Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie, 1580–1830

From Sidney to Blackwood's

Will Bowers, Hannah Leah Crummé, Will Bowers, Hannah Leah Crummé

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137545527
• eBook ISBN: 9781137545534
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

 

Afterword: Writing Coteries, Reading Coteries

Helen Hackett¹

(1)

University College London, London, UK

Reading the essays in this collection is like joining a lively conversation. Members of different scholarly communities with different specialisms—perhaps we could call them coteries?—have gathered here to evaluate the productiveness of the term ‘coterie’ in their particular areas of expertise. Their findings suggest that it may be applied to widely various settings and groupings: family networks; clusters of writers around a patron or mentor-figure; sets of friends; members of a particular college or legal inn; customers of a particular tavern or coffee house; or participants in a fashionable salon. Some contributors are suspicious of the word. Mary Ellen Lamb, for instance, finds that although Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and her son William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, are often seen as the centres of coteries, the term may obscure the precise dynamics of their interactions with other writers: the tensions in the Countess’s patronage relationships; the extensiveness of the literary intimacies of her son. For Felicity James, on the other hand, importing the word ‘coterie’ to criticism of Romantic literature is a useful way of disrupting conventional models of solitary authorship and foregrounding instead the sociable writing practices of a figure such as Charles Lamb. Christine Gerrard reminds us that no two coteries are the same, and each one has its own particular dynamic; it seems also to be the case that critical usages of the term ‘coterie’ can differ widely. What conclusions can we draw from placing different coteries and different approaches to coteries side by side?

My own interest in coteries mainly arises from the literary activities of two particular seventeenth-century women. Lady Mary Wroth flaunted her family connections on the title page of her published prose romance, the Urania of 1621: ‘Written by the right honourable the Lady Mary Wroath. Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester. And Neece to the ever famous, and renowned S ^r Phillips Sidney knight. And to the most exelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased’. ¹ The full title of the work, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania , also announces various kinds of familial coterie credentials: emulation of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (authored by Wroth’s uncle Sir Philip Sidney, dedicated to and published by her aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert); composition in a sociable context; and dedication to a close relation and friend, Susan Vere Herbert, Countess of Montgomery, Wroth’s sister-in-law. Either Wroth or her printer or both clearly believed that announcing her affiliation to a group famous for producing and situating their works within an intimate family circle, and thereby making a paradoxically public declaration of the supposedly private nature of her writing, would be a selling point. The reader is invited to gain a glimpse of, and even an imaginary entrée into, the world of the aristocratic and literary Sidney-Herbert family.

As we venture beyond the title page of the Urania , this effect is intensified by multiple fictional allusions to events in Wroth’s own life and the lives of others known to her. Hints and clues intimate that her fictional characters might be versions of herself and her friends and relations, building on her uncle Philip’s insertion into his works of his fictionalised personae Astrophil and Philisides. Her stories are imbued with implications that those in the know will find hidden depths, veiled allusions to real people and events; and also that these knowing readers will keep their knowledge to themselves, silently recognising encoded truths but not exposing them. Pamphilia, the central heroine, seems to be a fictional persona for Wroth, and in a characteristic layering of narratives she relates the story of Lindamira (Lady Mary?), which in some details resembles the known facts of Wroth’s life. Her companion Dorolina judges it ‘some thing more exactly related than a fixion’, but her ‘discretion taught her to be no Inquisitor’, modelling Wroth’s ideal reader: one who is cooperative and sympathetic, and who will participate in the fiction that this fiction is indeed merely fiction, consenting to Wroth’s use of it as a safe space where troubling or controversial real-life events can be addressed. ²

Thus both the packaging and the content of the Urania create what we might call a ‘coterie effect’, publicly announcing it as a text with levels of private address to cognoscenti. However its reception went wrong: Edward, Lord Denny read the work uncooperatively and unsympathetically and objected to Wroth’s recognisable fictionalisation of a recent scandal in his family by attacking her in vitriolic letters and verses. ³ It may be that the Urania was originally written, like Wroth’s uncle Philip’s works, for manuscript circulation among family and friends, and that Wroth naively misjudged the likely response to the release of this relatively private work in the more public arena of print. The apparently coterie nature of the Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella , published safely after their author’s death, had been an attraction to readers of the posthumous print editions; but Wroth’s deployment of coterie codes was deemed more dangerous not only because she touched on more scandalous matters, but also because her gender made any act of authorship controversial (Denny exhorted her to ‘Work oth[er] Workes leave idle bookes alone/For wise and worthyer women have writte none’). ⁴ The episode suggests that a coterie may be both a context for textual production and itself a textual construct; that this construction of coterie ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• Literary Coteries of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke
• Maecenas and ‘Oxford-Witts’: Pedagogy and Flattery in Seventeenth-Century Oxford
• The Circulation of Verse at the Inns of Court and in London in Early Stuart England
• ‘If I Had Known Him, I Would Have Loved Him’: Bloomsbury Appropriations of the Scriblerian Coterie
• The Hillarian Circle: Scorpions, Sexual Politics and Heterosocial Coteries
• Edmund Spenser and Coterie Culture, 1774–1790
• Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Forging of the Romantic Literary Coterie
• The Many Rooms of Holland House
• Aggressive Intimacy: Mass Markets and the Blackwood’s Magazine Coterie
• Backmatter