Dear readers, may your Christmas and New Year be restful, happy and all that you would wish!
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| The mistletoe, or, Christmas gambols design'd by Edwd. Penny |
Saturday, 24 December 2016
Monday, 19 December 2016
The Crown Spire is Free This Week!
Thursday, 15 December 2016
Lady Anne Barnard
It's a pleasure to welcome Stephen Taylor, author of the fantastic, Defiance, to the salon. This wonderful biography of the estimable Anne Barnard, a most remarkable adventuress, is not to be missed!
She lived vividly at the heart of Georgian society, wrote a ballad acclaimed by Scott and Wordsworth, was privy to one of the great secrets of the age and left a body of papers that bear comparison with those of Fanny Burney. So why is she better known today in South Africa than in her native land? As the biographer of Lady Anne Barnard, it is a question I puzzled over for years.
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She lived vividly at the heart of Georgian society, wrote a ballad acclaimed by Scott and Wordsworth, was privy to one of the great secrets of the age and left a body of papers that bear comparison with those of Fanny Burney. So why is she better known today in South Africa than in her native land? As the biographer of Lady Anne Barnard, it is a question I puzzled over for years.
I knew when I started my research that the materials were rich. Anne’s years at the Cape of Good Hope from 1798 established her as one of those indomitable women travellers of the early empire, a free spirit who mixed as easily with indigenous Africans as with aristocratic proconsuls sailing to and from India. Her diaries, published in South Africa and pored over by historians, showed too that she was a brilliant writer and artist.
What I did not realise when I asked her descendants for access to her papers was how much broader the sweep of her pen had been. Rather than a starting point, the Cape had been a climax in Anne’s bewilderingly busy and adventurous life; and her chronicle of it – unpublished and virtually unseen – is a trove of fresh information and insights into the Georgian age.
But to go back to the starting point: why is she not better known?
The eldest child of the Fifth Earl of Balcarres, Anne Lindsay grew up in the brilliant milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment, sharpening her wits among the likes of David Hume and Adam Smith. James Boswell used to relate a story from their Scottish tour how this 23-year-old “lady of quality” could hold her own in exchanges with Samuel Johnson.
But hers was an age when the daughters of impecunious lairds were commonly married off to men of fortune, and from the outset Anne stood her ground against such a fate. She rejected at least eleven suitors, insisting that marriage must go with love. “Matrimony, I am not ready for thee!” she wrote. “To say Yes to a proposal that would thwart the heart as long as I existed? To cheat an honest man out of the only fortune he can expect to get with me, a free heart? No, I can’t”.
Her defiance of convention sat ill with Edinburgh’s pillars of rectitude. When Anne rejected the son of a judge, Lord Kames, he called her “a witch and a she-devil.” Attempting to turn a page, she fled to London.
Brilliance in company quickly established her as a figure in fashionable society. The Prince of Wales became a close friend and Anne introduced him to Maria Fitzherbert, the Catholic widow with whom he became infatuated. As his attentions intensified, Anne and Maria escaped to Europe, travelling together for almost a year before Maria’s resistance melted.
Meanwhile reputation started to catch up with Anne. To the cream of the social whirl, the haut ton, she was always an outsider. The respectable thought her eccentric – what a later era would have termed bohemian – because she lived independently, buying, decorating and renting houses in fashionable locations like Berkeley Square.
There were also scandals. London loved gossip and though Lady Anne Lindsay never gained the notoriety of Frances Villiers or Mary Coke, her love affairs attracted a good deal of attention. An incident involving a dissipated wastrel, Lord Wentworth, led to Anne being dubbed “the Devil in Scarlet” by Lord Byron’s mother-in-law. In the course of another doomed liaison, with the politician William Windham, she travelled to France to observe the Revolution.
These episodes left scars. As became clear when I discovered her papers, it was Anne’s sensitivity about her past that resolved her, in effect, to blot out her story.
The prospect that she would marry appeared to have passed when she received what was her thirteenth proposal at the age of 42. Andrew Barnard, a handsome but unknown former army officer, was 30. She accepted, and began the biggest adventure of her life.
Together they sailed to the Cape where she had obtained him the post of secretary to the governor. The Barnards lived in a simple cottage called Paradise at the foot of Table Mountain where she kept a small menagerie of wildlife. At the same time she acted as the governor’s hostess.
For this land, which they both came to love, she had a wider vision. When the Barnards set off on a wagon tour of the interior, Pitt’s government saw the Cape as no more than a strategic bastion to protect its vital shipping network to India from the French. Anne did her best to convince influential friends at home that Africa too had potential. “Here is scarcity, but here will be plenty,” she wrote to Pitt’s deputy, Henry Dundas. “It is in the power of activity to make this the finest scene in the world by planting.”
