Gardening Women Who Wrote; The Parker Circle of Saltram

Strolling through Saltram's Gardens

Saltram was chosen to represent Norland Hall, on the set of the 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility, on the basis of its prevailing rural tranquillity, although the estate is not near Exeter, as Jane Austen specified in her novel. Saltram, mise-en-scène, for Austen’s novels is not too dissonant though, for the writer was acquainted with Frances, Countess of Morley, who was one of the cluster of women from the Parker family who, over a couple of centuries, inhabited this place - Catherine, Theresa Parker, Anne Robinson, Frances herself, Theresa Villiers, and others. Though their presence once upon a time was all pervasive, in the here and now of history and National Trust infiltration, the Parker women have become quite elusive. Not erased; but I find as I am guided through the elaborately re-constructed rooms, that for the most part, past female presence at Saltram has to be found in gaps, spaces, tucked away in shadowy corners - between pieces of furniture, on faded wall-paper, within the frames of scenes in little pictures along dark corridors, on plaques in the garden. For, the house, like the library is predominantly masculine.
…
     

In the gardens at Saltram

     Women of the Parker family, from Saltram, were predominantly responsible for the creation of its still renowned gardens. Whether the evidential material in the archives corresponds to the actual lived lives of these individuals in their estates I do not know; perhaps it is just the fact of more archives having been preserved at Saltram than at other estates. But, it does appear to be women from the Parker circle who have left the richest legacy of written material in the Devonshire archives. The lives of the network of women from the Parker family of Saltram are deeply intertwined with the landscape and gardens at that estate. I have not yet come across any comparable archival collection relevant to female gardens and gardening in the county. The many of their letters now lying in archives indicate that their gardens and gardenings, their selves and writerly identities are intricately bound together. The Saltram women’s correspondence frequently materialises using the language of plants, and conversely, their actual gardens are often represented by and interpreted as intricately worked texts. The Saltram women’s importance to Devon’s lost literary history of women goes way beyond the parameters of gardening per se. the following is noted as introduction to the Parker archive at the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office:

‘whilst the letters contain much detail about the Parkers and their estate at Saltram, they also have a wider significance. The letter writers (particularly in the later letters) were often prominent politicians and literary figures. The letters describe national as well as local events, contain political and cultural comment. The letters are particularly valuable for the insight they give into social attitudes, attitudes to women, class and family life, they also contain much detail about lifestyles and such topics as travel, medicine and fashion ... ‘

       It is possible to begin to acknowledge these women’s presence at Saltram, retrieve them from its darkly conforming rooms. Though once at the heart and hub of local and national society, chock-full of vibrant wit and artistic and aesthetic sensibility; though once they sat at tables, away from glaring summer sun in their summer-houses to write letters, novels, poetry, they are now more or less condemned to the margins of their property. Their forgotten voices make occasional entrances when they are mentioned in a book. Women's Domain for instance, acknowledges the ‘remarkable women associated with Saltram in the course of the eighteenth century’. And, inside the house one or two ephemera, such as Catherine Lady Parker’s writing desk, remind the visitor that some of the house’s previous residents were women of culture.

      One of the voices you may be aware of whilst visiting Saltram and its garden is that of a woman who wasn’t from the Parker family. The diarist Fanny Burney, who visited Saltram in 1789, as part of the entourage of George III, has a vantage point, ‘Fanny's Bower’, named after her, which is labelled on a plaque outside. Burney, both garden lover and ardent diary compiler, loved the Saltram garden and voiced her response to it:

... I spent the time very serenely in my favourite wood ... The wood here is truly enchanting; the paths on the slant down to the water ... and it abounds in seats of all sorts. Today was devoted to general quiet; and I spent all I could of it in my sweet wood, reading the ‘Art of Contentment’, a delightful old treatise, by the author of ‘The Whole Duty of Man’, which I have found in the Saltram library.’ (See Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay)

      Burney was evidently head over heels and besotted with the accomplishment of her own literary activities, her reading and her journal-keeping and with the enjoyment of Saltram’s garden space as cultural document, to be interpreted as a central site/sight of meditative pleasure.Her pleasure within the deep recesses of Saltram’s garden was shared by, but could have been quite different from that of the women in the Parker family, who may have been split between developing their own literary skills and devoting their attentions to the construction and enhancement of the garden itself. For, several of them were evidently intensely participatory in both. Although all these women were from the upper echelon of society and likely to have been privileged in that that their time would have been spent largely in pursuit of their own favoured activities and hobbies, they may have experienced a conflict in their loyalties to the dual pursuits of writing and gardening.

       There are complex intra-relationships between the women, their involvement with Saltram’s garden and their writing activities, which as well as prolific letters, included fiction, biographies and poetry. Here's a cluster of little snippets from the Devon archives summarising Saltram letters amongst women of the Parker circle; they illustrate their exchange of information about their impact on the estate’s gardens:

Letter from Anne Robinson: News of visitors to Saltram and of the arrival by barge of trees for the garden; Letter from Anne Robinson: news of the orange trees in the greenhouse; Letter from Anne Robinson: how she passes her time and the changes she is making to the gardens: Theresa Robinson, daughter of Lord Grantham RE Frances CofM Theresa Villliers: letters to sister in law Frances CofM, 1841: Enquiries after the cost and productivity of Saltram's garden to compare with that of The Grove; Letter from Barbarina, Lady Dacre: Sends thanks for present of melon seeds.
And here, a sample from a batch of correspondence which demonstrate how closely engaged some of the Parker women were with literary endeavour:
Letter from Barbarina, Lady Dacre, desires copies of [Frances's] poem Irina;
Letter from Barbarina, Lady Dacre comments on Frances's love of theatricals; account of the Charades she organizes for her granddaughters, written by herself and performed before family; visitors and servants;
Letter from Frances, Lady Morley to Mary Berry. Her pleasure at Miss Berry's enjoyment of her writings; sends Miss Berry a collection of her work; Notebook of poetry belonging to [Frances, Lady Morley] including: a poem on the beauty of Longleat House, Wilts; a verse dedicated to herself and Lady Granville concerning the lives of Lord Morley and Lord Granville; story partly in verse called 'The honest Drover or the parson in jeopardy'; a poem on leaving Chatsworth House, Derbys; a poem 'An Expedition up the Tamar; Page of poems relating to the sea and insects [by Frances, Lady Morley] Verse concerning an unnamed lady's writing skill [probably that of Frances, Lady Morley], by Sydney, Lady Morgan Thoughts' short stories , incomplete.[ii] (See The National Archives)
...

       Saltram was built for John and Lady Catherine Parker in the 1740s. Catherine, the daughter of the 1st Earl of Paulet, is recognised as the person responsible for initiating the Parker family’s transfer from Boringdon Hall (now a hotel) to Saltram and for the establishment and development of the family’s new estate there. Not only did Catherine supervise and design the estate’s new building, ‘she also furnished the house ... and was ‘responsible for beginning the patronage of art that brought to Saltram its wealth of fine paintings, porcelain and furniture’. (See Women's Domain) Presumably, Catherine’s passion for her new home extended to the initial formation and planning of its gardens, although I have not found a record to confirm this, and in any case according to various records little is known of the original garden. Perhaps it was Catherine who was responsible for the ‘creation of the woodland walk behind the Orangery which is punctuated by stone pedestals with urns [and] probably dates from the 1740’s’. (See the Saltram Guide.)

