Florence Marryat

Dr. Catherine Pope

• Publisher: Edward Everett Root
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781911454632
• eBook ISBN: 9781911454700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria femminista

Once dismissed as a "purveyor of dangerous inflammatory fiction, " Florence Marryat has suffered a reputation as a trashy and formulaic novelist, unworthy of critical attention. / Critics have consistently overlooked the radicalism of her work, which confronts themes such as marital violence, single motherhood, and female sexuality. By gathering evidence from across the range of her fiction, Catherine Pope establishes Marryat as an important feminist writer – one who consistently challenged prevailing ideas of femininity in both her life and her work. / With a life neatly spanning the Victorian period, Marryat (1833-99) was well placed to experience and to observe the ways in which women's lives were transformed during the nineteenth century. At the time of her birth, a wife's legal identity was entirely subsumed into that of her husband; by her death in 1899, women had benefitted from momentous changes that granted them a separate identity and greater rights over their bodies and personal property. As Pope argues, Marryat contributed to the debates that heralded these changes, partly through her ability to produce sensation novels at a prodigious rate, and also by pursuing a scandalous and thoroughly un-Victorian lifestyle.

Chapter 1

A Notable Woman

“The great thing … is to be bold. People take you so much for what you seem.”

Mount Eden

Florence Marryat left no diary, few personal letters, and deliberately obfuscated some aspects of her life. She also suffered convenient memory lapses, and a tendency to cast herself as either the heroine or the victim in any situation. Much of what is known about her has been pieced together from fragmentary memoirs in her non-fiction works and accounts written by her contemporaries. Her daughter Ethel wrote a candid, yet affectionate, obituary – “The Real Florence Marryat” – that illuminates aspects of her character. Some gaps can be filled through official documents, such as marriage and death certificates, census returns, and court proceedings. We also have The Nobler Sex (1892), a novel that follows the documented events of Marryat’s life closely with only a few details, mainly names and locations, changed. Written retrospectively in the first person as Molly Malmaison, it fulfils George P. Landow’s criteria for the text to be classed as autobiographical: “a work must not only present a version, myth, or metaphor of the self, but it must also be retrospective and hence it must self-consciously contrast two selves, the writing “I” and the one located (or created) in the past” (Landow, 1979: xliii).

Every chapter heading in The Nobler Sex starts with “I”, reinforcing that it is Marryat, rather than the heroine, who is addressing the reader. The narrative commences with the statement: “What I am about to write is the true history of my life” (Marryat, 1890b: 5–6), concluding: “I have told my story clumsily, perhaps, but I have told it truly” (313–4). Although interpreting autobiographical fiction is undoubtedly problematic, the intersections between known facts and dramatic versionings can offer an insight into the emotional turmoil behind the official documents. For example, Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland is frequently accepted as an account of the author’s life (Anderson, 2002: x), even though the central character is a man; this subterfuge allowing Linton to describe her sexual relationships with women. Marryat uses self-representation throughout her writing – telling Helen C. Black that “The most successful of my works are transcripts of my own experience” (2011: 101) – but The Nobler Sex is the only novel written in a clearly autobiographical style.

Florence Marryat was born on 9 July 1833,2 the ninth child of Captain Frederick Marryat, distinguished mariner and popular novelist, and Catherine Shairp, daughter of the British Charge d’Affaires in St. Petersburg. Her parents legally separated in 1839, the young Florence dividing her time between their two homes: the Captain’s Norfolk estate and her mother’s small house at Southsea (E. Church, 1899: 588). Although she held her father in high esteem throughout her life, Florence was clearly perturbed by the way in which the separation affected her parents disproportionately, this forming a recurring theme in her fiction. As a middle-class woman born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no possibility of Catherine Marryat earning her own living, so she spent the remainder of her life dependent on her daughters. In 1893, The Idler asked popular novelists “Is childhood the happiest or the most miserable period of one’s existence?” Marryat responded candidly: “If I am to choose one, or the other extreme, I should say decidedly the most miserable, and made so by the folly, ignorance, or neglect of parents. Not one hundredth part of the men and women who marry are fit to become fathers and mothers” (“The Idlers Club”, 1893: 234). This idea is perpetuated throughout her fiction, with heroines succeeding in spite of, rather than because of, their parentage. Later, Marryat spoke frequently on the need for alternatives to marriage and reproduction.

