Jane1fest

(1758-1852)

Jane West, the only child of Jane and John Iliffe, was born in London on 30 April 1758 in a building that later in the century became St. Paul's Coffee House. When she was eleven the family moved to Desborough in Northamp­ tonshire, the region where she was to spend the rest of her long life. Self­ taught, she told her friend Bishop Percy, "I berhymed the seven first chapters of the Acts at 13; I read Martin's Philosophy soon after, and composed an astronomic poem. Pope's Homer inspired me with the epic strain at 16; and I sung (or rather howled) the glories of Caractacus. The catalogue of my com­ positions previous to my attaining 20 would be formidable. Thousands of lines flowed in very easy measure; I scorned correction, and never blotted." 1 In the late 1770s or very early 1780s Jane married Thomas West, a yeoman farmer from Little Bowden, and bore three sons.2 Even when her children were small she published books of verse, including Miscellaneous Poetry Writ­ ten at an Early Period in Life (1786), The Humours if Brighthelmstone (1788), Miscellaneous Poems, and a Tragedy (1791), An Elegy on the Death if the Right Honourable (1797), Poems and Plays (1799-1805), and The Mother: A Poem, in Five Books (1809), as well as plays and novels. She published her early novels under the pseudonym Prudentia Homespun, a name earlier used by the Irish poet Charlotte McCarthy. She also wrote conduct books and essays and became a regular contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine. admired West's poetry but was critical of her drama Edmund. West's anonymously published novel A Gossip's Story was the main source for 's Sense and Sensibility; admired the way it showed "the small causes which destroy matrimonial felicity and peace" 3 and asked

I. Jane West to Dr. Percy, bishop of Dromore, 1800, quoted in the obituary notice for West in Gentleman's Magazine 38 (July 1852): 99. 2. Thomas, born 21September1783,John, born l5January 1787, and Edward, born 24 March 1794. 3. Quoted in Gina Luria, introduction to West's Letters to a Young Lady in Which the Duties and Character of Women are Considered (r8o6; reprint, New York, 1974), 6.

792 Jane ffist 793

Mary Hays to review it for the Analytical Review. West described her verse as "inelegant and crude/ Confus'd in sense, in diction rude," 4 but Bishop Percy told her, "Your 'Odes on Poetry' are of the first-rate excellence; nor could I read them without emotions which I have seldom experienced. They are sublime, animated, rich in imagery, and, what I could scarce have expected from a lady's pen, learned." 5 But West always protested that domestic duties took precedence over lit­ erary occupation. She told Percy, "My season for study and composition ... is winter. I am engaged in the duties of active life, and to those duties my pleasures ever have been subservient. You noticed my pile of stockings; they were not affectedly introduced. My needle always claims the pre-eminence of my pen. I hate the name of 'rhyming slattern.' "6 Even so, her pen was a productive one. Percy sent West's poems to Dr. Anderson, editor of the British Poets, in Edinburgh, who told him, "They do credit to the genius, taste, piety, and benevolence of the amiable and elegant writer. They do not, in general, possess the spirit and elevation of the higher poetry; but they abound in tender, interesting, and moral sentiments, elegantly expressed in easy numbers, and adorned with pleasing imagery. In some instances, as in the Ode to Poetry, she soars far above mediocrity, and approaches to sublimity." 7 West's anti-Jacobinism became explicit in her second novel, A Tale of the Times (1799), whose villain is a supporter of the French Revolution. In 1800 she asked Percy to review her conduct book Letters Addressed to a Young Man. She had written in the preface that her "secluded life afforded her few opportunities of profiting by literary conversation, or the collision of minds actuated by a similar taste, and engaged in congenial pursuits.'' It was, how­ ever, at about this time that she began corresponding with Sarah Trimmer. Percy wrote a long and enthusiastic piece for the November 1801 issue of the British Critic, in which he reported that a gentleman who had acciden­ tally called upon West the previous year had found her not "absorbed in books, and surrounded with papers, with all the paraphernalia of a professed authoress." Instead she was "looking over the linen of her large family, and regulating its economy, in one of the neatest mansions he ever entered; she herself being a perfect pattern of neatness in her person and dress, and of unaffected simplicity in her manners and character.'' 8 There was some dispute, however, among West's reading public regard­ ing her station in life. She described herself as "a charmer/ Self-taught, and