       The passionate energy displayed by Catherine’s daughter in law, Theresa Robinson/Parker, (the 2nd wife of John Parker, 1st Baron) daughter of the Earl of Grantham and god daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria), who was typically considered as a woman of exceptional gifts, is everywhere evident in and outside Saltram. Correspondence exchanged between her and her brother Lord Grantham and sister Anne provides vivid detail about Theresa’s interaction with the garden, for in one she is noted as having taken  responsibility for landscaping the grounds and decorating them with features. In letters to other family members Anne also comments on her sister’s energetic activity. In 1769, the year in which Theresa married John, Anne told a correspondent that her sister had had ‘a planting fitt’ and had ‘planned a new greenhouse or orangery where the present one is as you go to the shrubbery.’( See Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art: 1550 - 1850) After its completion between 1773 and 1775, Theresa’s letters express how thrilled she was with her Orangery. Next, she planned the new building's decoration:

‘I want to have Niche and Statues for the Summer, exposed as it is, to the Sea air, and the Dampness there must be in the Walls, set aside all thoughts of Paintings.’

     Within two years Theresa was planning a summer house, which would be placed in a site looking over both the estate and the sea, which she must have paused to view as she frequented her estate: ‘Pray do not forget the castle ... something must be done upon that spot’, she noted in a letter to her brother. The octagonal summer-house was constructed at the western edge of the garden. The castle was intended as an eating-room, a shelter on a perambulation of the garden and especially as a viewing point for the pastoral views of grazing cattle, which would then have been viewed as a vision of ‘arcadia’.

Inside the Summer-House at Saltram

        A year later, in 1772, Theresa was apparently getting impatient after an apparent delay in the completion of the planting of the 220 acre deer park, which at that time served to provide the estate with its external swirl of natural landscape. Her sister Anne told a correspondent that Theresa was ‘fully resolved not to let another year slip but [to plant] the whole top of the Hill immediately.’

     As well as keen garden designer and landscaper Theresa was also an avid plantswoman, and passionate letter-writer. Sadly though she only lived for 5-6 years after her marriage. After her death her unmarried sister Anne Robinson came to live at Saltram to supervise care of the two children. Anne’s important role in the development of the estate is suggested by the following archival note in the Devon archive:

‘Until 1793, the majority of letters come from Anne Robinson and the Parker children at Saltram. As such they give information about Saltram House, garden and estate and the lifestyles of those who lived there.’

       It was Anne who took over the supervision of her sister's children, but also management of the estate, both inside and out. She seems to have taken up projects that her sister had begun and completed them. In September 1785, evidently feeling that she was at least partially influential in ongoing work, Anne wrote on the subject of the hill on the Hardwick Plantation that ‘we are going again to repair the plantation on top of the Hill, which has suffered much by the severe winter and dry summer ... about one in three have died.’ By November, she was reporting that ‘We have almost finished planting the hill’, and by the following February noted that ‘The new approach to the Plantation goes on, but not as fast as it did in the late fine weather ... luckily all the planting was over the day before the first frost began'. (See The Setting of Saltram Park)

      The active and influential responsibilities taken on by both Robinson sisters in the organisation and control of the wider Saltram estate seems to counter the typically well-differentiated and gendered roles displayed in household management by C18 aristocracy. One writer explains:

‘There was separation of management within the landscape garden that reflects the divide between male and female spheres of activity; the flower garden and pleasure ground being closely tied to the domestic rituals of the house – the daily round of sewing, painting, strolling, chatting and gardening – as well as the domestic economy of the household. These jejeune and edifying activities were largely separated from the world of the hunt and estate management.’(See Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850)

      On the other hand maybe it was not unusual for C18 and C19 aristocratic women to be actively involved within their home surroundings, as well as skilled and cultured initiators of manuscripts. Perhaps the problem is that documentation of their interactions with garden and texts is not there. Or, more likely, they are there, lying waiting, still to be found, amongst the letters and correspondence foraged away in archives.

      The Parker women’s involvement at Saltram did not stop, but continued down through the family line. Theresa Parker (Villiers), 1775-1856, sister of John Parker, 2nd Lord Boringdon, 1st Earl of Morley, spent most of her early life with her aunt Anne Robinson at Saltram, following the death of both her parents whilst she was still a child. She married George Villiers in 1798. Theresa, seemingly the most active writer of letters in the family, was said to be an excellent translator, and aware of this the painter Reynolds presented her with a copy of Armand Berquin’s L’Ami des Enfants, when she was ten. Theresa’s letters indicate a lively intelligence and humour and give glimpses of her childhood. Correspondence dated after soon after her marriage mentions the garden of her new home suggesting that she shared her mother’s, aunt’s and grandmother’s interest in gardens and gardening:

‘1799: News of the carriage and planting of trees and other alterations to the [Slyes Hill] gardens; plants trees in the gardens [at Slyes Hill]; 1800 news of her gardening 1800 the improvement of the gardens;1802 account of a visit to Ranelagh Gardens.’[Parker of Saltram, Correspondence]

        Theresa Villiers’ sister in law Frances Talbot, Countess of Morley/Lady Borington, 1782-1857, daughter of a Norfolk surgeon, became John 2nd and 1st Earl of Morley/ Lord Borington’s 2nd wife. The dual gardening/writing occupations of the Parker women were especially notable during the period in which Frances was at Saltram, for she participated in a thriving circle of literary people. Frances was acclaimed in her own right for her literary endeavour and at one time was even rumoured to have written some of Jane Austen's novels. Her niece Maria’s husband Thomas Lister also pastiched Austen’s work. The Gentleman’s magazine described Frances as ‘a woman of strong mind and considerable literary and artistic abilities’, whilst the Atheneum noted that she had ‘sufficiency of grace and talent to have given their writer a fair place among the authoresses had she taken pains and time to try for it.’ (British Women Poets of the Romantic Era) and several of her poems have recently been published.

        Frances Talbot was keenly involved within networks and circles that included other contemporary women also known for their writing. Several of them were close family members. Her niece (through marriage), Maria Theresa Lewis, published biographies of Lord Clarendon and edited the journals of Mary Berry and at least one textual project appears to have been a co-written enterprise. There is some dispute as to the authorship of the C19 novel, Dacre, published in 1834, which was said to have been written by Maria Theresa and edited by her aunt Frances Talbot, the Countess. However, when the novel was reviewed in the Edinburgh Review, it was praised as Frances’ work. A recent view suggests that disguising the author with ‘such subterfuge was common in the period and the book was widely known to be her [Countess of Morley] work’.[xiv] The Edinburgh Review remarked that her novel[s] introduced ‘graphic’ and ‘picturesque’ ... ‘sketches of natural scenery’. Another recent critic notes that the Countess’ novels ‘attained considerable popularity both in England and America’.(See more information about Frances Talbot/Countess of Morley  in  British Women Poets of the Romantic Era) The Countess of Morley’s contribution to the lost canon of C19 Devon women’s literature seems apparent as indeed does that of the wider circle of women of the Parker family of Saltram. There is much still to be rescued from archives so as to restore their literary reputation within the context of the county's cultural history.

A Poem's Lost Past: Sylvia Plath & the 'Eavesdropper'

'Toad-stone! Sister-bitch! Sweet neighbor!'

Row of gravestones in North Tawton churchyard

...' I was a child walking past the church-yard, the rows of graves, then turning right to walk the few steps up the cobbled lane leading to her house, waiting for my aunt, my godmother, to open her door. The woman coming down the slope had a pram, a little girl trotted beside her – I didn’t intuit her later fame, she’s standing, gazing at me, through me, the still-child – neither knowing the real-life, after-life manuscripts: texts that would inevitably link us as witnesses of the sacred landscape. I was not aware of the word-bind she was interring in a poem which hyper-linked into my family, my world, perhaps drafting that very day, so that unbeknown to her, my strong-minded, exotic godmother would be embalmed for posterity as nosy-parker'...

