Isabella Fordyce Kelly (c. 1759-1857)

By Stephen C. Behrendt

Critical Essay

The life of Isabella Fordyce Kelly (c. 1759-1857) seems in many respects almost to have been drawn from the plots of her own novels, which were popular fixtures in circulating libraries during roughly the period of the Napoleonic wars. The first half of Kelly's life seems to have been overshadowed from the start by a variety of misfortunes, not all of which were her fault. Her grandfather, William Fordyce of Anchorthies, for instance, was a successful merchant whose happy circumstances failed to prevent his becoming entangled in a kidnaping scheme for which he was subsequently convicted. Kelly's parents (William Fordyce and Elizabeth Fraser) seem to have fared little better; both were cut off by their own wealthy parents after their clandestine marriage early in the 1750s. Nevertheless, her father entered the Royal Marines in 1755 and after attaining the rank of captain by 1761 eventually found himself appointed "carver and cupbearer," and then groom of the bedchamber to George III, though he seems ultimately to have fallen from favor. Isabella Fordyce, who had two older sisters and apparently at least one younger brother, later claimed to have been "bred at Court" (DNB; "Missing Persons"), although there is little to suggest that she or her family in fact enjoyed any particular status there.

Isabella Fordyce made what seemed a promising match when in December 1789 she married Robert Hawke Kelly, R N., the son of the famous Colonel Robert Kelly who had served the East India Company. The younger Kelly was a good deal older than his wife, and while little information reliable exists about the Kellys and their circumstances, her published writings offer several hints, none of them very cheering. Before she published her first work, the Collection of Poems and Fables, in 1794 she seems already to have suffered the death of a child and apparently also the imprisonment of her husband. When and how her husband regained his freedom is unclear, as is any indication of what the couple's marital circumstances were by then, although Roger Lonsdale has speculated that "the Kellys had marital problems" (481). Indeed, there is even some question about when Robert Kelly died. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he returned to Madras, where he had served the East India Company before his marriage and where he died by 1807. But two other modern sources claim he was dead already by 1794 (Todd, 183; Jackson, 177). This is certainly incorrect, however, for in the dedication (addressed to the Duchess of York) of her 1797 novel, Joscelina: or, The Rewards of Benevolence, she says of the Duchess's patronage that ". . . while the trembling wife venerates the Royal munificence which may extricate a husband from distress, the anxious mother blesses the gracious hand which preserves her infants" (vi). This suggests that her husband was indeed still alive in 1797, and that the Kelly family situation was precarious. It is worth noting, moreover, that Kelly hints in several of her published poems at having been deserted, although, as in the case of "To a Wandering Husband, from a Deserted Wife" (26-28), it is difficult to establish that the poem's unhappy couple are in fact Robert and Isabella Kelly and not merely stock figures of sentimental verse. Kelly's fortunes seemed in any event finally to have changed when by 1816 she found herself the wife of a wealthy merchant, a Mr. Hedgeland. And yet she was widowed once again by 1820. This time, however, she was left well provided for, and she spent the rest of her long life in relative comfort, freed both of domestic distress and of the demands of the literary career she had pursued for more than twenty years of her life to counter that distress. Indeed, her son, Fitzroy Kelly (who was later knighted), enjoyed a distinguished career that included stints as solicitor-general, attorney-general, and lord chief baron of the Exchequer.

Kelly's ninety-year life, then, included a period - essentially encompassing her first marriage and first widowhood - in which she found herself, like many other married women of her time, forced by her circumstances to support herself (and her family) by means of a writing career. She did this most famously - or infamously - through a series of ten novels (five of them for the Minerva Press in 1794-1801, with some of them reaching second editions)) that combined (often uncomfortably) the sort of Gothic machinery we associate with Radcliffe and Lewis with melodramatic moral fables of distressed virtue. The first of these was her anonymous four-volume Madeline; or, The Castle of Montgomery (1794), which the Critical Review recommended for its "variety of incident" and for the fact that "the moral . . . is of the highest importance to the attainment of tranquillity and happiness" (1794: 472). Among her publications are also some educational texts for children - The Child's French Grammar (1805) and two collections of anecdotes (1811, 1819) - which suggests that she may have further supplemented her income during these years by working as a teacher, perhaps at a school for girls (Lonsdale, 482). Her son Fitzroy, who was born in 1796, attended the school run by a Mr. Farrar in Chelsea (DNB, 1236); that Kelly's Poems and Fables (1805, 1807) bear a Chelsea imprint supports the possibility of such a connection, whether formal or not. Moreover, in several of her prefaces to various works Kelly claims that she has written primarily to support and instruct her children, and only secondarily to gratify the wishes of her patrons or to achieve anything like a distinguished literary reputation. By 1823, however, following the death of her second husband, Kelly's domestic situation was, as noted above, sufficiently comfortable - and respectable - to enable her to mark that year by publishing her last book, an anonymous memoir of Henrietta Fordyce, the widow of her father's cousin, Dr. James Fordyce, a memoir apparently designed, in part, to offset popular rumors "that she had taken advantage of a generous elderly relative" (DNB).

