Three volumes of Emily Eden's letters

Miss Eden's Letters, Violet Dickinson, editor  (1919)
Letters from India, Vols. 1-2, Emily Eden (Eleanor Eden, editor)  (1872)

Reading Emily Eden's Up the Country made me curious about her other books. I had already read her novels, The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House, which always make me wish she had written more fiction. I found that an edition of her letters was published in 1919. Copies are rare, even in libraries, so I downloaded an e-version from Google Books (and read about half the letters). I was very pleased when ABE Books finally found me a copy two years later. It was withdrawn at some point from the Manchester Public Libraries - at least I hope it was, and not stolen. The "NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM THIS ROOM" notice pasted on the front cover, with its threat of prosecution, still makes me a bit nervous.

The letters in this book date from 1814 to 1863 (Emily Eden died in 1869). They consist primarily of letters from Emily to family and friends. Born in 1797, she was one of twelve children. Her father George Eden was a diplomat, raised to a barony for his service in various embassies in Europe. His second son George, who became his heir, went into Parliament as a Whig and then into government service. Their family moved in the highest social and political circles, and Emily's sisters married into prominent families. She and another sister Fanny never married, living with George and acting as his political hostesses. When their old friend Lord Melbourne appointed George Governor-General of India in 1835, Fanny and Emily went with him. He was recalled after the disastrous First Afghan War, settling again in England with them.

The first half of Miss Eden's Letters covers her life before India. The early letters remind me very much of Jane Austen's, full of family jokes and gossip. There are constant references to the birth of nieces and nephews, and to their marriages (Emily's oldest sister was twenty years older, so there was an overlap of generations in the family). Like Austen, Emily paid frequent visits to friends and family, but she moved in much higher circles. She stayed at Chatsworth and Hatfield House, and made long visits to Lord and Lady Landsdowne at Bowood. The first letter in the collection mentions that family friend Anne Milbanke has written to announce her marriage to Lord Byron. There are also frequent references to politics, in which Emily took a keen interest. I was a little out of my depth there, despite the footnotes.

The letters in this section include several from two of Emily's closest friends. Pamela FitzGerald was the daughter of Lord Edward FitzGerald, a leader of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. After his death in prison, his estate and his children were put under attainder. It isn't clear from the letters how Pamela and Emily met, but they developed a lasting friendship, sustained by long letters in between rare visits. I wonder if Emily was as surprised as I was when Pamela announced her marriage to Sir Guy Campbell, a widower with children whom she married shortly after meeting him in Scotland. He had to go back into the army to support their constantly-growing family, and they ended up stationed in Ireland. I felt her letters highlighted the limited opportunities for women of their class (even those not under attainder), and I wondered if Emily ever felt that she herself had chosen the better part (like one of her own sisters, Pamela bore eleven children). Another close friend and correspondent, Theresa Lewis, offered a different option. A wife and mother, she also wrote novels with her husband Thomas. It was Theresa who would later edit Emily's novels for publication.

Almost exactly half-way through this book comes the announcement of Lord Auckland's appointment to India. I had already realized that there are another two volumes of Emily's letters, covering her years in India. I decided to read those, before returning with her to England. The India volumes were published after her death. Her niece Eleanor Eden wrote in a preface that Emily had begun collecting the letters, after the success of Up the Country, but died before the project could be completed. The first letters in the first volume of Letters from India describe the preparations for the trip, and the six months' voyage. I enjoyed reading those, with their account of the passage via Rio and Cape Town. I am always in awe of people traveling such immense distances in small wooden sailing ships. It was a miserable trip, partly because Emily was a poor sailor, and partly because she didn't want to be there in the first place. She hated leaving England and her extended family, she did not want to spend five years in India, but she also couldn't bear to be parted from her brother. She disliked India from the start, particularly the heat and humidity of Calcutta (Kolkata). With Fanny, she acted as the "Governor's lady," hosting receptions and balls and theater performances, and joining Lord Auckland on formal occasions. But she lived for letters, and for books. She noted that pirated American editions were easy to find in the shops. ("The Americans are valuable creatures at this distance. They send us novels, ice, and apples - three things that, as you may guess, are not indigenous to the soil." Letter, April 24, 1836)

I found the first volume of these India letters interesting, with the journey out and the first accounts of their lives in Calcutta. Emily could find the fun in almost anything, I think, and she wrote comically about their European neighbors and the various social activities. She also liked to tease her brother, and to share jokes. There are more troubling elements, such as her attitude toward the Indian people. She frequently used the term "savages" in discussing them, though she also protested against their abuse by Europeans. She saw nothing to admire in their history or art, and she had no respect for Hinduism (Islam on the other hand was simply an incomplete religion). I know these attitudes were common. I just found them a bit wearing in letter after letter. I also would have appreciated some context on the political situation in India, which was presumably fresh in the minds of readers in the 1870s. I had to keep checking for more information, to understand how Lord Auckland got England involved in war with Afghanistan and what went wrong. At the same time, he was sending British troops to the First Opium War with China. Emily wrote about these events, of course fully supporting her brother's administration. There is no hint in her letters that he was actually recalled to England, under a cloud, because of the debacle of the Afghan war.

I finished the second volume of India letters with some relief, prepared to return to England with Emily. I was taken aback to find that Miss Eden's Letters continued with yet more Indian letters. I was also surprised to find myself enjoying those letters more. I think it's partly that they were written to people that I knew from the earlier correspondence. Though they included many of the same complaints, they felt more alive, and Emily's sense of fun came through more clearly. These India letters take up most of the second half of the book. The letters that date from her return to England deal mainly with her declining health, though she continued to follow politics carefully. Her brother George's death in 1849 was a terrible blow, as were the deaths of her sisters in the 1850s. It was in those years that she was writing The Semi-Detached House, and revising The Semi-Attached Couple. Like Jane Austen, she carefully collected reviews, both private and published. The letters don't mention the publication of Up the Country, however, which also did very well.

All of these books are available in e-versions, through Google Books. The two volumes of India letters have been reprinted in modern editions, and they are available in print-on-demand editions. I think Miss Eden's Letters is the best. Anyone interested in women's lives in the early 19th century, or in Emily Eden, will find much to enjoy. She really is good company, and I think this is a book I will return to. The India letters are interesting to a point, but I struggled to finish them. I would only recommend them to someone who wanted to delve deeply into the British women's experience in India in the 1830s.

Reading these letters did remind me how long it has been since I read The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House. I think I'll be taking my combined Virago edition off the shelf again before too long. It is clear particularly from The Semi-Attached Couple how much Jane Austen influenced Emily Eden's novels. There are frequent mentions of Austen's characters in her letters, which show how familiar she was with the books. She also enjoyed Charles Dickens' books, but I was tickled to find in the later letters that she had lost her taste for Charlotte M. Yonge's books.

I have been fairly beat by Miss Yonge's new book, The Daisy Chain, which distresses me, as I generally delight in her stories; but if she means this Daisy Chain to be amusing, it is is, unhappily, intensely tedious, and if she meant it to be good, it strikes me that one of Eugène Sue's novels would do less harm to the cause of religion . . . [I think] Ethel, the heroine, the most disagreeable, stormy, conceited girl I ever met with. . . I read on till I came to a point where she thought her father was going to shake her because she was ill-natured about her sister's marriage; and finding that he did not perform that operation, which he ought to have done every day of her life, I gave it up. (Letter, March 1856)

N.B. I have already filled the 1872 slot in my Mid-Century of Books, but I can still fill 1919 with Miss Eden's Letters.

Ending the TBR dare a little Early - due to the letter E

As James has just reminded us, there are only eleven days left in the TBR Triple Dog Dare. I know I could make it to April 1st, but I don't think I will. There are two reasons for this. The first is the long Easter weekend. While I'll be spending extra time at church, I'll also have extra time for reading, and it feels like a good time to get to some of the new books.

One book in particular, by Emily Eden. I mentioned before that ABE Books finally found me a copy of Miss Eden's Letters, edited by a great-niece and published in 1919. I had downloaded an e-version some time ago and read about two-thirds of it. I stopped at the point in 1835 where Miss Eden was preparing to go to India with her brother, Lord Auckland, the newly-appointed Governor-General. I've read her book Up the Country, a collection of letters written from India between 1837 and 1840. I have since learned that two additional books of her letters from India were published soon after her death. I've re-read Miss Eden's Letters up to 1835, but because I like my stories in chronological order, I've set them aside to read the Letters from India. Volume I (a modern reprint) arrived last week. As soon as I finish the book I'm currently reading (from the TBR shelves), I think I will be back with Miss Eden.

I really enjoy her letters, which remind me of Jane Austen's. Like Austen, she was part of a large, clever, close and funny family. Unlike Austen's, though, they were nobility, an old Whig political family. Emily's father, the first Lord Auckland, was a diplomat who served as Ambassador to France, Spain and Holland. She moved in the highest social and political circles. She and her unmarried sister Fanny acted as hostesses for their bachelor brother, with whom they lived. Like Austen, she came to value her "life of single blessedness," particularly as her sisters and women friends produced child after child. "Six small Intellects constantly on the march, and [sister] Mary, of course, is hatching a seventh child," she wrote in 1827 (another sister gave birth to seventeen).

I'll write more about this book later, when I've finished it, but I have to share this Austen-esque paragraph from an 1815 letter to her brother George, Lord Auckland:

There is to be a meeting of all the Sunday Schools in the district next week at Bromley, and a collection, and a collation. We mean to eat up the collation, and give all our old clipped sixpences to the collection, which we think is a plan you would approve if you were here.

And this one, to her oldest sister Lady Buckinghamshire in 1817, could have come straight out of Jane Austen's juvenalia:

My dearest Sister, the reason I am in such a state of ignorance about the letter is, that Mama and Louisa went to meet them on their way to London; that we were behind them in the poney-cart; and George behind us in the grig. We all fell in with each other and the letters in the middle of Penge Common, where we each took what belonged to us. I met immediately with the dreadful intelligence that you were going actually to take May Place, and on our recommendation, which dreadful intelligence I communicated to George, who immediately fainted away, and was driven off by his servant. I fainted away, and was driven off by Mary, and Mama and Louisa went on in hysterics to London.

The later letters are less light-hearted, but always interesting. I am looking forward to reading in Letters from India about the long voyage out, and her first impressions of the country.

I've done pretty well with the Dare as it is. I've cleared off 53 books, and half of two more. I've added another 35 to the shelves though, which only gives me a net gain of 18 (plus two pending). In addition to Miss Eden's letters, I'm looking forward to reading more Willa Cather, Patricia Wentworth, Margery Sharp, and N.K. Jemisin. I am also anxious to get to Shilpi Somaya Gowda's new book, The Golden Son.

Travels in India

Up the Country, Emily Eden

One of the books I'm looking forward to reading when this cruel TBR challenge is over is Eric Newby's Slowly Down the Ganges, about a trip with his wife Wanda in 1963.  But in the meantime, I have Emily Eden's Up the Country, an account of a trip down the Ganges 126 years earlier, and it seemed only right to read this book, so long on the TBR pile, first.  I have long been a fan of Emily Eden's two wonderful novels, The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House (originally published in 1859/1860, and reprinted together in a Virago edition in the 1980s). 

The Semi-Attached Couple, written in the 1830s, has clear overtones of Jane Austen but also reflects the author's experience of politics.  Emily Eden was born in 1797, the twelfth child of the first Baron Auckland, a politician and diplomat.  She chose not to marry, setting up a household with her sister Fanny and brother George, who inherited the title at their father's death.  Lord Auckland, an active MP before his elevation to the House of Lords, held several high offices in Whig administrations, and Emily became a noted political hostess.  When George was appointed the Governor-General of India in 1835, Emily reluctantly went with him as his "First Lady," joined by Fanny and their nephew William.  They would spend six years in India.