Andrew Barnard died at the Cape. It is clear from their letters that the marriage had been supremely happy and nothing could replace him in her life. Anne lived at Berkeley Square until her death aged 74 in 1825, devoting her final years to the creation of six volumes of memoirs in which she recorded her life with wit and irony, along with a searing honesty. Hence the edict she issued shortly before her death that they were for the eyes of family only and never to be published.
When writing to the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, custodian of the memoirs, I had no idea of their scope and content. As it transpired, they opened the door to exhilarating and ever more astonishing places. Anne kept me fascinated, and had surprises in store right to the end. So for the reader too, I hope, will Defiance: The Life and Choices of Lady Anne Barnard.
Monday, 12 December 2016
Déjà vu: Leading Strings and Other Things
It's my pleasure to welcome Barbara Silkstone, with a most fascinating tale and a touch of Jane Austen!
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Have you ever encountered a painting that tugged at you emotionally? It might be a portrait or scene that holds a deeper meaning for you. In researching my latest book: Darcy and Elizabeth – Will’s First Christmas, a Regency Christmas variation, I came across this painting that shows a nurse teaching a child to walk using leading strings or a leash. I shuddered as it brought back a rush of memories and not from the 19th century!
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| By Pieter de Hooch (1629–after 1684) - http://www.mdbk.de/sammlungen/detailseiten/pieter-de-hooch/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40616518 |
Leading Strings
Leading strings were narrow strips of fabric or ribbons that were attached to children’s clothing and functioned as a sort of leash to keep the child upright while learning to walk and to keep them from straying too far.
Pudding Caps
Note in this painting, the child is also wearing a pudding cap, a delightful name for a helmet-like hat that prevented head injuries should a child fall while learning to walk. It is thought that the term pudding cap came from the fear that if a child fell his brains might turn to mush or pudding—perhaps leading to the term “pudding head”?
In Will’s First Christmas, Darcy and Elizabeth take care to be sure the heir to Pemberley wears this quilted cotton, horsehair padded, leather lined, crash helmet. Elizabeth affixes the head guard, which is open at the top with a sausage-shaped padded roll that encircles Will’s head like a crown, and then she ties it securely under his chin with ribbons. (See photo.)
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Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Accession Number 2009.300.1453
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In the story, Jane and Bingley are the parents of identical twin boys. Jane and Elizabeth fasten walking strings to their sons’ shoulders to control the active little boys in the vast halls of Pemberley. I could hardly bear to write of this undignified action as it brought back all my feelings of toddler mortification.
Forced to wear a leash at a vulnerable age, I still remember the humiliation of being treated like a pet dog. My mother would often take my baby sister and I shopping. The stores in our little town were old-fashioned shops with open display counters on top and storage compartments below. Being a mischievous little imp, I devised a fun game. While my mother was preoccupied with her shopping list, I would quietly slide open a storage cabinet door and slip inside, sliding the door closed.
I would muffle my giggles as she called for me. A salesclerk or two would soon join her in hunt. Those delicious moments of pulling a successful prank were heavenly, but would all too soon end in discovery. It was after a series of vanishing acts that the awful pink harness and leash appeared. My mother would buckle the straps across my chest, clip the leash to the harness, and hold the end as if I were a dog. I distinctly remember mumbling toddler cuss words as I was forced to march down the street in harness.
The painting brought back that feeling of being trapped! Tied like a little puppet. Thank goodness leading strings have gone the way of the dodo. However, as a child, I would have welcomed pudding knee-guards as well as the cap.
About the Author
Barbara Silkstone’s Amazon Author’s page
Barbara Silkstone is the author of over thirty novels and novellas. She has currently written over fifteen Pride & Prejudice variations both Regency and Contemporary—always with a light comic touch.
Regency~
Darcy and Elizabeth Will’s First Christmas – New Release
Darcy and Elizabeth Serendipity – New Release
The Gallant Vicar and The Return of the Gallant Vicar, both tales of love rediscovered, featuring Darcy and Elizabeth, and a villain worse than Wickham.
Gallant Vicar
Return of the Gallant Vicar
The Witches of Longbourn ~ Three book series of magical comedies featuring Darcy, Elizabeth, and a Happily-Ever-After. http://amzn.to/2be6maT
Contemporary series of comedy mysteries ~
Barbara Silkstone is the author of the best selling Mister Darcy series of comedic mysteries ~ Eight books with more coming soon! http://amzn.to/1NVKlrn
All books are available in audio on Audible.com
I love hearing from my readers!
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