   It seems that with the forthcoming Plath anniversary everything I look at on the web, or in newspapers, seems to have yet another revelatory book or feature fiercely debating the various arguments that still swirl round the poet. Apparently, even Hughes' widow is to publish her own 'side of the story' before she gets too old. Watching this onslaught of new material has prompted me to think about when it is best to keep a secret and when it's (is it ever) the right time to tell what you know? There's a fine balance between revelation and concealment. Ever since the moment when I re-read a particularly vituperative late poem by Sylvia Plath some twenty years ago and with a shocking click of revelation realised that its female subject was someone I knew well, a family member, I have struggled with that conflict. It was after all not the same as having Jill, our  Old English sheepdog, who features in Plath's journals as 'queer old zombie-dog' (See in The Journals of Sylvia Plath).

       At the time the person concerned was well and, though in her late seventies, vibrantly alive. Irene (Rene) Sampson, was my aunt and godmother. After she moved to North Tawton during 1962 Rene's - and later her husband Herbert's - path of fate took her - and them - to become (for a while) Sylvia Plath's (and later Ted Hughes') closest next door neighbours in North Tawton. I can not recall exactly when in 1962 Rene moved into the cottage below Court Green, except that it must have been a little while before Hughes and Plath separated. I'm not sure how near in real-time aunt's move back into the town, (where she had already spent some years for both she and Herbert were from Devon), corresponded with the final paragraph of Plath's journals (Appendix 15 - which is a 'compilation  of notes that Plath kept on her Devon neighbours ... during the first six months of 1962' - See Trinidad, Hidden in Plain Sight), for the journal's ending - as presently published - suggests that after the death of Percy Keys Plath was curious as to who would be her next near neighbours:

Rose said she heard a couple outside our house "Oh but it has a thatch and is much too big for us". She came out. Were they wanting a house? Yes, they were retiring from London and wanted a cottage. Had come to North Tawton instead of South Tawton, by mistake. How strange says Rose, I am wanting to sell this cottage. O it is just what we want, say the people. Now I wonder, will they come?

Rene & Herbert Sampson
outside 4 Court Green
1990's

        Maybe the poet made up this story, or altered its facts, or that particular couple did not move in to 4 Court Green, for, other than occasional holidays home, Herbert and Rene had been abroad since the mid fifties, and as they were both local people would not have muddled South and North Tawton. They had spent several years in Ghana, where my Uncle worked as a civil engineer and surveyor, and returned to England early in 1962 to find a home for their later retirement. Herbert soon took up another post for the Crown Agents in Sarawak, whilst Rene settled into her new home in North Tawton. She had found the tropical climate hard to cope with but was to join him in Sarawak later in 1963, before their eventual retirement to the Court Green cottage, in 1968. In his own memoirs written much later Herbert said of their move to the town:

 ... we thought it advisable to make provision for our eventual retirement, so we started looking round for a house to buy ... We looked at so many but could not find the right place ... I had to come to North Tawton  for some reason and I saw Miss P. and mentioned we were trying to find a house. She said 'What about the cottage next to Court Greet? Mrs Key is leaving. So I went along to see Mrs Key who said her husband had died recently and she was going to return to London ... I thought the house was not bad and made arrangements for Rene to come to see it. We bought it, thinking it would be suitable as a temporary abode while we were in Sarawak, but we have been here ever since ... (W. H. Sampson, My Memoirs, privately printed).

        I do not know exactly when Sylvia and Rene first met. I lived in North Tawton at the time, but as I was still not yet a teenager I do not recall everything with precise detail. But, from conversations I've had since with Rene, I do know that after Hughes had gone she and Sylvia met quite regularly - probably until the poet moved to London.

        I was very fond of my handsome and rather exotic godmother. She was a warm, lively character, with great presence, a vibrant fashion sense, a sassy sense of humour and cracking laugh. Her husband Herbert recalled how he'd noticed her special 'character' in their school days, when she would tease him in the school corridors. She was always the doting and caring aunt as far as I was concerned, a wonderful cook and perfect hostess who in her younger days loved to entertain as well as going out to wine and dine. I did not witness the 'other side' of her feisty personality, though I know that sometimes the sparks could fly if someone rubbed her up the wrong way. I loved to visit Rene after school in the latter part of 1962, during the months she was in the town, just before my family moved away the following year and was sad that her move to our town had happened just before our departure.

Rene and Herbert
on their Wedding-Day

       
        Over the years I have been unable to decide as to whether to make public the link between 'Eavesdropper' and my aunt. I wasn't (and still am not) certain that I could do Rene justice in the face of such a vitriolic poem, nor, given its insulting nature, whether she would wish me to. I was also a little worried that telling of her connection with 'Eavesdropper' might drive a host of Plath researchers to my aunt's door. One thing I was always sure of was that Rene never realised that she featured as the main subject of any poem - let alone one by Plath; my disappointment was that I dare not tell her, because I knew she would be hurt, shocked and angry. If only Plath had penned a more complimentary poem I mused, as I thought about how I could have shown it to Rene; then I would have been able to tell her how pleased she should feel to be inscribed for posterity within a poem written by one of the most famous poet's last, and now rather infamous poems.

 Here is the poem - see in larger print at AllPoetry:

Your brother will trim my hedges!
They darken your house,
Nosy grower,
Mole on my shoulder,
To be scratched absently,
To bleed, if it comes to that.
The stain of the tropics
Still urinous on you, a sin.
A kind of bush-stink.

You may be local,
But that yellow!
Godawful!
Your body one
Long nicotine-finger
On which I,
White cigarette,
Burn, for your inhalation,
Driving the dull cells wild.

Let me roost in you!
My distractions, my pallors.
Let them start the queer alchemy
That melts the skin
Gray tallow, from bone and bone.
So I saw your much sicker
Predecessor wrapped up,
A six and a half foot wedding-cake.
And he was not even malicious.

Do not think I don't notice your curtain—
Midnight, four o'clock,
Lit (you are reading),
Tarting with the drafts that pass,
Little whore tongue,
Chenille beckoner,
Beckoning my words in—
The zoo yowl, the mad soft
Mirror talk you love to catch me at.

How you jumped when I jumped on you!
Arms folded, ear cocked,
Toad-yellow under the drop
That would not, would not drop
In a desert of cow people
Trundling their udders home
To the electric milker, the wifey, the big blue eye
That watches, like God, or the sky
The ciphers that watch it.

I called.
You crawled out,
A weather figure, boggling,
Belge troll, the low
Church smile
Spreading itself, like butter.
This is what I am in for—
Flea body!
Eyes like mice

Flicking over my property,
Levering letter flaps,
Scrutinizing the fly
Of the man's pants
Dead on the chair back,
Opening the fat smiles, the eyes
Of two babies
Just to make sure—
Toad-stone! Sister-bitch! Sweet neighbor!

       As well as the shocking revelation of 'Eavesdropper' and the realisation that our dog Jill popped up in the journals, there have been other occasions when Plath's texts have acted as a trigger for me to lost and personal childhood secrets; her words have the canny knack of making me snatch breath with a remembering of what is long gone, obliterated in the snows of memory. 

      Whilst I have informally mentioned the existence of the poem 'Eavesdropper' to a few people, I have not, until now, revealed aunt's identity. I don't know if having read the poem anyone else has hit on the connection. It is possible, but  I think unlikely - except that is, for Hughes himself and possibly his daughter and widow. As far as I am aware local people are far more interested in Hughes' work and significance as major poet than they are his first wife's- so much is this the case that  I was incredulous, when at a history exhibition held in North Tawton a few years ago, the organisers made him focus of the display, yet completely ignored Plath's very existence.
      Anyway, although several concerns have always stopped me in the past, gradually, over the years, I have begun to believe that maybe I should tell what I know of 'Eavesdropper's' connection with my aunt. Now, with the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death, on February 11th, and with several years passing since the death of Rene and more recently, of Herbert, it seems the appropriate time to set the record straight. Although between them they both share a number of nieces and nephews and their descendants, the couple did not have children of their own, so I do not need to fear any repercussions for either of them from public awareness of the link between person and text. Whilst I have no particular wish to add to the bedlam of extraneous Plath literature at present spilling out from every conceivable source - the so-called 'peanut-crunching crowd' (See 'Lady Lazurus') - several considerations have begun to sway me. For one thing, I've occasionally come across critical commentary which refers to the poem and come to with a jolt, after realising that even basic facts are incorrect and that, even with a degree of poetic licence there are significant gaps in the telling of the subject's side of the story; I believe these may lead to misinterpretations about the poem. For instance, in Method and Madness, published as long ago as 1976, Edward Butshcer, noting the 'harshness' of 'Eavesdropper' and the obvious fact that its target is a female neighbour, states that the subject is 'half of an aging brother and sister couple who now occupied the cottage where the old man whose funeral was described in 'Berck Plage' used to live' (Method and Madness). So, fact number one, Plath's new neighbours in 1962 after the death of Percy Key were not brother and sister, but husband and wife. Fact number two, whilst bordering on middle-age - for Rene must have been just fifty in '62 - neither she or her husband were exactly aging.
       I've also recently noticed that a few researchers appear to be making explicit reference to 'Eavesdropper', and in particular understand that at least one of them has referred to the subject of the poem at a Plath conference (David Trinidad's essay at Sylvia Plath Symposium 2012). I am not in a position to know what was said at that paper, or if  my aunt was identified and that is the main reason I have decided to get this piece out there. I am afraid that in the future the matching of poem and person may lead to misconceptions about Rene's personality. Although the 'truth will (probably) out', it may be biased and distorted. I want to make sure that any Plath researcher in the future will have an authentic portrait of Rene. In the process I hope this would re balance the depiction of my aunt's character and personality against the nastiness of the poem, which in future might otherwise poison her name and reputation.
       Lastly, I've noticed that, even with the onslaught of new textual material, critics still complain about the lack of referential information pertinent to some of Plath's last poems. In A Critical Heritage published in 1997, Linda Wagner Martin complained about the lack of decent annotation concerning several of the last poems;

'When we come to poems that concern, not Plath's father but her mother, husband, children, friends, or 'the other woman' there are no annotations at all beyond citations from Plath's own BBC commentaries ... What for example, was the situation described so vividly and viciously in 'Lesbos'? ... Who is the 'Sister-Bitch'! Sweet Neighbour' of 'Eavesdropper'?'

      More recently, one commentator noted of Ariel that the poems in the collection for which there are no concrete situations tend to 'remain obscure associations on an unexplained theme' and that because of this are less satisfactory (See The Cambridge Companion). Though 'Eavesdropper' is not one of the specific poems referred to here, it is equally abstruse.
      Apropos Plath studies setting the record straight seems the order of the day. (See Interview with Elizabeth Sigmund and Interview with Olwyn Hughes). This particularly applies to the last months of the poet's life and to her later poems. For instance, whilst considering a clutch of Plath's final, especially confessional poems written late 1962, one author insists 'there are irresistible pressures to reveal secrets' (Cambridge companion to Sylvia Plath). 'Eavesdropper' appears in the list ; others are  'Purdah', 'The Other', 'The Jailer' and 'A Secret'. Secrecy versus concealment have been and still are central concerns when the names Hughes and Plath are mentioned. The very essence of Plath's poetic rhetoric is that of the confessional and many of her poems - especially the later ones - have been discussed in terms of the tensions they figure between the pressure to withhold what is known and the contradictory impulse to tell all - and in the case of certain poems (including 'Eavesdropper'), to consider Plath's pointing up of differences in social mores between the US and the UK during the period of the Cold War. One critic sums up: 'there are irrepressible pressures to tell secrets' (Deborah Nelson, see Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath). Meanwhile, the crux of the still raging furore which plays out in the press and various academic papers centres round the whereabouts of the poet's missing journals and the allegedly lost novel Doubletake:

'Readers long for the secrets they would reveal ... the dirt on the break-up that triggered her astounding poetic outpouring' (Trinidad, Hidden in Plain Sight). 

      But I still felt uncomfortable about self-revelation and the insistence amongst various critics re the concomitant impulse to read the self in the text. Did I really want to add to the already heaving, frequently junk-pile of material, which obsessively analyses Plath's poetry and its portrayal of woman as poet? As her daughter has complained, 'the clay from her poetic energy was taken up and versions of [my] mother made out of it, invented to reflect only the inventors as if they could possess [my] real, actual mother ...' (Frieda Hughes, Ariel Takes Flight).
     I didn't.
     Yet, increasingly, I realised that I did. I can't stop the plethora of Plath analysis. But I can ease a trace of a lost voice into the cacophony about Plath's final months. A missing piece of jigsaw, which one day might fit into the gap of what is lost of the poet's life in the vanished journals, as well as provide a valid source of information for future annotation and authentic readings of the poem.

     ... Several of the poems that Plath wrote or re-worked afterwards in London were initially drafted in her Devon home. 'Eavesdropper' was apparently one of the poems first drafted within nine days of Plath's separation from Hughes, in September 1962. However, one source says that 'Eavesdropper' was first drafted October 15, 1962, on a scrap of paper, whose front contained Hughes' unpublished radio play, The Calm; other drafts were also first written on these scraps, including 'A Secret', (October 10), 'Daddy'  'Medusa', (Oct 16) The Jailer' (Oct 17) 'The Applicant', (Oct 11)  'Lesbos', (Oct 18),  and 'Lyonesse' and 'Amnesiac' (Oct 21), which were originally one poem, (see Revising Life, Susan Dyne). Other poems first drafted in this period included 'Stopped Dead' (Oct 19), 'The Tour, (Oct 23/25) and 'Winter Trees' (Nov 26).
        In many of these late poems local landscapes, people in the district and Court Green's garden features become integral ingredients within the texts’ figurations: the church and graveyard; the yew-tree; the elm trees; farm-animals; the bees; local people; and the ancient Court Green mound. When she left North Tawton in December 1962 Plath took with her to London some of the new drafts that she had written in the last months at Court Green and, according to Hughes, at Christmas time arranged forty of them into a specific sequence, which she formulated as a collection within a black spring binder which she gave a title, Ariel and Other Poems. One source says that on the last day of December 1962, she revised ‘Eavesdropper’ and ‘Sheep in Fog’; during January and the first days of February she wrote ‘Mystic,’ ‘Kindness,’ ‘Gigolo,’ ‘Totem,’ ‘Child,’ ‘The Munich Mannequins,’ ‘Paralytic,’ ‘Words,’ ‘Contusion,’ ‘Edge’ and ‘Balloons’. So, although her last months were spent in the rented London flat, several of these poems suggest that the poet’s mind was still very much occupied with her life left behind in her Devon home. Memories of the place played over and over in the drama of her last weeks. Plath had also begun work on a new novel titled Doubletake (later changed to Double Exposure) and my understanding is that the poems 'Brasilia' and 'Childless Woman' were first drafted during this period. Hughes provides another comment about the genesis of  'Eavesdropper within the context of the later poems:

In late 1962, while the Ariel poems were being written, she corrected and sent off the novel's proofs, and worried over questions of possible libel. The last Ariel poem, "Sheep in Fog," came on December 2nd. This was also the last poem she wrote (except for the unfinished "Eavesdropper") until after the novel was published. It was then the first poem she picked up, on January 28th, when she made the correction that revealed it as the elegy and funeral cortege for the Ariel inspiration. Whereupon it became the first (three more written that same day and all eleven within the next week) of the final group, the true death-songs (Hughes, "On Sylvia Plath," in Raritan, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 1-10

       The publication history of Plath's poetry has become notoriously complicated. Hughes' selection of poems from his first wife's work for various publications and collections sparked annoyance and argument. Wagner Martin, for example,  irritated with him for what she felt were his limited annotations of Collected Poems and conceding that 'perhaps [he] considered it indelicate to reveal the identity of living persons', added 'but in that case why annotate the text at all?' It seems that Hughes maintained a fine balancing act between the selection of poems he elected to publish versus those he decided to withhold from public view and fifty years after Plath's death and fifteen after his, there are still plenty of people out there still quite prepared to vilify him (see for instance Hidden in Plain Sight, David Trinidad). 'Eavesdropper' was evidently one of the poems that gave Hughes a problem. I imagine that he soon came to know his new neighbours and out of respect for my aunt did not, at least initially, want to broadcast the unpleasant poem in this country. My understanding is that 'Eavesdropper' was first published in Poetry in the US, in 1963, along with two other of Plath's late 1962 poems (the last clutch of the poet's poems placed in that magazine), some eight months after her death:

'Plath appeared several times in Poetry, the last time in August 1963 with "Fever 103°," "Purdah," and "Eavesdropper" The first of these, especially, shows her at the height of her powers, using a feverish delirium as a metaphor for love gone awry 'Darling, all night I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.' Yet all three of these poems are fascinating—and often disturbing—in their rapidly-shifting depictions of a female speaker as, at turns, a "lantern," a "pure acetylene/ Virgin," a "mirror," a "peacock," a "lioness," and, in "Eavesdropper," a shockingly bitter housewife.The bio sheet she completed for these poems (included here) is dated January 29, 1963, less than two weeks before her death.' (Poetry Foundation Archive)

      In 1976, at the time of Bustscher's book, 'Eavesdropper', in company with two other late poems, 'Amnesiac' and 'The Detective', had not been published in the UK; again I assume that Hughes withheld it intentionally, considering the poem to be yet another of the 'more personally aggressive poems from 1962', (Hughes, Introduction to Plath's Collected Poems), which he thought best to leave out of the first collections. So, other than in Poetry, 'Eavesdropper' to my knowledge remained excluded from any UK collection of Plath's work until 1981, when Hughes included it in Collected Poems along with a number of other previously unpublished poems of 1962, and the as yet omitted twelve poems that she had left arranged in the Ariel sequence at her death. 'Eavesdropper' appears in the book as the last poem in the 1962 section.

        ...Well, what can I say of  'Eavesdropper' and its portrayal of  Rene as the text relates to real life that might feed constructively into the interpretative miasma concerning the last poems, the lost texts and the ongoing conversation about Plath/Hughes? Firstly, I must mention that I can only comment about the published version of the poem, as I have not had a chance to see the alterations and additions that Plath made to the poem, which were apparently quite extensive (See in Kendall, Sylvia Plath; A Critical Study). I might also add that the following remarks are set against awareness of a background critical context which construes intense focus on biographical references as reductive. I hope I can catch the appropriate balance between discussing material about the lives of poet and person, and valuing the poem as art.
        'Eavesdropper' may at first glance seem to be fairly insignificant in terms of the whole opus of the poet and also may initially appear to be about a rather common situation, whose subject's importance is solely that of being the 'nosy' busybody who has moved in next door. 'She' as far as the poem is concerned is one- dimensional in that the onlooking or 'eavesdropping' reader is not aware of her perspective on the situation as presented in the poem, and also because the poem inscribes her as a female subject entirely defined by a proclivity for interfering intrusiveness into others' business. I believe this to be very much only part of the story.
         From Rene's comments to me over the years when Sylvia's name has crept into conversations I have come to believe that my aunt acted as a kind of proxy therapist to her neighbour during the time of the poet's last weeks and months in North Tawton. I do not know if my aunt's name appears in the lost journals and if so, what kind of tone they might adopt. Neither do I know if Plath may have sent Rene any letters from London. It is possible, but if so Rene would not have kept them; she was a meticulous housewife and her small home was always spotless and welcoming; not the kind of place where clutter and ephemera would accumulate. Although the two women did not know each other for long in terms of clock-time, during the short period  when they were neighbours I assume they developed quite a close and possibly intense 'sisterly' bond. Presumably their association was almost as long as that between Plath and Elizabeth Sigmund, Plath's 'earth mother' and 'confidante', who also first met Plath sometime in 1962. Given the difference of approximately twenty years in the ages of my aunt and her neighbour, they may even have begun to establish a pseudo mother/daughter bond. This would allow the possibility of projective transference, with all its attendant emotional repercussions. I suggest this because it seems to me relevant to a reading of 'Eavesdropper'. An initial reading of the poem attests that the 'nosy neighbour' is just that; someone who lives near or next door to the poet, but who is not in her confidence. On first reading the poem may not seem to share any information suggestive of any kind of familiarity between the two women; yet, at its mid-point and ending line it metaphorically hints at the reflection of the self via the other, a psychological mirroring:  'Mirror talk you love to catch me at' and 'Sister-bitch'. After several more readings the poem's spite can be somewhat put aside, the reader can get to its ending lines and note the sudden 'twist', 'Toadstone; Sister-bitch; Sweet neighbour', whose tone of bitter amusement and self-reflective irony seem to diffuse the dark mood of the foregoing lines at the moment the final line establishes a mutual gaze of recognition between poet and her subject. This mutuality and doubling occurs at various levels: the conscious realisation of the writer's own propensity toward nosy and  intense scrutiny of others, and the unconscious projection of self on to the other. 
        'Eavesdropper' can be related to other late poems in which the poet's self analysis in terms of the double becomes central to the text's interpretation. For instance, 'The Other; 'The Applicant' and 'The Tour' all scrutinise intensely an 'Other' (self) and open with a dramatic remark (in the case of 'Eavesdropper', an 'incoherent outburst' - see Van Dyne, Revising Life; Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poem - the 'Your brother' referred to was in real-life Rene's brother-in-law, who at the time held the farm where she was brought up, in nearby Exbourne) directed to an alter-ego, who is assumed to be an absent addressee.
        There are other echoes which connect 'Eavesdropper' with significant metaphorical figurative devices in other Plath texts; in particular, the 'yellow' self and the 'toadstone' - both of which are significant images in several poems and are also used by Hughes, in Birthday Letters, as linking symbols to his wife's poems.  Stanza two, for example, which finishes with a cascade of what someone called 'erotic (phonemic) pulsation' (See Mitchell, Sylvia Plath; The Poetry of Negativity) - (Your body one/Long nicotine finger/On which I/White cigarette/Burn for your inhalation ...) - is written in terms of the duality of the 'Godawful', 'yellow' bodily self of the subject versus the white-self of the speaker. There is a suggestion of alchemical transference, a transmutation between the two selves, which continues into the next stanza. Incidentally, my aunt's stay in Ghana probably left her with a fading tan, which would account for the poet's derogatory description of her appearance; whilst Rene loved the tropical heat she also had long-standing health problems to keep at bay.
        I do not wish to add to the already rich commentary about Plath's two selves, but I think it's useful to consider 'Eavesdropper'  alongside poems such as 'In Plaster', where the poet describes her two selves:

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one
 ('In Plaster')

or, to the split-self of Esther, the self-'heroine' in The Bell-Jar, the novel Plath completed during the final months of her life. As I read the text the subject of 'Eavesdropper' can be viewed as yet another of Plath's 'rejected doubles' (Jo Gill, Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath).
       The toadstone is another repeated and I believe cryptic and important motif, which first appears in 'The Rival' and is picked up by Hughes in Birthday Letters. It appears in one of the early drafts of 'The Rival', 'Toadstone I see I must wear you in the centre of my forehead/And let the dead sleep as they deserve', in which context 'toadstone' seems to echo its symbolic use in As You Like It:

sweet are the uses of adversity
which like the toad
ugly and venomous
wears yet a precious jewel in his head

In Birthday Letters Hughes seems to pick up on the dark aspect of the toadstone motif in the poem '18 Rugby Street', with the line 'toadstone in the head of your desolation'. Yet, later in the sequence, in the poem 'The Prism', he uses it to confirm the toadstone's mystical potency as an ambivalent symbol; here it is recognised as mythical stone, whose magical powers are valued as amulet of the self: It goes with me, your seer's vision-stone/Like a lucky stone, my unlucky stone ('The Prism').
       I find the toadstone a rather compelling motif and when I re-read 'Eavesdropper' like to imagine that as she worked through this poem the poet pushed through the defensive ambivalence she initially felt toward her new neighbour, and came upon a more supportive self-reflective realisation of that neighbour's own present mirroring life-experience to her own. Not artist, nor writer, nor mother; but Rene was a woman of her time; a woman with secrets; a woman living alone; perhaps, after all, a woman after the poet's own heart -

'Toadstone! Sister Bitch! Sweet Neighbor!'

                                                                         ...

       I was thinking about the poem 'Eavesdropper', about the poet, Plath and the person, my late aunt and special god-mother, when I, with others of my family, said our farewells to her husband, my uncle Herbert - himself an amazing figure at 104 - almost two years ago in North Tawton church and cemetery. I recalled that some years ago, when I asked Rene if she might one day share what she knew of the Hughes couple she was adamant that she would not. She knew them both well. From many earlier conversations I knew she had confidences and secrets she could tell, yet out of consideration for Ted and his family was adamant she would never share them with the world at large. I respected her for her decision and did not try to press her. In retrospect I wonder if she might have changed her mind if she had been made aware of the poem. Given the merciless legacy of 'Eavesdropper' there seemed to me to be a bitter twist of irony in her decision; offered the opportunity to reveal all that she knew (of her 'eavesdropping sessions'), she chose to remain silent.
       As I get older, and as my memories of my aunt begin to recede into the distance and as each time I come across 'Eavesdropper' its vindictive recrimination hits me again, and whilst assuming the poet's absolute right of artistic licence to distort and misrepresent, I am pleased that I've tried to redress the skewed imbalance of the poem. There may be others around who have identified Rene. As I've suggested above I am convinced that Hughes himself recognised the portrait of his neighbour - for Hughes and Herbert and Rene had many neighbourly interactions - and so held back that poem as he did others, so as to protect  her.  In his Memoirs Herbert tells of how, after his retirement, Hughes let him cultivate and use the neglected  Court Green kitchen-garden:

One day our neighbour Ted Hughes came in to see what changed to the cottage we were making. During his visit ... I broached the subject of what, in previous times, was the kitchen garden of Court Green ... it was completely overgrown with nettles and other weeds, masses of raspberry canes gone wild, saplings and even full-grown hawthorn trees ... Mr Hughes agreed a reasonable rent and got a solicitor to prepare a lease, and I set about the task of clearing the weeds and brushwood, burning the same and digging the ground ... I continued to use the plot until I was approaching 80.

Hughes indicated his affection for the couple through presenting them with a signed copy of each of his books as they were published. I guess he may have been a little more cautious to do so on publication of his first wife's Collected Poems, in 1981, when 'Eavesdropper' finally made an appearance in the UK. I'm not sure they had a copy, though they certainly had Ariel and Winter Trees. If they did I guess neither of them would have spotted the portrayal of Rene. Although they always admired their poet neighbours both Hughes' and Plath's poetry was obtuse and foreign to my uncle and aunt - who were more at ease with Betjeman, Yeats and Rupert Brooke - the latter of whose poetry I know Rene was especially fond. More recently, before his death, Hughes made a special exception for Rene when, during his last illness, during a period in which he was not signing texts, she asked if he would sign a copy of Birthday Letters for her niece (me) - who he did not know. I treasure this book.
     Having undergone angst about even attempting to write this particular blog piece - for reasons which by now must be obvious - I am now just a little more reluctant than usual to press the publish tab. How do you try to convey in just a few paragraphs a sense of what a special, loved person has meant to you over a lifetime? This piece is very much a first try to put what I want into words and is, I fear wanting; perhaps one day I might decide to expand my reading of 'Eavesdropper'.
      But now I seem to hear an inner voice and my late godmother Rene's gravelly laugh, her wicked sense of humour; she's cheering me on. I muse about how the two women's neighbourly acquaintance may have evolved if Plath had returned to Court Green as indeed it seems she planned: would they have ended up bosom pals, or bitter rivals?

‘… It’s my plan to return to Court Green in the Spring … Aprilish …please plan on coming back to Devon with me! It would be such fun to open the place up in the Spring there with you.’ (Letter from Plath to Ruth Fainlight, Jane and Sylvia - in Poetry Society).

Rene as a young woman

   

Copyright Julie Sampson 2013

Family history meets fiction & poetry in Dean Prior; weavers and writers; Robert Herrick and Rose Macaulay writing in the South Hams

Dean Prior, Devon

          It is a rare delight to find a fragment of my own Devon family history written in the fabrics of its landscape converging with a past writer’s imagination, so it was with increasing interest that I found that the once and long-time home village of a branch of my maternal family has doubled links with literature; for not only did a famous poet of the Stuart era live there, but also a more recent novelist based one of her historical novels in the area.

         I had known about Robert Herrick, the poet's, link with Dean Prior for years and sometimes mused upon the possibility that some of his verses might have embedded intriguing lost narratives about individuals from my own ancestral past. Frequently remembered for some tediously mundane and even very lewd verse, Herrick also wrote lyrical poems about flowers and rural phenomena - 'brooks and blossoms', 'birds and bowers',  'may-poles', 'hock-carts', 'wassails' and 'wakes', 'bridegrooms, brides and bridal cakes'. It seemed reasonable to suppose that his richly evocative texts encode, albeit mostly anonymously, the lives and landscapes of the locality of Dean Prior and at least one other researcher confirmed my belief that 'In the hundreds of poems comprising the bucolic scenes of Herrick's Hesperides, readers are treated to portraits of local figures as well as to images of a rural life replete with seasonal patterns, ritual repetitions, and unsophisticated naturalness.' 
(In Vino-Et in Amore-Veritas: Transformational Animation in Herrick's "Sack" Poems, William C Johnson Papers on Language & Literature, Winter 2005).     

           Several times over the years I’d passed the village where Herrick had lived overall for a period of some 32 years. In 1629, a year after his mother's death, he was appointed the Dean Prior living and stayed in the parish until 1647, when due to his Royalist leanings.  he was removed from his post. After the Restoration the poet pleaded to be reinstated at Dean; this wish was granted and Herrick returned to Devon in 1660. He remained vicar of the parish until his death in 1674.

           Towards the end of her own life my maternal grandmother Annie often told me about her father’s family, the Abbotts, who were for the most part wool-combers, or wool traders who had married daughters of local yeoman farmers. There were a whole string of male Abbotts from Dean district - mostly Roberts or Johns or Williams - who, from marriages to local women had gathered other names into the genetic fold - Gidley, Legassic; Lavers; Lane;  Honywell; Ford; Veal and Pearse. As I tried to  imagine the Abbotts' family lives (side-tracking here if anyone is interested in genealogical research there's a short piece about the Abbotts here), I’d wondered how long my ancestors had lived in Dean and ideally conjured up scenarios in which one or more of them may have met and spoken to the poet. I’d always been rather intrigued by the village, but until recently never stopped to look around.  I read with interest that a couple of centuries after the poet's demise the locals still remembered and could recite his verse - lines from which apparently were recounted down the generations. (See Gentleman's Magazine) Other rumours confirmed that, although Herrick lay in an unmarked grave his ghostly presence hovered over the place:

Herrick lay in an unmarked grave, but his lively spirit did not rest there. For the next century there were stories of his haunting Dean Prior, and a visitor who arrived therein 1810 heard "a whole budget of anecdotes about his ghost." (Two Gentlemen; the Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick, (available on Questia, p. 267) 

        I  wondered if Herrick’s texts and research about him and his work might provide me with much needed information about my ancestors and their lives in the surrounding area. Perhaps I could begin to fill in some gaps and solve some family puzzles.

        That is as far as my interest and investigations went, until very recently, when browsing the web-archives for tit-bits of lost family history, I was able to confirm that our Abbotts -or/and families whose marriages brought them into that family - really had been rooted in and around Dean and district for at least as far back as mid to the last half of the C17, which coincides with the period when Robert Herrick was in the village. From parish registers it seems that the Abbotts may have moved down the Devon lanes to Dean from nearby Buckfastleigh, which is logical given that Buckfast was the centre of the wool producing area.  There were Nicolai and Phillipi, both Abbotts; there was Richard Abbot, whose wife Jane was from the Pearse family; her mother was Dorothy Lavers. The Protestation Returns for Dean Prior for the year 1641, which are signed by the vicar,  'Robert Hearicke', is peppered with names of men whom I believe to have been  our family's forefathers: William Lavers; Henry Legasick; John Honywill. This coincidence of dates prompted me to begin to look at Herrick’s poetry again, in conjunction with an increased focus on genealogical research about the family from Dean. I re-read some of the lyrics from Hesperides with new intent. Not that his comments about the locals were altogether complimentary. Anything but in fact. His poetry is replete with lines labelling the locals as ‘rudest Salvages’.  Readers who may be unfamiliar with his work will know his poem 'Discontents in Devon', which begins: 

More discontents I never had since I was born than here; where I have been, and still am sad, in this dull Devonshire

Or, they may know his poem titled 'Dean Bourn a rude river in Devon by which sometimes he lived', in which the poet deplores both the uncultivated landscape and 
uncultured people.

         But recent Herrick criticism has questioned the prevailing conclusion (arising from lines in his own poetry)  that Herrick hated his time in Devon, despised and ridiculed the locals, and loathed the isolated rural setting. In any case, as the editor of the new paperback Selected Poems of Robert Herrick says, many of the poems 'attest to his joy in various aspects his life in Dean Prior and to his interest in country life' (introduction) and as another blogger notes, 'Dull it [Dean Prior] may have been, and discontent he may have been, but something kept Herrick in place in Devon' (See The Reader Online).

            A poem such as The Little Spinners seems to connect directly with my ancestors:

YE pretty housewives, would ye know
The work that I would put ye to ?
This, this it should be : for to spin
A lawn for me, so fine and thin
As it might serve me for my skin.
For cruel love has me so whipp'd
That of my skin I all am stripp'd ;
And shall despair that any art
Can ease the rawness or the smart,
Unless you skin again each part.
Which mercy if you will but do,
I call all maids to witness to
What here I promise : that no broom
Shall now or ever after come
To wrong a spinner or her loom. 

         Whilst Herrick is decidedly not the kind of poet a C21 writer would turn to in order to illuminate the lost worlds of women's lives and writings with what you might call a feminist perspective, the poem 'Spinners' does resonate with the lives of the women of the time - those whose identities are forever bound up with those of father or husband. It reminds me that several, perhaps many, of my female foremothers would have spent much of their lives inside their cottages hard at work at the loom.  A while ago I wrote a short lyric trying to glimpse a fragment of the life of one of them, Susannah Gidley, who was born a few decades after Herrick's death: 

My wheel’s turning

moorland vistas up by

    Hannaford

 behind its frames

   fibres twist

flyer of time

rotates

 I, spinner

left holding the yarn

(Susannah Gidley Abbott, Dean Prior, 1741-1823)

           I pondered whether another foremother, Dorothy Lavers, who was born in Dean in 1671, may have been baptised by the poet during his last incumbency in the parish. Perhaps indeed, her parents John Michelmore and Dawnes Michelmore were married by him the year before. Conversely, it might be possible that one, or a few, of the charmingly, ostensibly innocent often unwitting temptresses)  and unnamed young girls who frequent his Hesperides - who become paradoxically, either objects of his eroticised (and even lewd) attention or recipients of his fatherly advice, were my own foremothers. Poems to 'Anthea', 'Corinna' and the mysterious 'Julia' thread the book; their presence tempts him; break his heart. Sometimes there is a hint of a fragment of an erotic frissance between poet and woman from the village, such as; 'The Suspicion upon his over-much familiarity with a Gentlewoman', a 'comely and most fragrant maid'. Or, local rural customs come to the fore merging with Herrick's Carpe Diem preoccupation, when an anonymous girl, in the guise of  her pastoral name, Corinna,  is bid to rise from her bed, to join her friends and other villagers in the traditional May-Day rites: 'Rise and put on your foliage, and be seen/To come forth like the spring-time, fresh and green ...'

         And what, I wondered, about the clergyman who took charge of the village whilst the poet was absent; a weaver, John Syms, was vicar during the years of the Interregnum.  Meanwhile after Herrick's death William Pearse took over the living. There were Pearses from Dean in our family. Could there be a link between the family branches? And I began to wonder if my woolcomber Abbott ancestors had been puritans and if so if they may have been influential in the decision to remove Herrick from his Devon post. 
    
         Above and beyond these possibilities of personal connected lived lives the poet's work also teems with evocative details of C17 Devon village life, all of which can help the family-history researcher to flesh out a context for their own personal story through the provision of authentic backgrounds for their lost forebears. Herrick's home at the vicarage is a 'little house whose humble roof/is weatherproof; his food is simple, with 'Wassail bowles to drink'; the outdoor world is adorned with 'dew-bespangling herb and tree', with 'whitethorn laden lanes whilst rural rituals come alive, with 'The harvest swains, and wenches bound/For joys to see the hock-cart crowned.

        It is unlikely that I will ever find any definitive paper-trail connections between poet, poetry and personal ancestral past  but there is a lasting and mutual imaginative interaction between them, which provides extra impetus and richness, both to my reading of the poems and to my pursuit of that past.

          ...  Those who are familiar with the route of the A38 as it follows down through the South Hams of Devon will understand why most people do not stop and take a tour round Dean Prior. They will know that the road passes right next to the church, ripping the heart out of the place as it splits it in half. 

The village surrounding the church, once included a school, and many cottages, these were all pulled down to build the new road through. Around the church, now lying directly to the left of the main road, had been ‘Church Town, with its cottages, church house and school and across the valley and now on the other side of the A38, lie Upper Dean and Deancombe. Lower Dean lies to the left of the A38. (The Church of Dean Prior)

A38 goes by Dean Prior
© Copyright Pierre Terre and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

            For the most part my Abbott ancestors seem to have lived in Dean Combe, the small sub-hamlet of Dean Prior main village, which has always been a hamlet, rather than having its hamlet identity forced on it by modern requirements for fast roads.  Near the opening of her novel They Were Defeated, first published in 1932, the novelist who re-created Herrick’s time in Dean richly conjures the C17 landscape of Dean Combe indicating that she must have visited the locality. 

They were come now to Deancombe; a cluster of steep-eaved thatched cottages, deep in rosy-fruited orchards, huddled beneath the steep bank of a bracken- gold, furze-gold,brambled hill ... She saw it now, as she stood at the top of the lane that dipped steeply down from DeanWood to Deancombe village. The smoke of bonfires drifted sweetly on the light, coolair; behind her stretched the long dark gorge of the wood, climbing densely up DeanBourne to the wild moors; unyellowed yet, it climbed, a tangled darkgreen forest of oak, birch, holly, beech and pine, on either side of the brawling river far below. Julian loved to climb up all the river's wild length, from Dean village to where the long steepravine opened out onto the purple moors at the ford where the old Abbot's Way startedacross Lamb's Down towards Buckfast Abbey in the far south. But now she turned to where Deancombe lay huddled away in rosy orchards beneath steep copses golden with furze, and beyond it to the south the blue landskip swelled and dipped. The day, the landskip, and the world were so beautiful that they burnt Julian's heart in her breast.

          A mysterious and mystic landscape. It's not surprising perhaps that legends such as that of the Deancombe Weaver have evolved about the locality.

Bridge near DeanCombe
© Copyright Tony Atkin and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

          The whole of the first part of Macaulay's historical novel is set in Dean Prior. Wikipedia sets the scene to the novel:

Dr Conybeare, a progressive-minded physician, resides in the parish of Rev. Robert Herrick. The widowed doctor lives alone with the youngest of his four children, his fifteen-year-old daughter Julian. Conybeare himself is an atheist, but the studious Julian attends church with her friend Meg Yarde, granddaughter of the local squire. Meg's brother Giles is a student at the University of Cambridge, along with Julian's brother Kit. Dr Conybeare deplores the lack of educational opportunities for women, and has Julian privately tutored in the classics by Herrick, who also instils in her a love for literature, particularly poetry. When an elderly local woman is accused of witchcraft, Conybeare and his daughter hide her in their home, but she is discovered and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The doctor administers a fast-acting poison to save her from suffering, and thus incurs the anger of the local population. Deciding to take Julian away from the hostile atmosphere of the village, Dr Conybeare arranges a visit to his son in Cambridge, and a party is made up, consisting of the Conybeares, Herrick and Meg Yarde ...

           Just as in her later novel The World My Wilderness, in which Macaulay 'is fascinated by the way the voices of the dead speak through the ruins of the streets and houses and buildings they once inhabited' (See Sarah LeFanu in The End of the Affair), what shines through They Were Defeated is a similar sense of someone listening for the past, who allows glimpses of the rural landscape of the real sensate Devonshire setting to resonate from behind the characters' voicing of cleverly reconstructed local dialect-speak. As Sara LeFanu, her biographer, says, by the time Macaulay wrote this novel she 'was already attuned to the ghosts' voices speaking out of history' (Rose Macaulay, 192).

          After a central and climactic section set in Cambridge the novel's concluding postscript returns the reader to Dean Prior to where Herrick has returned from Cambridge. It is now 1647 and the poet is preparing to leave the community after his expulsion:

Mr Herrick ... was at last to be ousted as a superstitious scandalous malignant and delinquent minister, who refused the Covenant, and a Buckfastleigh weaver would pray and preach in Dean Prior Church. It was a scandal, the squire and his wife agreed (p.436).

          I had not known of Rose Macaulay’s fascination with Herrick, nor been aware of the existence of her novel based on him and his time in Devon, until my recent exploration of the place and poet. It was therefore with considerable interest that I  read her own imaginative historical recreation of the era and setting in conjunction with Herrick's work. It seemed to me that her narrative authentically recreates the prevailing temper of the time, both in terms of  local responses to the turbulent fervour occasioned by the dispute between King and Parliament and also in the way she presents the wider Devon community. It almost seemed as though one could reach out and back and for a moment intuit the thoughts and responses of forefathers who had lived in and around Dean:

        The Dean men had mostly been back for over a year, sullen and rebellious against those who had dragged them into this foolish fighting. They cared little for King or for Parliament, Church or Presbytery; all they wanted was to be left unmolested on their farm and fields and allowed to carry on their lives, delivered from the burdens of garrison, quartering and plundering ... Such was the west-country farmers' view of the war (436-8).

           Macaulay was recovering lost fragments of her own distant past just as I'm attempting to recapture a personal lost world in this blog. She did indeed visit Dean Prior a year before the novel was published, so presumably whilst she was immersed in its writing. Her re-examination and revivifying of Herrick in Devon is especially understandable because she was related to his family; rather like my own involvement with the place hers initially seems to have been initiated through her need to pursue her ancestral past and perhaps seek some re-evaluation of her writerly identity by means of examining the life of the once poet, who had  been her ancestral distant cousin. Her novel is dedicated to her uncle 'William Herrick Macaulay'. Apparently her great-grandfather Aulay Macaulay's wife Anne Herrick was of the same family as that of Herrick the poet.

         Those who are familiar with They Were Defeated may wonder why I have not brought Julian Conybear, the young would-be poet and central tragic heroine of the book, into my discussion  about Macaulay and her Devon novel, given that it is Julian as well as Herrick the poet who provides  the central impetus to the plot. I've decided to postpone talking about Julian until a later blog piece. This one is already becoming rather lengthy and Julian - along with Herrick's Julia - will take me into different writerly territory. Sufficient to say that the whole book and in particular, its representation of the poet and the young girl heroine is 'an imaginative synthesis of fiction and biography' (LeFanu, 197). That success may stem from the writer's own identification with its characters for she remarked that 'Julian's own story and end were very near my own heart'. (197) Her projection into her main female character is accentuated through her choice of her own mother's surname, Conybeare. How family and fiction can interweave! 

....
        As sometimes happens, via a string of strange coincidences or synchronicities, as I came to the end of my research for this blog and began to write it up I discovered another serendipity between the Dean Prior writers and their worlds and other familial branches of my own ancestral tree. One of Robert Herrick’s Devon friends – and possibly the contact who provided the initiative for the poet to come to the county in the first place, was the Revd. or Dr John Weekes, rector of Shirwell. Weekes - or Wykes - was from one of Devon’s oldest, and prolific families, whose main estate at the time was at North Wyke in mid-Devon.  According to some sources Herrick sought sanctuary with his friend when he was expelled from Dean. A branch of the Weekes family had sprung up in the Broadwoodkelly - Honeychurch area and although the Weekes genealogy is complicated it seems that Herrick's friend was a son of the latter branch; his parents have been identified as Simon and Mary Weekes of Broadwoodkelly. My paternal Sampson ancestors for the most part came from Broadwoodkelly and Susannah Weekes, from one of the local Weekes' branches, married into my family at the beginning of the C18. So, the possible perturbations of Robert Herrick's Devonshire life as it may have intermingled with lost lives of my own ancestors extend out even more and leave me with much food - for finding forefathers and foremothers - thought.

       ... As I leave this post I remember that Mary Lady Chudleigh Devon's proto-feminist poet was married at the age of 18, in 1674, the same year the Herrick died and that the Chudleigh's family estate, Place, at Higher Ashton, was some twenty miles up the rural roads from Dean Prior. Herrick may well have known and visited her husband's family on occasions when he visited Exeter; after all the Chudleighs appear to have been staunch Royalists, as was he. As it happens Chudleigh's writing lies waiting at the back of my mind, in preparation for my next blog-piece... 

ps There will be more photos here later ...