In the fall of 1837, the Edens set off on what would be a two and a half year tour "up the country," from Calcutta northwest toward Delhi, then into the Punjab.  Emily chronicled their experiences in a letter-journal written to her sister Mary Drummond back in England, and her wonderful writing in this day-to-day account brings the reader along on this extraordinary trip.  The Governor-General and his suite travelled with an entourage of 12,000, whose line of march stretched ten miles.  Emily rode camels, elephants and horses, sometimes transferring to open carriages or palanquins carried by bearers.  The pace was slow, because the roads were bad, and also because there were frequent stops at the courts of local rajahs and princes, and at the stations with British residents, civil and military.

This tour had a political purpose beyond impressing the local rulers with British authority and prestige.  In Simla, Lord Auckland began talks that would eventually draw Britain into the First Afghan War in 1838.  Its disastrous end in 1842 would tarnish his reputation and overshadow the achievements of his administration.  Emily Eden, fiercely loyal to her brother, was not deeply concerned with the politics of the tour.  Nor was she greatly interested in the history or culture of the areas she visited.  After two years in India, she was intensely homesick for England, her sister Mary, and the rest of their close-knit family.  But she was determined to support her brother and play her proper part in his administration, though she was also determined to get all the fun out of it that she could along the way.  A gifted artist, she took every opportunity to sketch people and scenes, and some of her work was later published in a book of lithographs.  After accounts of the coronation of Queen Victoria reached India, Lord Auckland asked his sister to paint a portrait of the new queen, to be given to an important ally.  Emily drew on the newspaper accounts for details of the Queen's robes, but she had to make up the features of the face herself, hoping the prince would never know the difference.

Even on the march, Emily constantly recorded the arrival of mail and packages from home, forwarded on from either Bombay or Calcutta.  Letters brought family news, sometimes out of order ("Then Charley was going back to Eton. I never knew you thought of sending him there at all. I went all about the house, asking about him and his school").  She also received care packages with food ("preserves and sweetmeats and sardines and sauces from France"), clothes, new bonnets, and above all, books.  The Edens were major fans of Charles Dickens.  They left on their tour with The Pickwick Papers, and along the way they read and re-read Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, sometimes in serials sent out from England, and other times in cheap pirated editions.

With her brother and sister, Emily attended dinners and dances with the local British residents in the areas they visited, which were recorded in her journal with vivid sketches of the company.  She also took part in the durbars, ceremonial meetings with the Indian princes, and she and Fanny were sometimes invited into the cloistered women's quarters.  One of regular features of the visits was the lavish exchange of gifts, including fabulous jewels and valuable shawls. The Governor-General's sisters came in for a share of these gifts, but under government policy they could not keep them, though occasionally they were able to purchase some of the items back for themselves.

The only other Victorian woman traveler whose writings I have read is Isabella Bird (The Englishwoman in America, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan).  It is difficult to compare the two, first because their travels were so different.  Emily Eden travelled literally with a cast of thousands, as part of her brother's suite.  Isabella Bird travelled alone, with only the necessary translators or guides.  But even more than that, Emily seemed detached, uninterested in India and its people, focused on her family.  She wrote, "I never ask questions, I hate information."  Isabella Bird would talk to anyone, and she constantly asked and answered questions.  She made herself at home, while never losing sight of her position as an Englishwoman abroad.  I was also reminded of Elizabeth Grant, whose Memoirs of a Highland Lady include an account of her family's residence in India in the late 1820s, though she left India before the Edens arrived.

The edition I have is a Virago Travellers, published in 1983.  I see that other editions are available, and I hope that they include maps of the areas that Emily visited, the lack of which is a real handicap in this book.  It would have been even more helpful to include notes linking the English place-names that Emily uses with their modern equivalents.  I read this book with my trusty atlas on hand, but it was difficult to track their march from Umritzir, for example, until I figured out it was really Amritsar.  There are several pages of notes in the back of the book, reprinted from a 1930 edition, most of which identify people who for privacy appear only as initials.  But there is no asterisk or number on a page to signal an endnote, which I found frustrating.

Those quibbles aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  Emily is delightful company, even in her sad and homesick moods, and the pomp and circumstance of the trip is endlessly fascinating.  The introduction mentions two other volumes of her letters that have been published, and I will be looking for those as well.