From The Literary Hub:
Literary history can seem full of women frustrated with their lack of time for reading. Florence Nightingale rails in Cassandra (1852) against the way women are constantly interrupted and never protected in their study, complaining that “there is no time appointed for this purpose and the difficulty is that, in our social life, we must always be doubtful whether we ought not to be with somebody else or be doing something else.” Virginia Woolf makes this frustration into the beautiful manifesto, A Room of One’s Own (1929). Few, however, seem quite as angry about their lack of time as Catherine Talbot. She rages in her unpublished journals about not having enough time, she muses on her lack of time in her published pieces of writing, and she makes time a constant theme of her letters to Elizabeth Carter.
As friends, Talbot and Carter had much in common. Neither married, both belonged loosely to what we now think of as the Bluestocking Circle, both knew Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson, and both were nourished to different degrees by their Christian faith. But Talbot’s situation was particular because she grew up under the protection of her father’s friend, the Bishop Secker, and was obliged to him for including her in his busy, affluent, and often very public household. The intensity of this situation comes out at one point when Talbot erupts in fury at Carter’s failure to understand that her business is of a special degree: “You suppose that when I complained of wanting leisure I had several hours. You forget that you rise three hours earlier than I am allowed to do; that we visit 18 families at from three to 14 miles distant, and 20 I believe in Oxford, and are besides eternal riders, walkers, and airers. That I have many correspondents, and cannot for my life write short letters. And with all that crowded together, at first I had scarce one hour.”
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At various points Talbot rails as fully as any 18th-century Christian woman could against a system that precludes her from having what Nigel Thrift calls her “own time.” “How much rather would I stay at home this evening and study,” she exclaims to Carter, “than to go out shivering in the cold and to pay half a score of unedifying visits.” Although Talbot was recognized early on as a literary teenage protégée and valued by Secker as an interlocutor throughout her life, she found it harder as she grew older to justify her education. And while she played key roles in literary coteries that Betty Schellenberg identifies as two of the most important of her day—the one that formed in the late 1750s around Elizabeth Montagu, and the one around Samuel Richardson—Talbot was a conservative producer of manuscript and wary of writing for even limited publics. She complains to Carter that what skills she has cannot endure the life she’s obliged to lead: “By some means or other my golden hours are all engrossed and I cannot help feeling a perpetual dissatisfaction—feeling that my little genius was not made to take in so large a round, even of proper and laudable engagements.”
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Talbot’s sense of failure to command her own time, and her tones of anger and frustration, support Rhoda Zuk’s description of her “relegation to a round of undervalued employments.” Talbot’s “unhappy resignation to her role of modestly but variously occupied lady,” Zuk argues, “paralyzed her confidence and even generated despair.” Sylvia Myers and Emma Major both see her in similar terms, as tragically interred in the work that comes with her role as an unmarried woman within Secker’s family. They remind us of the independence she lacks structurally and of the difficulties any woman faced, even in this relatively fertile period for women writers.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
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