During the twenty-plus years of her most prolific literary production, Kelly also published several collections of poetry, each one building upon (and borrowing from) its predecessors. The first of these, A Collection of Poems and Fables, appeared by subscription in 1794 and was followed in 1802 by Poems. Poems and Fables on Several Occasions appeared in 1805, with a "second edition" (reproduced here) following in 1807. Her poems have been charitably characterized in recent years as "warm, simple verses" (Todd, 183), and despite their often maudlin material and approach, some of them do achieve a measure of effectiveness. Still, they received little notice during Kelly's lifetime. Indeed, one of the few mentions of her poetry occurs in a review of her 1813 novel, Jane de Dunstanville, or, Characters as They Are, where the response to her poetry by the Critical Review (which generally reviewed her novels favorably) is decidedly unfavorable:
In the 12th chapter of the third volume, we meet with a trial of poetic skill, between Dillon, Jane de Dunstanville, and Alfred. Not sitting at present in our capacity as judges of Parnassus, we shall not decide to whom the wreath of triumph is due — but we will give the fair authoress a little advice, which is, to leave the higher regions of poetry, and continue her walks in the humbler fields of fiction. — We make no doubt our hint will be understood. (Critical Review, 99)

Moreover, although his remarks are not about Kelley's poetry but rather about her 1797 novel, Joscelina; or, The Rewards of Benevolence, what the Monthly Visitor's critic says about Kelly's prose is remarkably appropriate also to her poetry:

If it never rises into greatness, it seldom sinks below mediocrity, and may be safely recommended to every reader, as an amusing and instructive performance. If the authoress could be prevailed upon to take her prose down from the stilts, the style would be considerably amended. (190)

The modern reader is likely to concur in this judgment.

Like the Sheffield writer Barbara Wreakes Hoole Hofland, with whom Kelly's experience offers a number of interesting parallels, Kelly seems to have placed her name and her work before the public first in the form of her subscription volume of poems, a tactic that was not at all unusual for an as yet unknown woman writer whose misfortunes had placed her in financial difficulties. Subscription editions were, after all, often exercises in philanthropy on the part of the subscribers, who were able by this means to subsidize a struggling author without that support formally appearing to be mere charity: the published volume served as a commodity, an item of exchange, and in the rare and happy event that the volume found favor with the public and enabled its author to pursue a literary career on a more professional "for-cash" basis, so much the better for everyone. It is entirely reasonable to see Kelly's 1794 collection in precisely this light, particularly given the fact that her first novel appeared that year - without her name.

The title page of the second edition of Kelly's Poems and Fables on Several Occasions (1807), which bears a Chelsea imprint, indicates that the volume was printed for the author and "Sold by T Faulkner, at his extensive Circulating Library, No. 1, Paradise Row; and C. Chapple, Pall Mall." The reference to Faulkner's circulating library suggests that by 1807 Kelly's name would have been familiar to subscribers as well as to a general reading public. That the title page alludes to none of her novels is a bit surprising, however, given that many of those novels are inscribed with references to previous ones, and indicates something about the separation among genres that was maintained even by well-known authors and their publishers, all of whom appreciated the marketing value of cross-referencing new publications to the titles of earlier ones.

In a conventional pleading preface to her volume, Kelly apologizes "for obtruding a Second Edition on the Public of what is so entirely personal as only to interest, or indeed be understood by the parties concerned" (iii). Rhetorically, such a statement serves two purposes. First, it shields the author from criticism for publishing poems whose subjects and references might seem to have little significance for a broader public audience. Kelly underscores her point at the conclusion of the preface by assuring her readers that in publishing her poems in a second edition she is not presuming brazenly upon a critical public but is rather simply gratifying the desires of her friends and patrons:

Why (it may be asked) offer them a second time to the Public? Simple truth must recommend the answer. Inclined by nature, and constrained by sentiments of gratitude, to yield to the wishes of those who honor her with their patronage, she has published them solely at their desire; and has chosen rather to hazard the censure of the many, than refuse to Friends that compliance to which their kindness, and good offices, so well entitle them. (iv)

A statement of this sort serves notice on the critic that to object to the poems is to misunderstand their nature as a "gift," a gesture of generosity offered to a supportive circle of known patrons even at an acknowledged risk to the author's own feelings. To criticize the poems under these circumstances, her rhetoric implies, is to be both unfair and ungenerous. Indeed, she makes the point explicitly in the preface to The Baron's Daughter: A Gothic Romance (1802) when she remarks that "as my literary efforts have hitherto been encouraged, I rest satisfied that, while sitting in judgment, generosity will mingle with candour, and procure "The Baron's Daughter" a meritful, an indulgent decree" (iv; my emphases).

The preface's second rhetorical function is related to the first in characterizing the nature of the poems that follow and in establishing the ground rules for any critical discussion that might ensue. After pointing out that several of the poems (which she pointedly does not identify for her reader) were written before she was fourteen, Kelly says of the remaining poems:

. . . the rest were the effusions of a heart under the pressure of a variety of domestic calamities: they were the appropriate feelings of a Child, a Wife, and a Mother; for a Father injured, and oppressed, by the unfeeling hand of power; a Husband neglected by those on whom he had hereditary claims of protection; and a beloved Child laid in an early grave; - that Father is gone to eternal rest, - that Husband lies in a foreign land, - the Orphan, the Widow, still survives - survives to feel the wrongs, to feel the anguish accumulated in her struggles for an infant family. (iii-iv)

The latter part of this passage, beginning with " - that Father. . . ," first appeared in the 1807 preface, which further suggests that Robert Kelley's death had occurred after 1805. Especially in light of such circumstances as she outlines here, Kelly implicitly asks the charitable reader, how then can critical disapproval of poems that convey the burdens of family disappointments and disasters - of the Jobean testing of virtue and fortitude that accompanies domestic tragedy - be regarded as anything but callous cruelty? Kelly was not the only woman writer of the time to employ this sort of self-defensive rhetorical procedure, of course; indeed, it is so familiar as to seem almost more a stock gesture than a genuine appeal to readers. And yet the consequences for women of the protracted war with France that devastated so many British families were themselves distressingly familiar, as were the means - like writing for profit - that many of those women employed to support themselves and their children when their men were lost or when they simply abandoned their families.

Kelly sets out immediately in her volume to follow up on her emphasis on the personal, familial nature of the poems, putting in the opening position an elegy on her infant son and following it with another to her mother. "To the Memory of the Lamented Mr. Robert Hawke K-y" mourns the "dear departed infant" who was "so late my child - my hope and pride, / Who ever pleas'd, until the hour thou died" (1). Nothing, we are told, neither an illustrious lineage or the traditional birthright of a Briton, could preserve the unfortunate child, who could not even be buried on the day he was taken to the church-yard but had to be taken away and returned the following day. In a rhetorical gesture structured upon emotional and circumstantial contrasts and familiar to readers of Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith and others, Kelly pointedly exclaims, "How sweet thy rest! from ev'ry evil free! . . . Oh, why!" but concludes with the formulaic admonition:

. . . but soft - be still, my murm'ring breast —
My little angel's gone to endless rest;
With kindred spirits, far remote from pain,
He waits the hour when we shall meet again. (3)

But perhaps the most profoundly human - because the most psychologically acute - observation on a mother's bereavement is reserved for a poem that appears much later in the collection, "Retired Thoughts to a Departed Infant." Recalling all the lost delights she associates with her own dead child, the narrator writes,

Ah! sad remembrance, why exert thy power,
Why, why recal [sic] the past endearing hour,
When thy sweet frame upon my breast repos'd,
And opening beauty every look disclos'd?
Each happier mother, vain of her delight,
Still, still obtrudes her darling on my sight;
Then in the harmless smile, the feeble cry,
I hear thy voice, I see thy languid eye. (37-38)

This totally believable psychological response to the suffering inadvertently inflicted by the innocent mothers' celebration of their own still living children lends an authenticity of sentiment to Kelly's poem that overcomes the frequently stilted and artificial diction that mars this and so many other of her poems.

