‘‘Crossing the Water’: dark voyages; grey gulls; secret gardens: Plath, Rhys and H.D. negotiate the sea’.

Rhys and Plath: Cheriton and Court Green *

These two at least are drawn toward the heart
not by pulsating blood were always set apart
agendas written memories of other coasts
sand-salted air sea-spray shiftings ghosts
pursued animal tracks footsteps they knew
allowed bone instinct renewed
a tug of roots towards our far west coast
each found a home a haven her most
aerial though anchored texts spilled out
over night-time tables dispelling doubt
and fear these hit hardest during days
when sheep grazed fields in Devon space displaced
the given self its fretted folds and pleats
to fractured arteries that beat beat beat.

      Sea has become a sea/cret garden of delight for several women living and writing on the south-western sea-coast … It was then (from the standpoint of a Devonian sea lover), a shock to read in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters that for the poet Sylvia Plath, living in the heart of Devon in the mid C20, and immersed in the writing of her later poems, including some of those published in Crossing the Water, sea trips in the south-west peninsula were not even pleasant, let alone inspiring. On a day-trip to Woolacombe, craving the ‘oxygen’ of her beloved American seas, Hughes notes that she finds instead the ‘flip of an ocean fallen dream face down’.

     It was a surprise also to find that Jean Rhys, writing early drafts of Wide Sargasso Sea in Bude on the North Cornwall coast, actually loathed the place, considering her little flat to be a bathing hut or deserted tea shop for tourists. However, for the poet H.D., who was, admittedly, writing much earlier in the century, when beaches were quieter and less polluted, the west Penwith seascape at Bosigran in Cornwall was restorative, even mystical. Walking in this landscape and writing early drafts of her autobiographical Bid Me To Live/Madrigal, in 1918, she felt that ‘the whole world … [was] given her in consciousness, she was see-er, priestess … wise woman with her witch ball the world’. And when staying in north Devon, during spring 1916, she revelled in daily walks to the wild cove at Heddon’s mouth … 

      As a child, H.D. had lived not too far from and often visited the sea during family holidays. Later, as writer living in England, her poetic forays into Greek straits were realised during periods spent on the coasts of North Cornwall and Devon, when she was re-membering her childhood seascapes of the North Atlantic: New Jersey, Rhode Island and the Casco islands off the coast of Maine.

       Sylvia Plath was also brought up in the eastern coast of the United States; her early childhood was spent in a seaside town in Massachusetts: her beloved Nauset on Cape Cod was, for her, a ‘jewel in the head’. Near the end of her life, when she was living in North Tawton, Plath wrote many of the poems later published in Crossing the Water; including ’Babysitters’, with its penultimate line,  ‘And from our opposite continents we wave and call’. However, given her apparently negative interactions with the coast during this time, Plath’s sea poems must have arisen from an interior imagination or remembering of the past.

      For the first eight years of her life Rhys was brought up in Dominica. Her island paradise was surrounded by Caribbean seas, in particular, the Sargasso Sea. Much later, (but only five years after Plath's death), while living in Cheriton Bishop, a village only a few miles from where Plath had lived, she completed her last, most rebellious novel, the prequel to the famous Jane Eyre, which was centred on the sea-strewn landscapes of her childhood, abandoning the familiar city settings of her earlier novels …

…      All three writers had the sea-scape in common as a powerful childhood formative influence. All three also ‘crossed the ocean’ and became writers in exile living in England. All three later lived periods of their life in Devon (and for Rhys and H.D., in Cornwall).

          Perhaps, subconsciously, they were harking back to their sea-roots …

          Let’s side-track for a moment and briefly retrace these three women writers to their early sea experiences. Rhys' childhood paradise in Dominica haunted her. She left it for England at the age of sixteen, but those formative experiences of the sea kept playing in her mind, and for the rest of her life metaphorically flickered tricks of light in and out of her fiction. H.D. was born only a few years before Rhys; her memorable family holidays on the North Atlantic coast were later re-iterated persistently in her poems and prose, becoming part of her palimpsest-map of self-discovery. Plath, a ‘sea girl’, lived until the age of nine at the sea-side town of Winthrop, in Massachusetts. This coastline remained in her memory as ‘beautiful, inaccessible’, playing over and over in her mind with the ‘jewel’ metaphor of Nauset. These sea images proliferating in her poems were frequently emblematic of the paradoxical nature of her self-realisation …

       … Given their seaside childhoods, it is unsurprising that all three of these writers persistently employed sea figuration, not only in their fiction and poetry but also in letters, journals, essays and other writings. They critically self examined their status and sense of dislocation as expatriate in their various texts, to explain and analyse their creative impulse and self identity. The quest for each of them was to delineate a textualised self in terms of the loss of an early idealised childhood sea landscape and a real, or figurative, looking back over amniotic Atlantic waters, to their distant American or West Indian shores.

         Their topographical textualisation of the sea reflected the treatment of the alienation, severance, schisms, displacement and fragmentation, which they all felt as part of the ‘difference’ they experienced as expatriates. For instance, H.D., writing in Tribute to Freud, mentions ‘two countries, America and England … separated by a wide gap in consciousness and a very wide stretch of sea’ …  

          Rhys also chooses water imagery to express her inspirational modes. Whilst writing Wide Sargasso Sea, she likens the creative process to ‘walking on water’. Rhys began to write her novel after she woke from a dream, with ‘words’ on her lips; subsequently she completed the novel after another suggestive dream about childbirth and amniotic waters. The title of the earlier novel Voyage in the Dark, highlights a ‘metaphor of the drifting boat … positioning Anna in her wayward passage between two cultures’, which parallels H.D.'s ‘wide gap in consciousness’.

     One critic notes Rhys's ‘double dislocation’ as exiled colonial and gendered subject. Both novel titles, (Voyage and Sargasso), focus on the sea as an ‘important feature of Caribbean topographical and literary space, as well as being an historical marker of the notorious Middle passage of the slave route’. The figures Rhys chooses to explain her modes of creativity tend to oscillate, but they all derive from the sea-strewn landscapes of her childhood: sometimes the motif is the spiritual miracle of ‘walking on water’, or else, as ‘drifting boat’, it is more stormy and unpredictable. It is then, as Rhys puts it in a letter, ‘more like one wave after another knocking me against rocks … a great net of weeds that could trap ships and men. Like the Caribbean islands’.This ambivalence may reflect the writer's precarious dislocation, a state in which ‘she is in danger of being drawn towards that legendary site of becalmed wrecks, the wide Sargasso Sea.’

