cMy Dearest Geraldine5 : Maria Jane Jewsbury's Letters

HARRIET DEVINE JUMP Department of English Literature, Edge Hill University College

The John Rylands Library holds an important collection of MSS papers, the Jewsbury Letters. Most of these are letters written by Maria Jane Jewsbury (1800-1833), who published under the name MJJ as a poet, essayist, short-story writer and reviewer, to her younger sister Geraldine Ensor Jewsbury (1812-1880), novelist, reviewer, essayist and publishers' reader, between 1826 and 1833. The collection also includes two letters from Maria Jane to her mother, written in 1818; one letter from Maria Jane to James Burke, a family friend, dated 13 October 1826; a letter of late 1826 to Geraldine from Miss Bagley, a family friend; an undated manuscript poem by Maria Jane entitled 'A Ballad on Delight' and a prose piece by her, 'Desultory Thoughts' dated from Tamworth, Staffordshire, 1 March 1831; and seven letters written to the Jewsbury family by friends after Maria Jane's death in 1833. Interest in Maria Jane Jewsbury, and appreciation of her literary gifts, has increased substantially in recent years. A careful examination of the Jewsbury Letters, especially when they are read in conjunction with a collection of Maria Jane's letters to Dora Wordsworth (held by the Wordsworth Library, Dove Cottage) is of considerable use in correcting the mistakes and inaccuracies of her biographers, past and present. 1

1 The Jewsbury sisters are probably best known today from Norma Clarke's Ambitious heights: writing, friendship, love the Jewsbury Sisters, , and Jane Welsh Carlisle (London: Routledge, 1990) (hereafter Clarke) which discusses their relations with each other as well as Maria Jane's friendship with Felicia Hemans and Geraldine's with Jane Carlyle. Earlier biographers of Maria Jane include Jane Williams, The literary women of England (London: Saunders and Otley, 1861), Francis Espinasse, worthies (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co, 1877) (hereafter Espinasse); Eric Gillett (ed.), Maria Jane Jewsbury: occasional papers with a memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1932) (hereafter Gillett); and Monica Frykstedt, 'The hidden rill: the life and career of Maria Jane Jewsbury', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of , 66 (2), 1984, 177-203; and Bulletin, 67 (1), 1984, 450-73. 63 64 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY The Jewsbury sisters were born in Measham, a small town in .2 They were the daughters of Thomas Jewsbury, a prosperous cotton manufacturer, and his wife Maria Smith, who was reputedly a clever, artistic and accomplished woman. Presumably she was responsible for encouraging the literary abilities of her oldest daughter, who appears to have been precociously talented. In adult life Maria Jane told a friend, the poet Felicia Hemans, that, 'When I was nine years old when the ambition of writing a book, being praised publicly, and associating with authors, seized me with a vague longing'.3 The opportunities for achieving these ambitions, especially the last, must have seemed remote when the family was living in such a relative cultural desert as Measham. Maria Jane was sent to boarding school in Shenstone, Staffordshire, but a severe illness when she was fourteen put an end to her formal education. Left largely to her own devices she began sitting up half the night writing poems, beginning a play and planning tales and novels. At the age of seventeen she managed to publish a verse satire, 'Curiosity and Scandal' in a local newspaper, The Coventry Herald.* In 1818 the family moved to Manchester as a result of financial problems. Shortly afterwards, a few weeks following the birth of her youngest child, their mother died, and Maria Jane, not nineteen, took over the running of the household. Somehow, in the intervals between housekeeping and childcare, she managed not only to publish poetry in the Manchester newspapers and journals, but also, in 1825, published Phantasmagoria, a two volume collection of her own poems, stories and essays. Most of this material, which shows great talent and promise, was 'written in ill health Booksellers urgent Children sickly so that she wrote in a sick room, and often sate up till three or four o'clock to enable her to do so', according to Dorothy Wordsworth.5 As soon as the first volume was published, Maria Jane sent a copy to Wordsworth, to whom, as her 'spirit's father', the work was dedicated. He wrote back, and shortly afterwards she called on the family at Rydal Mount, where she was an instant success. She stayed with the family several times and was visited by them in Manchester, and Dora Wordsworth, daughter of the poet and four years Maria Jane's junior, became her closest friend. Maria Jane carried on a lively correspondence with Dora throughout the succeeding months. She seems to have been

2 Measham is now in Leicestershire, the county border having been moved at the end of the nineteenth century. 3 Quoted in Clarke, 15. 4 See Gillett, xv-xvi. 5 The Utters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edition, The later years Pan 11821- 1828, revised, arranged and edited by Alan G. Hill, from the first edition edited by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), (hereafter Hill), 435.