Kelly's elegiac poem on her "exemplary mother," Eliza Fordyce, who had died in 1785, praises that woman's "unspotted worth, which never knew a stain" but which constituted unstinting charity and benevolence toward even the poorest and most neglected members of her society. In the process of her elegy, though, she remarks on the straitened circumstances of her mother's life, in which "Few were her comforts in this varying state, / A painful pilgrimage her weary fate; / Few were her joys on earth while doom'd to dwell . . ." (4). This sense of life as a burden, a doom, seems more than mere rhetoric and probably reflects the difficulties Kelly's parents confronted as a consequence of their rejection by their aggrieved parents. Indeed, these economic realities lend particular poignancy to Kelly's observation that "The bright example of a virtuous mind, / Is all the dow'r this parent left behind" (4).

Given Kelly's declaration that the bulk of her poems reflect her personal circumstances, it is tempting to read a number of them from an autobiographical perspective. "To Arthur," for instance, seems at first glance to be a rather formulaic - if rhapsodic - poem about a young woman's doting love for her young soldier:

Then take, my Arthur, from these trembling hands,
The trifling tribute which thy love demands.
Auspicious hour! when nature fram'd thy mind
To bless and dignify the human kind;
. . .
Ne'er e'en in death my Arthur I'll resign,
Be all his sufferings, all his sorrows mine.(16-17)

Given what we know about the actual relationship of Robert and Isabella Kelly, however, it is hard to accommodate these lines to any but their earliest years together, and that knowledge makes us read with greater insight curiously prophetic lines like these:

But in this erring, ever varying scene,
Should darker clouds o'ershade our state serene,
Oh! thou great Power, omnipotent and wise!
Teach us thou sendest blessings in disguise. . . (18)

Less easy to accept — at least for most modern readers — are the sentiments expressed in a poem like "On Beholding Arthur Asleep":

Long may my arm support his head,
Or kinder still this beating breast,
His slumb'ring hours to fondly watch,
When waking charm his soul to rest.

With silent pleasure I will wait,
With duteous, tender care attend
Thy gentle slumbers, busy hours,
My guide, my love, my husband, friend! (47)

Such overly enthusiastic submission of the personal female self to the male love-object, while it remains a stock feature of popular culture even today (witness countless popular song lyrics and romance novels), is nevertheless chilling when one remembers the frequent betrayals which this same unquestioning devotion seems inevitably to have produced, in our own times no less than in Kelly's.

One of the most interesting poems in Poems and Fables is a brief lyric, "To an Unborn Infant," which had already appeared in the 1794 Collection of Poems and Fables. For the modern reader, this poem recalls Anna Letitia Barbauld's better known poem, "To a little invisible Being who is expected soon to become visible" (composed c. 1795, published in 1825), but unlike Barbauld's bright and hopeful poem, Kelly's - which is narrated by the expectant mother - is characteristically melancholy. Foreseeing her own death, she tells her unborn child to focus her attention and her affection on her father while still remembering her, even when that father remarries (which event the narrator implies is a certainty):

Live, sweet babe, to bless thy father,
When thy mother slumbers low;
Softly lisp her name that lov'd him,
Thro' a world of varied woe.

Learn, my child, the mournful story
Of the suffering mother's life;
Let thy father not forget her
In a future happier wife.

Babe of fondest expectation,
Watch his wishes in his face;
What pleas'd in me, mayst thou inherit,
And supply my vacant place. (22)

Like all the women in Kelly's poems, even this unborn one is represented as wholly male-dependent, her emotional and intellectual life focused firmly on loving and supporting a man who may be expected to be fickle, faithless, and even cruel. And while this posture is a familiar element of sentimental writing, it is hard to divorce it entirely from the facts of Kelly's earlier years as the record reveals them to us.