    For Plath, the topographical split of continents (equivalent to H.D.'s wide consciousness or Rhys's drifting boat in the dark) precipitates a more real, heart-rending angst. The pervading image of her sea-past is conjured as a ‘ship in the bottle’/white flying myth.  As much as she wills that it should be, the Devon or Cornish coast is not the precious gem of the Massachusetts seas, of Nauset. There is every suggestion that for Plath, the new home in North Tawton was, at least to begin with, understood as her permanent haven – somewhere she would see as a lasting base and creative locus. Then the disillusion set in, encapsulated in the double betrayal of the not-sea and her father-husband’s infidelity: there is anger, betrayal at the perceived loss and her sense of exile was intensified. In Ocean 1212 W the poet recalls how

‘the cold salt running hills of the Atlantic … my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own … Now [ this is in Devon]… when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood somebody solicitous will … drive me to the nearest briny horizon … I stretch my legs, I sniff. The sea. But that is not it, that is not it at all.’

Plath offers her essay Ocean as ‘a fine, white flying myth’ of origins recalled from the sealed off memories of childhood. She pin-points the exact moment when her life changed and took her away forever from the ‘poetic sea-heritage’ of her first nine years.

‘This is how it stiffens, my vision of early childhood. My father died. We moved inland. Whereon those 9 first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle, beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.’

…
…  Plath's figuration of the ‘sea-cradle’ of her childhood as a ‘sealed off’ unit links with the subject of her thesis at College, which concerned the concept of the ‘double’, that which is divided from the physical and becomes the ‘deathless double of the mortal body’. It is a schism that is lifelong: she can not return to that split off ‘aspect’, which then becomes the ‘site’/’sight’ of the wound that leads to her schizophrenic disposition … 

…. Sea as eternal space called all three of these writers to respond to its energy as elemental source of creativity; each of them in their own way challenged the canonic and patriarchal strictures of the symbolic order of language; each of them projected qualities of their own psychic-personal introjections from their childhoods onto the outer seascapes in which they lived and wrote: in a sense, for them all, the empty page was the seascape.

         It was in their response to that call that they varied from one another.

       H.D,’s inter-relationship with sea, both in life and texts, is mostly blissfully jouissant. She had many dramas and traumas to chasten her, but essentially sea-envelopment was a transformative, sometimes clairvoyant, healer. H.D. enjoyed a relatively long life for her generation. Plath did not, and Rhys’ last years in Devon were anything but happy. The negativity in both the latters’ lives is picked up, predicated on, or predicted by their complex textual relationships with the sea.

      For Rhys, living by the sea at Bude, or in a cottage in the mid-Devon village only fifteen miles from the southern coast, sea as real sensual element in the landscape, to be enjoyed, watched, observed, swum in, paddled in even, didn’t exist: for her the sea was present only in memory. Her south western surroundings seemed, perversely, to take on more and more negative responses from her. Devonian territory, including Devon’s coast, became as though a projection of a kind of dark brooding anti-muse, and this was perhaps, and ironically the motivation that enticed her into developing her famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, where moor-scapes figure a sea-scape, its ‘undulating surface of heights [like the] roll of waves on the sea’. Wide Sargasso Sea is not located in England’s westcountry, yet the novel’s potent sensory power may derive from Rhys’ subconscious introjection of the wave-like curves of distant Dartmoor to be seen from near her cottage in Cheriton Fitzpaine.

Dartmoor as 'sea', seen from near Cheriton Bishop

Dartmoor-sea again

    

















For Plath living in Devon the situation became more intolerably fraught with difficulties; the double-split of her childhood, divided by (good) sea-experiences and (bad) after-sea life, became doubly mirrored by the geographical divide between the States and England. Then there was another split, that of the repetition in her adult married life of her earlier childhood separation when she came to live in what seemed to be a blissful Devonian environment, only to be eventually utterly disenchanted and disillusioned. Within a year, her world, which, like HD’s sea-journey was full of jouissance and semiotic envelopment and fusion, transposed into that of an ugly, terrifying black swamp of semiotic abyss: aesthetic creativity turned into iced-up imagination.

      Supposing the poet had found a beautiful sea-place which matched that of her interior sea-space? Would there have been such a place for her in the south west? Could she have found such? Or, was she forever predisposed to internalise any sea-experience as disagreeable? I think the latter. The idyllic eruption of the semiotic for her at Court Green, figured by the garden, its apple trees, the bees, the cooking and all the other elements of her ‘green property’, was crushed and displaced by the ‘alien paternal tongue’. As David Lodge puts it, in his analysis of Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’, ‘looking for the father, failing to find him anywhere, the speaker finds him everywhere instead’. The overwhelming presiding supra-ego? - the symbolic law of the father – her father – and that of the patriarchal world, everything had to be subsumed into that which had eluded her and which she had tried to find and put together again - but had, paradoxically, become alienated from her. Her ‘flying white myth’, which, after her father’s death, she had originally encapsulated as the life left behind in a capsule, in her childhood’s sea-imagination, returned to her in some of her chillingly best and final poems, as she envisioned the dissolution of her self- identity and poetic persona dispersing into the white-blue fields of sea-sky.

       Although these three writers, in their connections with south-western seas, experienced their mutuality or antipathy towards the coast in wildly contrasting ways and explored their textual seascapes using very different genres, modes, themes, atmospheres, characters and moods, they shared in common what Derek Walcott called the ‘white hush between two sentences’.

       For H.D., Jean Rhys and Sylvia Plath the common roots of their backgrounds, their lives as expatriates (which occasioned their re-memberings of childhood coasts), became channelled into their respective textual sea-iconographies and negotiated the crossing/s of the split coasts of their lost childhood (sea) lands. Any Devonian lover of books, who has been born and bred near the shaping waters of the south-west, can only sit back and admire all three of them for the way that as one critic put it, as exiles they ‘cross borders ... break barriers of thought and experience ... seeing the whole world as a foreign land makes possible originality of vision’. Like dazzling seahorses, the interplay and intertexts of their aquatic writings still glitter and sparkle reflectively on the stormy textual-coastal waters of our post-modern world.
 
This piece consists of excerpts taken from a longer piece. It is a 'companion' to Sea-thyme. There are quotations from various sources (all marked within parenthesis, but too many to specify here).

copyright julie sampson
*This poem was published in Shearsman,75/76.

Sea-Thyme

Heddon's Mouth in north Devon

Really pleased to have my essay 'Sea-Thyme in the Southwest' published in the latest edition of H.D.'sWeb e-newsletter.

Caroline’s Garden; A Countess at Mount Edgcumbe.

Mount Edgcumbe's gardens

Mount Edgcumbe House, from the garden

     
       Some four and half miles or so south-west of Saltram, across the Plymouth Sound and on the Rame Peninusula, is Mount Edgcumbe, which, though now in Cornwall, used to be within the Devon boundaries. Mount Edgcumbe is another of the Devon estates which has a longstanding and near unbroken chain of chronology, taking it back to its mid C16 foundations by Richard Edgcumbe, Anne Dowriche’s father. Mount Edgcumbe must have been central to Dowriche’s childhood, whether or not she lived there, or perhaps visited with her father during the period that the original house and gardens were being constructed. No one will ever know if Anne was interested in gardens or gardening, but more recent female members of the Edgcumbe descendants seem to have been. One of them was yet another of the cultured and literary gardening women related to the Talbots of Redlynch (see Wives and Daughters for evocative information about the women of that family) , who were known for their gardening pursuits.

     Caroline Augusta Feilding, 3^rd Countess of Edgcumbe, married Col. Ernest Augustus Edgcumbe 3rd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (son of Richard Edgcumbe 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe), in 1831.  See a portrait of Caroline at BBC Your Paintings.

      As far as I can tell, unlike the contents of the rich Saltram archives – which hold extensive documents about the women of the Parker family -, there is little, if any, documentary evidence to be found about Caroline’s own contribution to Mount Edgcumbe’s spectacular gardens. However, I do not take that to mean her lack of active engagement in the development of the garden during her time at the estate. Anything but, judging from personal correspondence, for Caroline’s letters are brimming with rich evidence of her acute love of plants, botany, gardens and gardening. In the many letters that she wrote to her half-brother William Henry Fox Talbot Caroline intersperses scattered comments about gardens, plants and gardening – especially after her marriage, about Mount Edgcumbe’s estate. The letters range from aesthetic love and enjoyment for a particular flower or garden-space, to an inquisitive thirst for information about a species of plant, to concern about the maintenance of the garden. They even occasionally include  a garbed annoyance that Henry has not picked up a comment concerning a particular  plant and responded to it in his own return letter.

There is a gulf between Mount Edgcumbe’s actual physical garden, Caroline’s presence at the place and the link between the two, which is richly filled by her own words. Again and again her letters fill us in on her personality and her obvious passion for all things pertaining to “garden”.

View from Mount Edgcumbe

What follows is a chronological cross-section taken from Caroline’s letters to her brother. They range from several years before her move to the Devon estate on her marriage and right up through her many years there. Of special interest are Caroline’s  comments whilst visiting Mount Edgcumbe not long before her marriage and her meeting with Frances, Countess of Morley, a woman who seems to have made a deep impression on the soon to be 3rd Countess of Edgcumbe.

The following excerpts, quoted at length (there are many more in the archive) from Caroline’s correspondence, mostly to her brother, will give a sense of Caroline’s love not just of her garden, but recreate her acute sensibilities towards it. They begin before her marriage and at least one of them indicates her love of her childhood garden. They end with Edgcumbe. There are many more in the archives. Hopefully one or two people who read the excerpts, not knowing about Caroline, will pursue the letters here at The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot: – (just type in “Caroline Feilding” or “Caroline Edgcumbe” in the search box):

3 June 1820 My dear Henri,
We left Paris on the 25th of May, and we arrived in Chantilly, which is ten leagues from there on the same evening ... We walked in the forest, which is very beautiful, and I picked several plants which, I believe, are rare, and which I dried for you. There is also a very pretty castle where the Duke of Bourbon resides, when he comes here goes hunting, and a delightful garden that they call the hamlet, where there are streams winding through the lawn, and here and there many rustic little bridges ... Amongst some of my flowers, whilst travelling I found “yellow Irises”; Mama says that they are not very rare; but personally, I have never seen any before, so you will be the judge. I have found yet another flower, which neither Mama nor I has ever seen before; it is lilac and yellow and it grows in fields crowded with “Pink Vetch”. Horatia also has flowers for you, but I do not think they are as rare as mine. Farewell, my dear Brother ... I hope we will take many walks together to botanise; It was a great pity that it rained the next morning, so that unluckily we saw nothing. I must only advise you to go & see it whenever you can, & in the first place because it is surrounded by a very pretty country, & secondly, because I never saw such a quantity of beautiful & curious flowers of all colours; a species of ConvolvolousI think I never saw before, & a sort of ridiculous yellow flower, that hangs like bells, surrounded at the top with black, & lower down with green leaves like those of Barberries. I send you a very beautiful sort of crimson flower, that grows about a foot high; with leaves like those of a Narcissus; I am not sure that it is not the same of which M^r Montgomerie found only one specimen near the Thuner-See. I saw besides all sorts of blue flowers, some like small anemonies , & other like Viper's bugloss at a distance, but which are quite different on a near approach, but as they are now dead I cannot send them to you; as I have said a great deal about flowers ... I have studied trees here, as it is a good oportunity for there are not many about Florence, except in the Caserne. Beautiful Syclamons grow wild in the woods here, if I think of it, I will keep some for you ... Naples. 

Friday 20th May 1823.
My dear brother ... At Salerno, we went to see a very curious acqueduct of light, gothic architecture; they told us it was made by the Devil, & that it had been there since the beginning of the world. – I found near it a very curious flower; you may imagine a plant about a foot & a half high, with leaves in the shape of groundsel, only a great deal larger, & covered with large thorns; the blossom is exactly like that of a potatoe, & the same colour, (lilac) the stem also is covered with thorns. – At Pæstum I found a flower that might appear to the vulgar eye, like a dandelion, only of a lovely pink; I saw there also some beautiful pink Convolvolus ... My dear Brother I walked in Russell square yesterday and saw a papilionaceous flower about as big as half a Laburnum, and quite yellow, will you tell me the name of it ... found the fern u in the Closet and I hope you will never again suspect her of having any of your ferns or mosses in her drawers, or if she does happen to have some, not to think she put them there. I send you a hundred kisses and my love. Do you work much in your garden, and have you a great many flowers in it ...
September 11th 1828 –
My dear Henry We arrived here last Sunday, after having spent a few days very pleasantly at Saltram, & a week still more agreeably at Kingston Hall. – Saltram is in a charming country, about two miles from Plymouth – we made an excursion in the admiral’s twelve-oared barge to Mount Edgcumbe, which far surpassed my imagination, though I had heard so much about it; ever since we have been in this part of the country, we all feel somehow as if we were out of England, & Mt Edgcumbe in particular put me more in mind of Italy than any thing I have seen since I left it. – You would be delighted with the gardens; there are three, English, french & Italian – the orange-trees are more than one hundered years old; & the finest ilex’s, bay-trees, cypress’s, cork-trees & magnolia’s grow in the open air. Ld Mt E. received us very hospitably & lent us his carriage to drive about the grounds; looking at the calm, blue sea through trees, from a great height, struck me as particularly italian. –We then went to the Breakwater, a stupendous work built at the entrance of the sound; when finished it will a mile long, & 460 feet broad at the foundations; but it will be some time before it is completed, as it has already been sixteen years in building, & a great deal still remains to be done. –The Russian fleet happened to have been driven into the harbour a few days ago by stress of weather, so we determined to finish our excursion by a visit to the commodore ... Lady Morley  is the most agreable woman I ever met with, & draws & paints like an artist ... 