Marryat’s biography of her father, The Life and Letters of Captain Marryat (1872), describes a benevolent and indulgent parent whose children received an erratic education. Florence and her sisters were taught by a succession of ineffectual governesses, their lessons supplemented by the Captain’s language lessons (Marryat, 1872: 239–40). Given the sustained criticism of Marryat’s French and grammar throughout her career, the Captain was an unsuccessful, if enthusiastic, pedagogue. Much of Marryat’s later fiction calls for middle-class women to be formally educated,3 either so they can seek fulfilling employment or become better wives to intelligent husbands. Captain Marryat was remembered with pride and affection by Florence; Catherine Marryat, conversely, is largely absent from her memoirs and there is no mention of her at all in the biography beyond the elliptical “His widow also survives him” (322). In a letter to the publisher Richard Bentley on 18 February 1866, Geraldine Jewsbury deplored the “cursory” manner in which the author treated her parents’ marriage, concluding: “The impression made upon me by the biography is unpleasant” (Bentley Archives, Add. MSS 46657). Mrs Marryat was certainly a difficult character, and Florence perhaps thought silence preferable to either honesty or evasion. Recalling an encounter with the Marryats in Lausanne, Charles Dickens makes Catherine Marryat sound like one of his most ridiculous female characters: “Poor fellow! He seems to have had a hard time of it with his wife. She had no interest whatever in the children; and was such a fury, that, being dressed to go out to dinner, she would sometimes, on no other provocation than a pin out of place or some such thing, fall upon a little maid she had, beat her till she couldn’t stand, then tumble into hysterics, and be carried to bed” (cited in Forster, 1873: 2: 269).

While she was discreet in her memoirs, Florence’s various fictional portrayals of profoundly dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships indicate the sensitivity of the situation. Where mothers are present, they are at best ineffectual and at worst malevolent, conspiring to deny their daughters’ right to self-determination. Most accounts of Catherine Marryat describe her as intensely pious, and the dedication in Florence’s 1869 novel, The Girls of Feversham, indicates her mother’s attitude towards her literary career: “My dearest mother, I dedicate to you this little story; the first, perhaps, from my pen, in which not a line is to be found which can be called ‘sensational,’ and trust you will accept it with the love of your daughter” (Marryat, 1869a). This dedication is either disingenuous or mischievous: the plot features murder, elopement, and two families functioning quite happily without a mother. Marryat makes a rare reference to Mrs Marryat in The Spirit World (1894), twelve years after her death, recounting her horror when her young son on his deathbed demanded beer instead of soothing descriptions of the afterlife (1894c: 28).

To escape the stultifying atmosphere of the family home, Florence married a man she hardly knew: “she naturally looked upon the prospect as one of emancipation from the muffin worries, tabby gatherings, and woolwork, which formed the only distractions of life at Southsea” (E. Church, 1899: 588). The wedding took place just a few weeks before her twenty-first birthday, although she later claimed to have been only sixteen (Dolman, 1891: 1–2; Black, 2011: 98) – perhaps to downplay her share of the responsibility for what proved to be an unfortunate match. Little is known of the courtship of Thomas Ross Church and Florence Marryat, beyond the fact that Church was a frequent visitor to Marryat’s grandmother’s house in Wimbledon (E. Church, 1899: 588). After several years’ engagement, she headed out to be married on the Malaysian island of Penang on 13 June 1854 (Public Record Office: Marriage Certificate). In the novella “A Lucky Disappointment”, Laura Gray escapes a life that “had been monotonous in its dull tranquillity” (Marryat, 1876a: 13) by sailing for the Cape of Good Hope to marry her fiancé after a six-year separation. On arrival, she is bitterly disappointed by his sallow complexion and general air of seediness. Her dreams are shattered. Discovering that he has been pursuing a less-than-discreet affair with a mixed-race woman, Laura hops on the next ship home and rejoices in her escape. Perhaps this is what Marryat wished had happened to her. Writing after her mother’s death, Marryat’s daughter said of this marriage: “She was too young to realise the responsibility of entering into a life-long engagement with a man who was more or less a stranger to her” (E. Church, 1899: 588). As one of seven daughters in a genteel family, Marryat probably saw few options beyond marriage, not relishing the prospect of adding to the pool of ‘surplus’ women. Although the Marryats were relatively wealthy, Florence’s inheritance comprised only a one-fifth share in an investment worth £15,804 – certainly not enough to lead the life she had been brought up to expect. While this money was meagre, it formed part of her marriage settlement, later becoming the subject of two legal battles.

