume was "Printed but not published," and she evidently retained copies for gifts for a number of years. The British Library volume, which is expensively bound with tooled leather and marbled end papers (the NLS copy, in contrast, is undecorated and very plainly bound), was a gift from Bury to Lady Kirkwall in December 1831.
8. Bury's furious list of grievances against her son appears in a 20 December 1822 letter to Lady John Campbell; NLS Acc. 8508, folder 5.
9. The marketing of a suffering feminine persona in the fashionable poetry of the 1820s is a topic that has recently been attracting a considerable amount of attention. For an excellent discussion of the subject in relation to Hemans, see Laura Mandell, "Hemans and the Gift-Book Aesthetic," Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, vol. 6 (June 2001), www.cf.ac.uk/encap/ceir.
10. Anne Grant, as always one of the best sources for Scottish literary gossip, asks a friend whether or not she has read Rome in the Nineteenth Century, adding that "you will scarcely believe it to be the production of a lady; but it is written by a Scotch lass, Miss Waldie, who lived on bonny Tweedside" (J.P. Grant, ed. Memoir and Correspondence, 3 vols, London 1844, 3: 115).
11. [Charlotte Ann Eaton], Rome in the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1820, 1: vi.