1832:I want to hear what you are about at Laycock; the only thing I have heard of was from Mr Seymer,  who described to me a large tree you had just transplanted in front of the house, & the exact spot - I wish you would put some where I advised you near the canal bridge, just on the rise of the hill - only I think a young plantation would, perhaps suit that place better ...
1832 [only a year since her marriage]: My dear Henry ... The country must be charming now – pray find a leisure moment to visit my garden, & tell me most particularly if the standard rosa odorata & the climbing Rosa banksia are in flower – Fitzsimmons  sent me a most lovely specimen of the Boursault rose which grows on my Robinson Crusoe arbour – I hope you approve of our plan de route,  through the New forest <, &perhaps we may take a trip to Cowes & see Aunt Harriot  – I wish very much you may be able to come & see us at Mt Edgcumbe ... 

1832 july We have had a most delightful journey – the weather has been charming & the country all the way from Exeter a succession of hill & dale, beautifully wooded, & every where perfumed with honeysuckles growing in wild profusion – while the verdure of the meadows was most pleasingly relieved by the purple glow of innumerable Foxgloves & every variety of wild flower – I send you a specimen of Iris I never saw before & of Cotton Rush with which all the heaths are covered – is it the same that grew at Lauterbrunn? The Iris I found at Charmouth near the sea-shore ... I was charmed with Ivy Bridge & sketched the very one (I imagine) where once upon a time you let all Mamma’s paints & brushes drop into the stream ... We arrived here early on Monday – the air was heavenly & the Sea of the most Italian blue – we immediately took a drive round the amphitheatre, a green valley surrounded by magnificent beech, oak, cedar & tulip trees, terminated by the sea – from thence we wandered through the flower gardens full of roses & orangetrees, and ornamented with statues, vases & fountains, & at last rested ourselves at the old Fort, watching the boats as they glided by, till the shades of evening gathered round us ...
I have a charming apartment – a very pretty dressing-room in an octogan turret, with windows on every side, & a charming little sitting room with a pianoforte & a variety of pictures – I wish you were all here, you would enjoy it so much, & I could drive Mamma in a pony chaise, made for Ld Mt E. when he broke his leg, with wheels so broad that one can drive all over the garden & turf without injuring them – I always think of Mamma when I drive in it. – I have written to Uncle Harry to beg he will come while the fine weather lasts – I hope he will bring Stavy & Ste, they would be so well amused with Ronald Macdonald – he came here with Ld Alford & they are both staying for a short time – Why should not you sail here in the Petrel? at all events do come while it is fine weather – I am always so afraid of its slipping away in this uncertain climate. – We are going this morning to dine at Penlee point, where Ld V. has just build a Gothic seat, & made a new drive with plantations, & I am [to] have a little pépinière of my own on rock jutting out into the sea ...
Written ‘from the pavilion in the English Garden at MountE. Aug 1832;  I am laying out my new garden near the arbour above the house. – Is the enclosed rare? I found it on the turf ... 

from laycock abbey sept 1832 We arrived here last Wednesday after a very pleasant journey which we spun out to three days - Mt Edgcumbe  looked more beautiful than ever just as we were crossing over & took our last view of its white temples & beautiful woods, with the blue sea in the distance & Britannia lying in the Sound ... I have brought from Mt Edgcumbe two flourishing young Stone pines, 5 years old, in pots, for Mamma  she is charmed with them... ?date A Country house is an eternal bother. One has too many irons in the fire. Life in London glides smoothly along, but here between the Gardener, & the Bailiff, & the Keeper, & the Steward, & the Coachman the Clerk of the Works (with the Architect who comes down occasionally) it is enough to drive a body out of their wits, always something going wrong in some department. O London is Capua, is Sybaris to this! & Carnations! Then perhaps the Coachman overturns you into a ditch or down a quarry ...
1845 feb I want to inform you what flowers we have now got in the open air. Here is the list. Snowdrops, Crocuses, primroses yellow & lilac double, violets, polyanthus, [Chimonanthus?] fragans, (wh has never lost it’s leaves at all,) stocks wallflowers, anemones, pink china roses, & even the delicate yellow kind, narcissus, [petisforum?], & several plants of Carnations! The myrtles are as green as in summer & their flowers in bud – & in the Conservatory, the orange trees covered with bloom ... 

april 1846 We have very stormy & rainy weather – but all the trees & plants are coming out beautifully – the Horsechesnuts are quite out in full leaf – & the gallery is perfumed with cyclamens & hyacinths, & adorned with Salvia Splendens,  & lovely blue & pink Glocynias? ... 

june 1852 Dearest Henry I cannot help sending you a specimen of the Eucalyptus – for fear it should be out of bloom when you come. What curious buds! & unnatural leaves! The tree is now nearly 40 ft high. In the same box is a flower of a shrub, of wh it appears I gave the seed – when, I know not. It is abt 3 feet high, nr the Eucalyptus above the sea. Please tell us the name – & also the name of the red Ledum, given once upon a time by Uncle Wm. The Pimelia I merely send for its’ beauty ...
july 1852I should like extremely to have a Fan Palm – but should like still better a Date Palm. Do you think one wd grow here in a very sheltered spot – & has Price got any? & would they be more expensive than the Fan? Of course I shd be glad to introduce both sorts here ...
Sept 1852I am glad to hear your garden is so prosperous this year – I may say the same of ours – I never saw such a profusion of orange flowers – It is quite like Nice – & they are going on Still – The Myrtles too are still covered with bloom – & we have some splendid autumnal roses, white Japan lilies, Scarlet Geraniums, Plumbago, Agapanthus, all-coloured Verbenas, &c – &c – The weather is very fine now – & I never saw the views more clear or beautiful, even in the height of summer – so you should come now ... 

Nov 1854 The weather is charmingly mild still – & quantities of flowers enliven the garden. – The Plumbago ornaments the outside of the Orangerie with it’s lovely blue clusters – & the Petosporum is in flower – Did you ever get the fern I sent Rosamond  to shew you? It is a very rare one – There are only one or two specimens here; but at Cotehele  it grows 5 or 6 ft high, & is exceedingly handsome ... 

Oct 1855 We have had the Morleys staying with us, the Dowager do – (as amusing as ever)– the Bulteels, the Admiral & his daughters  whom we like very much – & a few other neighbours ... 

Oct 1857 I send you a specimen of a species of Plumbago which the gardener says grows in the chinks of the great Wall of China. He had a small plant given him a long time ago, & neglected it – Whereupon it grew into a flourishing bush – & he says the worse they are treated the better they thrive. Do you know it? ...
Dec 1859Have you ever seen the Bougainvilliea in flower? It grew at Palermo in the Botanic Garden, & flowered splendidly. Two years ago Captn Eyres R.N. made me a present of two plants, which he had brought from the King’s Garden at Lisbon. It’s <sic> native country is Brázil I believe. One of these two plants fell sick, & was taken to Mount Edgcumbe  to be nursed, where it is now doing well. The other grew in a straggling, uncomfortable way to the top of the Conservatory, without shewing the smallest intention of flowering – but quite lately it seems to have changed it’s mind – & has produced several long branches covered with blossoms, which hang down, & have a very pretty effect ...
Dec1860 Now do, dear Henry, ponder my request – & come & see me please. I want to introduce Katie  to you – & my dear little grand daughter – the sweetest tempered thing you ever saw! – We have still Crysanthemums & Calceolarias lingering out of the doors – & everything looks very green still.

(Caroline Feilding, Countess of Edgcumbe, letters, mostly to her brother, excerpts taken from The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot)

     These excerpts, taken from a much longer span of Caroline’s letters - most of which mention flowers, plants and gardens in one way or another - somehow retrieve both their writer’s lively personality and obsession with flora and gardening. They also re-create Mount Edgcumbe’s garden during a particular era, in the mid C19. Without them our ability to understand and visualise that garden-space is much the poorer. Will they one day be published, so as to enhance future visitors' appeciation of that estate?

A Handful of 2012 Anniversaries: Devon Women Writers; Names and Texts.

50 years ago:
Rosemary Manning published a fictionalised account of her school in Devon, which she named Bampfield, in her novel The Chinese Garden (1962); she later wrote an autobiography, A Corridor of Mirrors which was published 25 years ago, in 1987. Manning herself had spent much of her early life in Devon. Her parents often stayed at a rented cottage in the High Street in Clovelly. She later boarded at Bampfield School for Girls, in Somerset, whose name and location disguised the real place at the historic Poltimore College, near Exeter. Consequently a lot of readers since have assumed the book to be set in Somerset, rather than Devon. See A Devon House; The Story of Poltimore by Jocelyn Hemming, for the history of the house and its time as girls' school.

Poltimore gardens in the early C20. Acknowledgement to the Poltimore Landscape website  and see here about the latest conservation plans for Poltimore House. Manning’s experience at Poltimore/ Bampfield turned out to be so traumatic that she later turned it into fiction. The Chinese Garden conjures a corrupt school based in a crumbling estate, where ‘the physical standards are those of Dartmoor, the religion perverted, and the games mistress a sadist’ (Chinese Garden, chapter 8).

Manning’s autobiography A Corridor of Mirrors was published 25 years ago, in 1987.

 100 years ago:
Mary Patricia Willcocks’ novel, Wings of Desire was published in 1912. Here is a previous post on Willcocks and here a long poem I wrote after reading Wings of Desire. In the novel scenes extend from Devon’s coasts to the Magellan Straits, yet the crux of the emotional encounter between two key characters, Archer and Molly, happens in the vicinity of what is now Meldon reservoir, beneath what was in the early C20 the atmospheric gorge, under Longstone Hill. The valley, running along the West Okement river, is known locally as Dartmoor’s valley of the rocks; semi-fictionalised by Willcocks as the ‘Enchanted Valley’, it becomes both a place of ‘quietude’ for Molly, (who in today’s terminology is stressed out), as well as a site that is used to mirror the fluctuating emotions of the impending lovers.

Around Meldon and under Longstone 

Rosa Caroline Praed, (1851-1935), Australian novelist, published Our Book of Memories; Letters of Justin McCarthy to Mrs Campbell Praed, in 1912. The book is about her long-standing friendship with Irish politician, historian and writer, Justin McCarthy, who had written extensively to her on the progress of the Home Rule debate of the 1880s. They had collaborated on four books. Praed spent her last years in Devon. She moved to Torquay, Devon, in the early 1920s and lived quietly there with a psychic and medium, Nancy Harward - see a portrait of Nancy at Wikimedia  - until the latter's death in 1927. Then followed a further eight years of loneliness and illness. When Praed died on 10 April 1935, her three sons were already dead and her daughter Maud, who had been born deaf, was in an asylum. (Information on her life from Australian Dictionary of Biography, where you can find a portrait of the writer).



May Sinclair, who earlier in her career had lived in Devon, near Sidmouth –see blogpost on Novelist at Sidmouth – published three texts in 1912. One was  a short story, The Flaw in the Crystal. In her account of this story Suzanne Rait says: that it “describes the inner corruption of healer Agatha Verrall, whose failure to keep her own thoughts chaste allows the evil personality of one of her patients to merge with her own”. (See May Sinclair). Read The Flaw in the Crystal here at ReadCentral and also on many other online web-sites. The story begins:

‘It was Friday, the day he always came, if (so she safeguarded it) he was to come at all. They had left it that way in the beginning, that it should be open to him to come or not to come. They had not even settled … ‘

 The second text published in 1912 was Sinclair’s novel The Three Sisters, which draws on the life of the Bronte sisters. Lastly, In 1912 Sinclair wrote Feminism, for the Women Writers' Suffrage League, of which she was a member. This feminist pamphlet was written in response to an anti-suffrage article that had appeared in The Times, by Sir Almroth Wright. Sinclair later wrote The Tree of Heaven in which Dorothea, one of the  characters, takes part in the movement for suffrage. 
 These three texts taken together sum up Sinclair’s interests and preoccupations during that period:
‘the science of psychology, her participation in the fiery debates on feminism, and her thorough research in the lives and works of the Bronte sisters …’ See James J Miracky Regenerating the novel: gender and genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence, p 168.
May Sinclair was born in 1862, 150 years ago.