Thus, Marryat became the wife of an Ensign in the 12th Madras Staff Corps and began her new life in the Raj. Describing the experience as “seven years passed in exile” (Marryat, 1868a: 1), Marryat grew frustrated with the expatriate community. In her wonderfully waspish and indiscreet memoir Gup (1868), she described them as “characteristically divided into three classes – the gay; the religious; and the inane” (Marryat, 1868a: 9). In an obituary of Marryat for Womanhood, C. J. Hamilton observed that these recollections “made enemies for the authoress” (1900: 3). In some respects, the environment was no more propitious than her former family home, but there were some distinct benefits. Marryat recalls that married women were often left alone for long periods while their husbands were away on active duty; they were also allowed to receive male visitors without a chaperone. During a later posting to Burma, Marryat was free to ride through the Rangoon jungle with an unmarried man, intimating just how easy it was for wives to pursue extra-marital affairs when released from the strictures of English society. Commenting on the position of women, Marryat adds: “The Burmese laws are not much in favour of the weaker vessel, but in this again, I cannot see that in most respects our civilisation teaches us to outstrip them” (Marryat, 1868a: 282). Church, meanwhile, was not endearing himself to either his wife or his men. Marryat recalled that he was “considered a martinet”. Such was his unpopularity, a Madras Sepoy fired at his back “with the intent to kill him”. Unfortunately, the bullet instead hit his colleague, who subsequently died (Marryat, 1891c: 243).

Marryat returned home from India in December 1860, suffering from exhaustion and trauma. She was greatly shaken by the death of close friend John Powles eight months earlier, recalling that “His death and the manner of it caused me a great shock”. This event and “other troubles combined” made it intolerable for her to remain with her husband. She was accompanied by three children and pregnant with a fourth, describing the five-month journey as a “terrible affair” (64). Church remained in India and they were effectively separated – his military records show that he progressed up the ranks and did not seek to join a regiment based in England (Public Record Office: Military Records). A fortnight after her arrival in England, Marryat gave birth to her fourth child, also called Florence. She was born with a cleft palate and had to be fed by artificial means during her ten-day existence. Her death certificate cites the causes as “inanition” (General Register Office: Death Certificate for Florence Church), or what became known as failure to thrive. Essentially, she was unable to feed and there was no reliable surgical procedure for cleft palate at the time. Marryat claims the baby’s condition was considered so unusual that it was reported in The Lancet, although under assumed names,4 adding: “I was closely catechised as to whether I had suffered any physical or mental shock that could account for the injury to my child, and it was decided that the trouble I had experienced was sufficient to produce it” (73).

In Marryat’s short story “The Box with the Iron Clamps”, published in London Society in May-June 1868, Blanche Damer gives birth to a deformed baby after an extra-marital affair. She carries its tiny skeleton around in a sealed box as a symbol of her guilt. In A Fatal Silence (1891), Paula Bjørnson’s son is born with severe learning difficulties as a result of her husband kicking her in the stomach during pregnancy. Perhaps most notably, in Marryat’s first novel, Love’s Conflict (1865), Elfrida Treherne’s sickly baby survives only a few hours. Thanks to censorship by Geraldine Jewsbury, Elfrida blames herself for thinking of a man other than her husband and sees it as God’s punishment.5 Significantly, in a later novel, A Harvest of Wild Oats (1877), Elfrida reappears to ascribe the baby’s death to the stress of living with a violent husband. One possible interpretation is that Marryat became pregnant after an extra-marital affair, causing her husband to react violently. Certainly, the latitude she was given in India and Burma, along with repeated references in memoirs to a friendship she was obliged to end, make this plausible. The most likely candidate is John Powles, whose death in India contributed to Marryat’s breakdown. Although Marryat insisted they never had any physical contact, the episodes in which his spirit visits her in There is No Death suggest intimacy beyond that which might be expected from a platonic friendship at the time.