4. "To the Hon. Mrs. C-E.," in West, Miscellaneous Poems, and a Tragedy (York, r79r). 5. Quoted in obituary for West, Gentleman's Magazine 38 (July r852): roe. 6. West to Percy, r8oo (see n. r). 7. Ibid., IOI. 8. British Critic r8 (November r801) : 528. 794 Jane Jtrttst married to a farmer;/ Who wrote all kind of verse with ease,/ Made pies and puddings, frocks and cheese,/ Her situation, tho' obscure,/ Was not con­ temptible or poor./ Her conversation spoke a mind/ Studious to please, but unrefin'd." 9 In January 1802 the Gentleman's Magazine published a letter claim­ ing that West "pays the greatest care and attention to her farm, manages her dairy, and even carries her butter to market." 10 The following month, another reader wrote to object that West was too much of a gentlewoman to be per­ sonally engaged in trade, insisting that she supervised the sending of cheese to market "while knitting stockings for her husband and sons." 11 The latter correspondent is far likelier to have been correct. In 1805 West inherited land from her father that she did not bother to sell until 1812, at which time she realized at least three thousand pounds, a sum that would have supported a gentlewoman comfortably for a decade. Her fiction sold well. Bishop Percy reported to her in 1800 that at Brighton her novels had "the entire possession of this first of watering-places. Here are three circulating libraries, and the demand for your novels is very great in them all. In the shop where I have been waiting for my turn in your 'Tale of the Times,' I was told there were three sets; nor was it till last night that I could procure the first volume of one of them, although the season is scarce here begun." 12 West's last novel, Ringrove: or, Old Fashioned Notions, was published by Longmans in 1827. In 1833 she brought out a volume of Sacred Poems but was already thinking of herself as "an old Q in a corner whom the rest of the world has forgotten." 13 She outlived her husband, who died on 23 January 1823, and all three sons. On 25 March 1852, at the age of ninety-three, she died at Little Bowden, near Market Harborough, and was buried next to her parents in the West family plot at St. Nicholas Church. In a will dated 1846 she left all her letters, unpublished works, and manuscripts to her execu­ tor and grandson, the Reverend Edward West, but the whereabouts of these manuscripts are now unknown.

MAJOR WORKS: Miscellaneous Poetry ... Written at an Early Period ef Life (London, 1786); The Humours ef Brighthelmstone (London, 1788); Miscellaneous Poems, and a Tragedy (York, 1791); The Advantages ef Education; or, the History ef Maria Williams, a Tale for

9. "To the Hon. Mrs. C-E." IO. Quoted in Pamela Lloyd, "Some New Information on Jane West;' N&Q, n.s., 31 (Decem- ber 1984): 469. II. Ibid. 12. Quoted in Gentleman's Magazine 38 (July 1852): 100. 13. Jane West to Miss H., II July 1834, Miscellaneous Fragments, Letters and Papers, British Museum Manuscript Room, Additional MSS 41567, f. 63, quoted in Lloyd, "Some New Infor­ mation on Jane West," 470. Jane West 795

Misses and Their Mammas (London, 1793); A Gossip's Story, and a Legendary Tale (Lon­ don, 1796); An Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, 1797); A Tale of the Times, 2 vols. (London, 1799); Poems and Plays, 4 vols. (London, 1799- 1805); Letters Addressed to a Young Man, on his First Entrance into Life, and Adapted to the Peculiar Circumstances of the Present Times, 3 vols. (London, 1801); The In.fide/ Father, 3 vols. (London, 1802); The Sorrows of Selfishness; or, The History of Miss Richmore (Lon­ don, 1802); Letters to a Young Lady, in which the Duties and Character of Women are Considered, Chiefly with a Reference to Prevailing Opinions, 3 vols. (London, 1806); The Mother: A Poem, in Five Books (London, 1809); The Refusal, 3 vols. (London, 1810); The Loyalists: An Historical Novel (London, 1812); Alicia de Lacy; ari Historical Romance, 4 vols. (London, 1814); Scriptural Essays, Adapted to the Holydays of the Church of England (London, 1816); Ringrove; or, Old Fashioned Notions, 2 vols. (London, 1827).

TEXTS USED: Text of "On the Sonnets of Mrs. Charlotte Smith" from Miscellaneous Poems, and a Tragedy. Text of "Sonnet to May" from A Tale of the Times.

On the Sonnets of Mrs. Charlotte Smith

The widow'd turtle, mourning for her love, Breathes the soft plaintive melody of woe: And streams, that gently steal along the grove, In murmurs dear to melancholy fl.ow.

Yet to thy strains, sweet nymph of Arun's vale, Harsh is the turtle's note, and harsh the stream, Ev'n when their echos die upon the gale, Or catch attention by the lunar beam.

Thy strains soul-harrowing melting pity hears, Yet fears to break thy privacy of pain, IO She blots thy page with sympathetic tears, And while she mourns thy wrongs enjoys thy strain.

Hast thou indeed no solace? does the earth Afford no balm thy anguish to relieve?

I turtle] Turtle-dove, noted for its affection toward its mate. 5 Arun's] River in southeastern England. Jane Hist

Still must thou feel the pang of suff'ring worth, Taught by refinement but to charm and grieve.

Oh! if despair directs thy pensive eyes To where death terminates terrestrial woes, May faith from thence exalt them to the skies, 20 Where glory's palm for suffering virtue grows.

There may thy lyre, whose sweetly magic pow'rs From pain'd attention forc'd applauding tears, With hallelujahs fill the eternal bowers, The theme prolonging through eternal years. (1791)

Sonnet to May

Come May, the empire of the earth assume, Be crown'd with flowers as universal queen; Take from fresh budded groves their tender green, Bespangled with Pomona's richest bloom, And form thy vesture. Let the sun illume The dew-drops glittering in the blue serene, And let them hang, like orient pearls, between Thy locks besprent with Flora's best perfume. Attend your sovereign's steps, ye balmy gales! IO O'er her ambrosial floods of fragrance pour; Let livelier verdure animate the vales, And brighter hues embellish every flower; And hark, the concert of the woodland hails, All gracious May! thy presence, and thy power. (1799)

4 Pomona] Roman goddess of fruits and fruit trees. 8 besprent] Besprinkled; strewn with. 8 Flora] Roman goddess of spring and flowers.