 150 years ago:
Beatrice or Beatrix F. Cresswell, historian/writer, was born in 1862. Cresswell was evidently a prolific writer and you will find names of texts by her dotted all over cyberspace. For example, here is her Amazon Author page. Unfortunately, Cresswell’s evident productivity is not matched by any corresponding outpouring of information about her, her life, her writing, or her family. As yet I do not even know where she was born, or anything about her, other that her father, Richard Cresswell, was a clergyman. SHE is missing amidst the dark holes of lost Devonian history, even though the time-scale of her career is not long ago, for her death was apparently in 1940. She is of the same generation as my grandparents, just a stone’s throw of time away, so the absence is strange and only to be explained by the fate of so may female writers, which is to disappear from the face of the canon of literature.  At times in my own research Beatrix Cresswell’s writing has been both serendipitous and a godsend at a critical moment when some detail of a life or place is elusively absent. Her piece about Umberleigh Chapel  for example, filled me in with vital historical contexts and fascinating facts about that site when I was working on the Bassetts’ correspondence. As well as books she wrote many papers for the Devonshire Association, which were published in their Transactions and others which were placed in Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries - see on Devon History Society Page.
One day, when I have more time, I intend to begin a Beatrix Cresswell quest. It will start at the Devon Record Office, where I know they keep her manuscripts, journals and other documents (See lists on the National Archives site). Meanwhile, if anyone out there can begin to fill in some gaps about her life please let me know and I will begin to fill in her so far almost blank-page on my list of blog-posts.


 Elizabeth Rundle Charles, (1828-1896): Charles’ Chronicles of Schonberg Otta family, was first published in 1862. This fictional account of a German protestant family who followed Martin Luther out of the Catholic church was very popular in its day. Written in the form of journals Chronicles has multiple narrators, who voice the story from different perspectives.
 Elizabeth Charles was born and spent her early life in Tavistock. See this page about John Rundle, MP, her father. The family lived at the Bank in Market Street, then from 1838 they lived at Ferrum Hill House (now I understand called Brooklands) which is behind the foundry in Parkwood Road. The family moved there so as to be able to look after her grandfather John Gill, a banker. (Infomation on her homes, from  Dartmoor Literary Links. Elizabeth Charles wrote an autobiographical account of her years in the town in Our Seven Homes.

"To know how to say what other people only think is what makes men poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers, or both". Elizabeth Rundle Charles.

 250 years ago
 Mariana Starke was born in October 1762. There is an excellent web-site featuring her here. Starke returned to England in 1811 and settled in Exmouth, going back to Italy between 1817 and 1819 in order to research her "Travels on the Continent," published by John Murray in 1820. She wrote plays and became well-known for her early Travel Guides, as well as letters and poems.

Gallery of Women Writers & Devon; some Names and Places.

     

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This blog-gallery illustrates, in alphabetical order, names of women writers linked with Devon and some places associated with them. Each of these photos could take you on a trail, a journey of discovery: a place; a name; a life-story; a poem, or other text. Each framed photo of a site harbours a story of a richly complex narrative concerning a particular women writer. I hope some who find this may decide to go out and follow up some links. If nothing else there’s  an excuse to get out and about, explore some of Devon’s hidden corners – and with one photo to pop over the border into Cornwall. Although each story is already rich, there is much to find, a wealth of missing information.
      Many of the writers appear in this blog somewhere, or on its companion site, South-West-Women-Writers; others don’t – women such as Kate O’Brien and Adelaide Phillpotts. They wait for someone to pay attention to them and to find more about their one-time connections with the county.
… and this gallery is just a beginning. list of writers another day and it could start another quest ….

Writers and Place covered in the photos:

Jane Austen; Sidmouth.
Margaret Beaufort (Countess of Richmond); Sampford Peverell.
Charlotte Chanter; Ilfracombe Church.
Anne Dowriche; Cotehele and Dowriche House.
Jane and Mary Findlater; Prestonpans, near Edinburgh
Elizabeth Goudge; Near Marldon.
Edith Holden; Fernworthy Reservoir.
Anne Irwin; Looking over Ilfracombe
Elizabeth Jennings; Lundy Island.
Mary Kelly; Kelly House, near Tavistock.
Doris Lessing; Belstone village.
Rosemary Manning; Poltimore House.
Priscilla Napier; Tavistock station.
Kate O’Brien; Croyle House, near Cullompton.
Sylvia Plath; North Tawton.
Dollie Radford; Natsworthy on Dartmoor.
Lady Anne Southwell; Cornworthy.
Sylvia Townsend-Warner; South-Brent.
Mary Patricia Willcocks; near Cornwood.
Charlotte Yonge; Puslinch House.

Goudge’s Secret Gardens

View over Devon's garden from near Marldon

            Gardens and flowers frequent Elizabeth Goudge’s books, several of which were written when she lived in Devon; Devon is an important re-envisioned background setting, in a cluster of them. Unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one has the feeling that for her namesake Elizabeth Goudge the lost inner child never completely disappeared; through gardens real and imaginary she kept resurfacing, bringing with her a surfeit of joy. In several of her novels gardens and garden imagery appear essential to the fictions’ very existence.

           Goudge’s own early childhood garden, that of the Principal’s House at Wells Theological College, next to the cathedral, held a lifelong magically significant influence on the writer and probably provided the initial impetus for the burgeoning of garden backdrops in her later texts. Flowers, trees and other plants trail in abundance through the textual trellises of her texts. Gentians, gallica and rosamundi roses, ferns, jack-in-the-green, periwinkle, herbs, plum-blossom, elm-trees, weeping-willows, and a host of other species. Her autobiography Joy of the Snow frequently alludes to gardens where she lived. It is to the garden or to the garden’s periphery, that the writer turns to, for respite, healing, inspiration and solace. Gardens seem integral to her very soul and over and over again it is to a special, often secret space of solitude and exquisite beauty that she returns to, in order to foster creativity; a ‘deep well beside a tunnel of a lane’; or a ‘particular tree where a great white barn-owl used to sit at Twilight’; or a ‘very green shady and bird-haunted spot’.

Providence Cottage, Marldon

       
          At Marldon, where Goudge made her home for several years, it was a moment of transcendence, glimpsed through a window during her first glance at the garden - from a holiday bungalow at the ‘small wet lawn sloped from the window ... into the mist ... as though it was green water sliding over the edge of a precipice’, - that impelled her deep bond with the Devonshire landscape around her. At Westerland, where Goudge’s cottage was later built, there was a special corner ‘southwest of the orchard’, which had ‘a group of three giant pines, old and tough and strong’, the soughing of which, when it was windy, was ‘one of the two great voices of the place’. Goudge was able to gaze from Westerland at the same by now cherished view, and to wander to her beloved blue periwinkle bank which abutted the garden, where she could ‘dream her dream’ and ‘see her visions’ across the blue distance to Dartmoor.