Alone in England with three children to support, and receiving only limited financial assistance from Church, Marryat was encouraged to start writing by her childhood friend, Annie Thomas, herself a successful author. Marryat initially exploited her father’s illustrious network, asking Charles Dickens for help in establishing her literary career. Although her original letter has disappeared, his withering response (described by the Metro as a “sassy reply to a wannabe writer” [“Charles Dickens Sent This Sassy Reply to Writer Florence Marryat”; online]) recently came up for auction at Bonham’s. In the sale catalogue, the auctioneer describes it as “wonderfully rude”. Annoyed that Marryat had the temerity to solicit feedback on an article she had offered to All the Year Round, Dickens denounced her request as “scarcely reasonable”: “To read professed contributions honestly, and communicate a perfectly unprejudiced decision respecting every one of them to its author or authoress, is a task of the magnitude of which you evidently have no conception” (Bonhams, nd: online). Undaunted, Marryat would go on to edit her own journal, and to enjoy a personal life just as complicated as Dickens’s. She later described him as “highly strung, nervous, and imaginative” (Marryat, 1891b: 7).

Marryat submitted her first novel, Love’s Conflict, to Richard Bentley in November 1864. It was published the following year, although only after extensive revision by his reader, Geraldine Jewsbury. This work earned Marryat a relatively modest fee of £100, but she quickly followed it up with two further novels in the same year, Woman Against Woman and Too Good for Him, in which Isobel Reverdon turns to novel-writing to support her baby after her husband absconds. The plot, title, and emetic dedication suggest a jibe at Thomas Ross Church: “To Him whose life is one with mine, and for whom every effort of my own is made” (Marryat, 1865b). There appears to have been an uneasy truce between Marryat and Church during the remainder of the decade. They corresponded regularly (the letters have been since destroyed) and he visited “3–4 times” (“A Military Divorce Case”, 1878: 5) (there were four more children, so four is the more likely figure, assuming he was the father). He is recorded as present in the family home at the 1871 census, but this coincides with their more formal separation, so he had probably returned temporarily to settle his affairs. In this year the first Married Women’s Property Act came into effect, allowing Marryat to control her own earnings and live more independently (see Chapter 2). Church’s brother, Edward, was a frequent visitor and seems to have helped Marryat through this difficult time (“A Military Divorce Case”, 1878: 5). She dedicated her 1866 novel For Ever and Ever to him. Notably, it is the story of an adulterous army captain in India who physically and mentally abuses his wife and child.

Matters had come to a head in 1870 when Marryat converted to Roman Catholicism. Her daughter Ethel later commented that “The emotional character of that faith was peculiarly adapted to a temperament like hers” (E. Church, 1899: 589). Church strongly disapproved, fearing his children would be brought up as papists. He threaten...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series Editors
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. A Notable Woman
• Chapter 2. “Entirely Different Creations”: Marriage and the Sexual Double Standard
• Chapter 3. “An Entire Subversion of the Domestic Rule”: Women and Property
• Chapter 4. In Bluebeard’s Chamber: The Conflation of Medical and Patriarchal Authority
• Chapter 5. “Are you not a little prejudiced, dear Doctor?”: The Pathologisation of Female Sexuality
• Chapter 6. “Our Mother Who Art in Heaven: The Virgin Mary and Sacred Maternity
• Chapter 7. “Courageous Assertions”: Spiritualism and Power
• Chapter 8. Woman of the Future: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography