Mrs. F. Ryves

By Lisa Vargo

Critical Essay

Mrs. Ryves' Cumbrian Legends; or, Tales of Other Times, published by subscription in 1812, was written during a visit to the Lake District in 1806. The first and only volume by its author, it exists as a curiosity in bringing together different aspects of the British literary market-a work about Cumbria written by a woman from Ryves Castle (or Castlejane), County Limerick, supported by a large publication list of subscribers largely from Ireland and the West Indies, and published in Edinburgh. Ryves' text had a limited critical reception, significance, and subsequent influence. Yet, the work was of interest to its contemporary readers and has something to offer twenty-first century readers curious about the reception of women writers, the nature of early nineteenth-century poetry, and the relation between literary production and travel.

Literary reviews provide some idea of how the volume was received in its own time. According to William S. Ward, two reviews of the volume appeared. In the October 1814 issue of the European Magazine and London Review a four-paragraph consideration of the volume begins with an apology for taking two years to notice the work. While the reviewer notes that "real genius" is to be found and that the verses "seem to breathe the very soul of melodious versification," the poet is taken to task for displaying too much exuberance and excessive repetition of images. The Tales included in the volume are called "Picturesque Poems" that are "entitled to a large share of public attention" (231). The review ends with reference to the realities of the literary market and the observation that if there are more prose writers than poets, there are also more readers interested in prose than poetry. Accordingly "our fair Author" is exhorted "to exert her brilliant fancy in the composition of Tales in Prose" (231). The second notice is a paragraph in the February 1815 Monthly Review, which notes the dedication of the volume to Princess Charlotte of Wales and has little favourable to mention about the compositions themselves, which are faulted for their lack of "variety or animation" in their characterizations of people, while at the same time their author improbably "sets inanimate nature hard at work" (211).

These reviews contextualize the volume in relation to contemporary publishing practices. One matter is the volume's production through subscription, a convention dating from the seventeenth century and notably employed during the eighteenth century by Alexander Pope in his translation of Homer (Ingrassia 43-44). The European Magazine reviewer gives notice to "the patronage of a numerous and highly respectable body of subscribers" (331). As Catherine Ingrassia explains, "A subscriber usually paid part of the subscription immediately and then the rest upon receiving the book. The publisher and author have the money at the beginning of the project; their profit is guaranteed. The subscription process removed authors from the pressures and exigencies of the marketplace" (44). As well, books sold by subscription were often "prestige volumes" (Ingrassia 81). In the case of Cumbrian Legends the prestige does not so much concern the contents as it does the social position of the author. At the same time a recourse to subscription may also reflect a desire on the part of Ryves to represent her authority in a manner that emphasizes approval from her peers rather than grasping ambition on her own part. But most certainly the volume reflects her status with respect to the approximately 450 individuals who took out subscriptions to the volume.

These subscribers supported a work whose subject matter reflects literary and cultural preoccupations of their era. Ryves is one of a number of woman writers who wrote poems about the Cumbrian landscape, including Isabella Lickbarrow and Barbara Hoole, whose volumes were published by subscription in 1814 and in 1805 respectively, and Susanna Blamire, whose verse wasn't collected until 1842 (Jackson). Ryves, however, is a visitor rather than a resident of Cumbria, and it is significant that her volume appeared at a time when the Lake District was becoming a popular destination for tourists prevented by war from traveling on the European continent. Cumbria was celebrated for its picturesque beauty not only as a travel spot, but also as a "subject of description and illustration" (DeSelincourt in Wordsworth Guide ix). One well-known testament to the popularity of the Lake District is Mrs.Gardiner's proposal in Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice that Elizabeth Bennett accompany her and her husband on a trip to the Lakes, to which Elizabeth replies, "'Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?'" (154). Although Elizabeth never gets to test her resolution that they will "'not be like other travelers,'" (154) she confesses, "'she had set her heart on seeing the Lakes'" (239). An identification of an aesthetic of the picturesque with Cumbria's mountains and lakes is especially captured in Ryves' verse, and it is clear from the notes attached to her volume that Ryves made use of William Hutchinson's popular guide, History of the County of Cumberland and Some Places Adjacent (2 volumes, 1794), as an authority to shape the way she looked at the landscapes and for her response to the scenes she visited.

For the modern reader, an account of the Lake District is inextricably bound up with the writing of William Wordsworth, whose own Guide to the Lakes initially appeared as an anonymous introduction to a folio of etchings in 1810, four years after Ryves made her tour. A reader familiar with the writings of Wordsworth and of his sister Dorothy will necessarily find points of correspondence with Ryves' work. If in some part an interest supplied by this volume for modern readers is its relation to the Wordsworths, it is important to note that her contemporary readers did not make this connection. Ryves' poems demonstrate how Wordsworth was an innovator even as he was writing about places and subjects of interest to his readers.

One of these subjects is captured in the subtitle, "Tales of Other Times." Melvyn Bragg suggests, "The Lake District is an elephants' graveyard of legends" (118); Mrs. Ryves responded to contemporary tastes for antiquarianism in her poetic tales. Her poems are written in couplets and draw upon gothic literature and an interest in legend and antiquarianism, which are related to the literary concerns of eighteenth-century poets like Ossian whose "beautiful poems" Ryves mentions in a note (159). Rather than the Lake Poets (Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge), it is Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake (1810) that causes Ryves anxiety that her readers might believe that she was indebted in her portrait of the bard Hubert to Scott's Allan-Bane (Scott is listed as one of her subscribers). Thomas Warton's 1777 sonnet, "Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon," a defence of antiquarianism, serves as the epigraph to the volume. The allusion to Warton means the work takes its place with a set of tastes defined in the previous century, in which legend and to antiquarianism were employed to promote patriotic and national values.

Cumbrian Legends consists of three extended narrative/descriptive poetic tales, which draw upon the legends of Saint Bega, the House of Lucie, and St. Herbert, and an irregular ode addressed to the spirits of air. While the medieval settings and ruins reflect an interest in the sentimental and the picturesque, Ryves' fascination with legend and the figure of the bard contribute to a myth of a national literature during a period of war. In her "Address to Princess Charlotte" to whom the volume is dedicated, Ryves calls attention to "these disastrous times, when Nature bends / Beneath the weight of Providence's ends; / When trembling nations wait on despot rage, / And horrors more than human shake the age" (iii). The poems celebrate Britain's spiritual and moral virtues and therefore celebrate nationhood through the medium of a rich body of legend. Ryves' nationalistic fervour is evident in her "Address," in which Britain is celebrated as a place "Where freeborn genius woos the sacred shade; / Where fairest Liberty endears the scene, / And stamps a soul upon the native mien; / Where equal rights unequal ranks restrain, / And none is marked for privilege of pain" (iv). An evocation of tradition seems of a piece with the views of her countryman Edmund Burke, and she speaks as a woman to a woman in the address to Charlotte, where she imagines the Princess as another Elizabeth who may "grasp the virtues of her line" (vi). The legends reflect virtues that are meant to provide a kind of hope and solace to "the sufferers of the age" at a time when Britain is fighting Napoleon on the European continent (iv).

As much as the tales draw upon legend, Ryves also emphasizes her own experiences in the Cumbrian landscape. It is unsurprising that the story of a female Irish saint would capture her interest. "Saint Bega, or the Eve of Saint John," describes the coming of Begogh as a pilgrim to England during the ninth century. With reference to aspects of legend, Ryves describes the miracles associated with Saint Bega: the sea gulls' relinquishment of prey, wolves lying tamely at her feet, her skills with herbs for healing, how in response to the challenge of Lord Lucie a snowfall fell on St. John's Eve (the summer solstice), and her appearance after her death "amid her pious train" (18) on Midsummer's Eve. As a traveler from Ireland to England, Ryves seems to be reflecting on her own experience as a pilgrim to the "Cumbrian shore" (9).

And in so doing, like St. Bega she demonstrates what a visitor from the "isle which boasts unfading spring" (2) might discover in the English landscape. She evokes the beauty of the ruined Abbey at St. Bees and the spectacle of mists as she and some friends experienced them on "Sunday forenoon, April 15th, 1806, at 12 o'clock" (155-6) and she communicates her interest in the picturesque river Poe or Pow (156-7). Ryves is sensitive to the setting of St. Bees and its "vast phenomena of mists" (18), which "the rapt soul resigns in wondering praise" (20). She seeks to create a mood of contemplation and awe as she describes the abbey and its setting by the sea.

/ At the same time, in her place as pilgrim from Ireland she can discern the link between antiquarian legend and nationhood. After quoting Hutchinson's reflection in his History that in the past monasteries and convents helped to form "national manners," in a note she then makes clear her intentions in celebrating Bega's "ministr'ing to good" (17): "the tenderest charities, the most humane cares, nay, the humblest, and oftentimes the most dangerous offices, have been performed by the hands of the religious women, towards the poor and wounded, the sick and the infected, often to the loss of their own lives" (155). She is battling anti-Catholic legends associated with holy men and women and suggests "it is cruel and absurd to attempt to stigmatize a class of people" with "odious vices" (155). More significantly she would suggest the Irish roots of England's national manners and how the Irish Bega brought charity and calm to a wild English landscape.

If Ryves takes an interest in the founding of the community of St. Bees, she is also fascinated by the origin of place names. The second legend, "Woe to Bank, or the Wolf," a Tale in three parts, is a poem on the naming of places, but unlike Wordsworth's own poems of naming, which celebrate associations private to his friends and family, Ryves makes use of an account of the Crusades that commemorates the role of a faithful, devoted wife. The poem is set at Egremont Castle, near St. Bees, which was built around 1140 by the House of Lucie to uphold Norman rule and was destroyed in the sixteenth century. Ryves's main purpose seems to be to construct a narrative that draws upon interest in the antiquary. She introduces her tale with an evocation of woe and a song by Sisters, presumably meant to be the daughters of Lucie, left by their mother to the care of an Abbess. Lord Lucie has gone off to battle and his Lady, the mother of three daughters and expecting a son, leaves her children, undeterred by "murmured warnings of a fearful doom" (34) to "meet my lord upon the plain" on the River Enn (33). The first part of the poem concludes with their reunion. Part two introduces the figure of the bard Hubert, whose harp foretells the death of Lucie. Immediately after his song, cries are heard which tell of the death of the couple and their unborn child by an attack by a wolf. The lord's favoured friend then curses the bank on which the murder occurred (58), and the bodies of the dead are carried to the castle. The final section of the poem describes the service for the dead, as a train of monks and nuns gather around the tombs of the dead, where the figure of a wolf stands menacingly over the tomb of Lady Lucie, which is placed at the foot of her lord's tomb. Ryves contrasts the chanting of the males "telling of the grave with vast controul" (71) with the sister's song of life (72).

But as well as telling an affecting tale, Ryves wants to evoke a sense of continuity between legend and the landscape. Wordsworth chose another aspect of the House of Lucie legend when he wrote "The Horn of Egremont Castle" in 1806, which emphasizes a story of two brothers and forgiveness and repentance. Ryves contemplates how a particular landscape comes to embody a past act of woe and tragedy. At the end of her poem she moves to the present and describes how the traveler might mark the tomb within the ruins and feel the full effect of the legend. A note by Ryves points to the power of the tomb fragments to impress: "This Poem was written in the year 1806, at which time the limb of the Wolf was rudely formed, but strongly fixed on the breast of the dead-roughly sculptured on the tomb" (79). Ryves reflects a sense of continuity between past and present and her poem on the naming of "Woe to Bank" suggests that it is by "the well-known tale" of legend that a national consciousness grows. It is through travel in the landscape that Ryves is impressed and in turn impresses the scene upon her readers.

The final poem in the volume, "Fragment of the Recluse of St. Herbert's Isle," draws upon the legend of St. Herbert, a disciple of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who lived in solitude on an island on Derwentwater for many years. Wordsworth also drew upon the legend; he celebrates love and friendship in his account of the deaths of Herbert and Cuthbert in the same hour in an "Inscription: For the Spot Where the Hermitage Stood on St. Herbert's Island, Derwentwater" (1800). In her own poem Ryves departs from the specific legend and imagines a latter day hermit living on the island and writing poetry, whose verse is "Said to be found on raising some of the rude remains of the Cell / Where the Saint was supposed to have been used to kneel" (93). She employs the "grand and majestic scenes of Cumberland" to dramatize "the agitated state of the noble, the exiled, and persecuted" figure of the recluse, whose melancholy response to mists, the moon, and other phenomena is represented by four lyrics: "Cumbria. Morning," "Spring," "Music of the Chase,' and "Legend of the Floating Isle." If Ryves seems to enjoy the evocation of melancholy through landscape, she does not divorce her portrait of a man of intense feeling from a caution that sensibility must be moderated for a higher purpose. By the end of the series the Recluse has resolved to leave his solitude "And thro' the remnant of my days, / No more my page be spoiled with tears" (145).

The last and longest of these lyrics, "Legend of the Floating Isle," might capture the attention of readers familiar with Dorothy Wordsworth's "Floating Island at Hawkeshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature" published by William Wordsworth in 1842. In the 1835 edition of his Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth laments that the islands of Derwentwater are "neither fortunately placed nor of pleasing shape," like the islands of Windermere, Grasmere, and Rydal waters, but adds that "It might be worth while here to mention (not as an object of beauty, but of curiosity) that there occasionally appears above the surface of Derwent-water, and always in the same place, a considerable tract of spongy ground covered with aquatic plants, which is called the Floating, but with more propriety might be named the Buoyant Island . . ."(38). Ryves herself notes the "extraordinary phenomenon" of the island, which she estimates to be "about 40 yards in length and 30 yards in breadth" (166). If Dorothy Wordsworth's poem celebrates harmonious powers and fluidity, Ryves suggests the island in Derwentwater owes its existence to a legend that tells of the "rebellious will" of a "sacred sister" (118). For Ryves the Floating Island is treacherous and its lures are to be avoided.

Accordingly, the legend of the Floating Island is contrasted with the acts of faith and purpose displayed by St. Herbert on the more solid ground of his isle. In a consideration of Herbert and friendship, Ryves' Recluse turns away from his emotional flights of fancy to contemplate the healing aspects of a form of "social love, by Nature given" (135). Included with evocations of landscape and the story of St. Herbert, Ryves makes a case for the importance of legend:

Strange is the love of superstitious lore,
And strong the bonds by wildered fancy wore;
Hold boldest hearts, o'er purest bosoms steal,
And teach all mutual nature how to feel;
Assimilate high and low, and rich and poor . . . (138)

In her fragmentary poem Ryves enacts the value of ruin, evoked earlier by the ruins of St. Bega's abbey and by the mouldering funerary statuary of Lord Lucie and his Lady. For Ryves legend is a means to unite past and present and to find a home of sorts in a part of Britain to which she is merely a traveler.

That Ryves concludes "The Recluse of St. Herbert's Isle" with a "Stranger's Farewell" might be seen as appropriate for a writer who after one volume fell silent and about whom virtually nothing is known. That she did not follow the advice of her reviewer, and "exert her brilliant fancy in the composition of Tales in Prose," is unlikely to be considered a loss to the literary market. But Cumbrian Legends does have something to tell us about the character of literary production, literary tastes and British nationalism during the Romantic period.