Devon's 'green-world'

        Another instant of epiphany happened to her one day when standing rooted in the  midst of her garden at ‘Providence Cottage’ and immersed in its and the distant view’s intoxicating beauty, she felt purged of a hidden and persistent inner demon. As one recent critic put it, Goudge’s ‘green world is thus the primary agent of the hero’s quest for authenticity’ and her own ease within natural and garden settings is projected on to many of her female characters who float through the books in a cloud of ‘green-world locales’. (Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, (1981), 126).

       When I was a child I did not have the chance to read Goudge’s favourite and famous children’s novel The White Horse; unfortunately it did not ever appear on our rather denuded town-library shelves. If it had, its otherworldly and spell-binding garden scenes would have been added to that of our own play-time layered compendium of texts and garden montages. Moonacre Manor’s garden is modelled on the real and historically significant Compton Castle.

Compton Castle views

    
         During the period when Goudge moved to Devon and presumably visited that estate, the castle was being renovated, so she would have had ample opportunity to absorb its particular features, which included remnants of a pleasaunce or plesaunce and evidence of large formal gardens. Compton had belonged to several of Devon’s prominent families since at least the period of Henry II, in particular the Gilberts. One commentator mentions that

‘here and there, grey archways peep out ... As a military post, the house is of no value; for it is commanded by the old " pleasaunce," or garden, to which, in rear of the building, the ascent is by a broad flight of steps. From their summit, there is a charming view of that part of the fabric, which contains the hall and chapel. The whole is indeed buried in a luxuriant growth of ivy ...’

Another elaborates on the plesaunce:

‘Behind it are the formal walks of the old garden, or pleasaunce ... the southern court of the ballium had become a flower-garden, with quaint terraces, statues, knots of flowers, clipped yews and hollies, and all the pedantries of the topiarian art’.

        Lady Rosalind Northcott was another early C20 woman who in one of her books about Devon described Compton Castle. She remarks that ‘The Gilberts seem to have lived alternately at Compton and on their older property, Greenway’ and further comments on the garden that,

‘At the farther end, on steps leading into the garden, a peacock looks wonderfully appropriate, and some white fantails strutting in front of the heavy walls add very much to the picture. There is scarcely any sign of the old 'pleasaunce,' except a low and fairly broad box-hedge, which runs each side of a path in the present garden, where a few violets and one or two strawberry-blossoms are tokens of the softness of the air’.

One reader who was introduced to The Little White Horse as a child visited the area after her first encounter with the book, rather more recently than Northcott’s Devonian survey and described the place’s impact on her:

‘... child in you is fascinated by the walled courtyard at Compton Castle, where you can walk up the steps of the steps of the stone ramparts and walk straight on it seems, into the hills ... Here you get the sense of being gently held as if cupped in a giant hand ... feel safe looking far away to the reaches of Dartmoor ...’ (See Country Homes and Interiors, 1989)

Gardens near Compton Castle

          Little White Horse engages with its source’s real past and stirs the cauldron of garden layerings sunk within its layered earth. Goudge, alchemist, transforms Moonacre’s walled courtyard garden setting, sited within ‘silvery Devon’, into a crucible, wherein elements from various different forces dissolve, disintegrate and reassemble, in line, and in-keeping with the transformative unravelling and denouement of the narrative’s complex fairy-tale quest plot. The writer’s way of conjuring up the setting of her now classic children’s book seems to have involved a creative interweaving of the garden and surrounding rural environment as it was when she saw it, as it may have once been and as it unfurled its visionary potential in front of her imagining, interior, writerly eyes. She described the latter phenomenon in The Rosemary Tree:

‘This sense of kinship with particular things and people was not new ... As one lived in a place certain things about one – the branches of a tree seen through one’s window, certain aspects of the light ... moved forward from the rest of one’s surroundings and became the furniture of one’s own private world. One could not part from that particular tree ... without a sense of personal loss; and from memory they would never be lost’.

       It is a curious intermingling or layering of garden, text, imagination, history; the effect is achieved in such a way that the submerged child resurfaces, bringing with her her own lost gardens of a past and fusing them with the adult writer’s rationally induced ability to scrutinise her surroundings in acute detail. Perhaps the secret of Goudge’s spell on children and susceptible adults is that she manages, at will, to enter and exist different worlds, the child’s and the adult’s; her brand of magical realism merges together the real and the unworldly. As you read the books your own identity shift back and forth, imperceptibly, between two zones. At the same time, you are pulled down, down as in trance, to deeper levels of pre-symbolic consciousness – back almost to the semiotic state. In the Little White Horse the boundary-lines between zonal worlds are figured by a profusion of liminal Alice-in-Wonderland type garden entrances. The book is awash with threshold entrances - doorways in hills, gates, tunnels of bushes and trees, winding-staircases, archways and parting-curtains. The process occurs again and again, descending in figurative steps deeper and deeper, right from the book’s first pages, as Maria Merryweather and her companions arrive at Moonacre in her carriage. They have journeyed through mist and moonlight and are suddenly engulfed in a narrow passageway, between walls of rock, where, suddenly, a ‘door in the rock’ materialises, replete with a hanging rusty chain and opens onto Maria’s entrancing initial glimpse of Moonacre’s garden: ‘beautiful glades [with] ... silver ... so delicate that the moonlight sifted through it like a fine film of silver-dust’. Goudge has projectively re-envisioned her own first encounter with the mystical and misty view from her holiday bungalow at Marldon, onto her fictional scene. Next, the party in the carriage drive through ‘an archway in an old grey-wall’ and enter an entrancing ‘formal garden, with flower-beds and paved walks surrounding a water-lily pool and yew-trees ...’. The vision picks up details of fragments from what was left of Compton Castle’s real gardens and scatters them into the imaginative re-mix of the writer’s melting-pot.

      Goudge’s fiction - and not only that for children - illustrates how the woman writer who finds and allows her child-self free to roam, in the still rampant wild-gardens of the heart, wanders (and wonders) freely into ever-widening efflorescent circles of semiotic vision; there, not only is jouissance, but anything, is possible.

See also previous blog on Goudge
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Anna Eliza Bray; a Victorian writer remembered

Tavistock map with location of Bray's home

    In a previous blog I described a walk associated with the writer Anna Bray and letters of hers published in her most well-known book, Borders of the Tamar and Tavy. The piece appearing now was originally written for a local magazine. A version of it also appears on my my/writes;south-west-women-writers, another web-site. Given that Bray is one of Devon’s most significant women writers, I thought it was about time she was allowed to appear on this blog; her near absence from it is a little negligent. The following piece is a resume of her life and work.

     Mrs. Bray - the "female Walter Scott" - was in her lifetime well known for her three-volumed book, Borders of the Tamar and Tavy. This work, which was  first published in 1836, was a pioneering account of the geography, flora and fauna as well as a folk record of Dartmoor. The reader discovered a wealth of variety in its pages: other writers, history, geology, botany, ornithology,  legends, superstitions, pixies and ghosts. The book was centred around the Tavistock area where the writer lived for much of her life; it became her 'beloved town', a place she described as 'in a valley surrounded by hills, whose verdure is perpetual'.

      Even before this work was published Mrs Bray was a much acclaimed and prolific writer of romantic historical sagas influenced by Walter Scott's style - hence the comparison of her work with his. She was born in London on Christmas Day 1790. Her maiden name was Kempe; the family originally came from Cornwall. Her father was a bullion porter in the mint, her brother Alfred, an antiquary of some note. As a child Anna's acute observation and fanciful imagination were already noticeable and her early interests were the theatre and painting; through these pursuits she met Charles Stothard who became her first husband. He was an illustrator of sculptured monuments.

     They had three blissful years together during which Anna began to write. Her first work was a collection of descriptions of a long ramble that the couple embarked upon in France. Unfortunately their joy was not to last and just before the birth of their first baby Charles was killed in an unfortunate accident which occurred as he was working on one of his effigy drawings in Devon, at Bere Ferrer's church. The consequent trauma led to the premature birth of Anna's daughter who only lived for six months. Perhaps it was the shocking grief of this double tragedy that the writer began to transform into her first real fiction five years after her husband's death, which consisted of several novels with historical settings and romantic themes. These included De Foix and The White Hoods.

      Anne lived for sixty two years after her first husband's death and for much of that time she lived in Tavistock with her second husband Edward Atkins Bray, who was Vicar of the parish. The Brays' life together seems to have been contented and secure and so Anna was able to give her creative energies free- rein and to continue writing her series of novels. She adored the surrounding countryside and especially loved Tavistock Abbey, which was next to the Vicarage.


      Then in 1823 she began a correspondence which changed the mode of her writing and inspired her to write Borders of the Tavy and Tamar. Robert Southey was Poet Laureate. In 1823 he wrote to Anna after reading a memoir she had published for her first husband; she replied and thus began a friendship which lasted many years. Eventually he visited the Brays at the Tavistock vicarage.

     Initially Southey made some suggestions about her general approach to writing: he thought that for all her vivid flights of fancy her work might be more immediate if she were to focus her novels on the locality surrounding her, rather than describing remote places and distant historical periods. Anna took his advice to heart and during the 1830's a bevy of new novels appeared including: Fitz of Fitzford, Trelawney of Trelawne, Hartland Forest and Courtenay of Walreddon. These featured local traditions, folk lore and depictions of the local area and they became popular enough for a ten-volume set to be published in1845. These novels simultaneously recreate some of the episodes of South-west England's history - in Anna's words, they are 'founded on truth' - with detailed, albeit romantic evocations of the local scenery  as it then was; they can thus be read as historically important documents. For instance, in Hartland Forest; a Legend of North Devon, Bray evokes the wildness of Hartland Point:

'This great and bold promontory of the north coast stretches itself into the sea, and is united to the land by a causeway, narrow, broken, and so steep in parts as to be almost perpendicular. The angry and reverberating waves beat on either side, close to its very base. It is at once an object of terror and sublimity: to a depth that makes the brain dizzy, the eye looks down upon splintered and sharp points of rocks that rise up like spear-heads'

      Meanwhile Robert Southey continued writing letters of encouragement. He discussed with Anna the possibility of beginning a new work that would be "descriptive of the history, traditions and manners of the neighbourhood around Tavistock and agreed with her that it should be in the form of letters addressed to him. She embarked on this venture with characteristic enthusiasm and The Borders of the Tavy and TamarA Description of the Part of Devonshire bordering on the Tavy and Tamar, illustrative of its Manners, Customs, History, Antiquities, Scenery and Natural History, in a Series of Letters to Robert Southey, Esq. Fortunately this was later shortened!

     She presents her account of the moor with an adroit mixture of factual detail, romantic fantasy and sure artistic perception. In her second letter she describes Dartmoor as being

 'thirty miles in extent from north to south, and fourteen from east to west ... It is considered to drive its name from the river Dart, which rises on the moor, in the midst of a bog on Cranmere pool. This river ... is supposed to be called the Dart from the remarkable rapidity of its course.'

     Shortly after this passage Anna reveals her painterly skills:

'No one who would wish to view the Moor in all its grandeur should go there on a very fine or rather sunny day; for then it possesses none of those effects produced by that strong opposition of light and shadow, which mountain scenery and rugged rocks absolutely require to display the bold character of their outline and the picturesque combination of their craggy tops.'

        Amongst many other features of this rich and intricate text the writer shows her competence in the way she points out and assesses other writers linked with the Tavistock locality. She is particularly fond of the poet William Browne:

'... his chief excellence lies in the picturesque manner in which he imitated nature. His birds, his flowers, and his rural scenery have all the vivid fidelity of truth ... he has also studied rural character and whenever he touches on the feelings that are chiefly called into play in a country life, it is evident that he had seen and participated in those feelings he described.'

       Although Dartmoor is one of our most popular Country Parks, Mrs Bray's account of it is now all but forgotten. This is a shame because as one Bray admirer said, the book "is one of the principal sources of information about the history of Dartmoor". Anna could even be seen as one of the first conservationists. Take for instance one of her remarks in Borders:

 "Dartmoor has been a field to the spoiler and many of its most interesting memorials have been destroyed" .  

That was written in 1832, not yesterday.

     Mrs Bray moved to London in 1857, after the death of her second husband. She continued writing. An Autobiography (read online) was prepared and the re-issue of Borders. Her death was in 1853. She was 82.

   The ending of the obituary notice for Anna read at the Devonshire Association's annual meeting in 1883 provides a fitting conclusion to this piece:

'She leaves behind her a name which will long live in memory, by reason of her thorough acquaintance with every relic of a byegone age, be they preserved in monuments of stone or in the warm hearts of its people, which can be found among the cleaves and tors of the borderland of Cornwall and Devon, and for the skill with which she imparted to others both her knowledge and her enthusiasm.'