LHMP #564g Orr 2006 A Sojourn in Paris - Anne’s Letters

This section explores the nature and structure of the Lister’s correspondence. Although the correspondence index in the journal lists the full number of letters sent and received, and some note of their contents, the actual number of surviving letters is much smaller and selective. The nature of the content is also distinct from the journal, even apart from the restriction in which items survive. Letters carefully construct the self that Lister wished to present to the world, as well as managing her social relationships with her correspondents.

Published editions of Lister’s correspondence are found only in the two works by Green, who focused on Lister’s social life and environment while traveling. The surviving letters from the Paris trip constitute 19 items out of 30 indexed, primarily those written to her Aunt Anne, but also several to a friend, Miss Maclean. No letters to Mariana or Isabella survive. (To survive as part of the Shibden archives, the letters would need to have been returned there. This may have happened at the death of Miss Maclean. Aunt Anne’s correspondence, of course, had been sent to Shibden in the first place.)

The index lists 37 letters received by Lister, many from Aunt Anne, half a dozen or so each from Marianna, Isabella, and Miss Maclean, and three from miscellaneous sources. None of these survive except as index summaries and occasionally in larger transcribed extracts in the journal. As none of the surviving correspondence is with Lister’s lovers, and as the record is not otherwise representative, Orr’s analysis focuses on how the correspondence illustrates Lister’s social interactions.

Correspondence was sufficiently important to Lister that she had a portable writing desk, which features in journal references to its placement and arrangement. There are journal records of sourcing writing paper and of writing “small and close” to be cost-effective with respect to postage, but Lister’s handwriting in these is more carefully readable than her journal and uses few of the abbreviations that the journal is rife with. She notes making rough drafts before composing the final form of letters, often over a space of multiple days. Compared to the journal content, the letters often expand the detail of events and observations over the same material in the journal.

A great deal is made about how the sentimental, romantic language found in letters between female romantic friends was “just how everyone wrote back then,” but an examination of Lister’s writing practices find that the reality is more nuanced than that. While all of her letters used sentimental and affectionate language, distinctions can be identified in the language used toward Aunt Anne and that written to her friends and lovers. Sentiment was an important index to personal relations. Lister relates reading one of Mariana’s letters to Mrs. Barlow and the two commenting that it failed to match the tone of Lister’s letter to her (quoted in the journal) but rather was unrevealing of anything more than “what might be read to all the world.” This is a clear indication that the sentiments expressed in letters to lovers were expected to be different in quality from ordinary levels of sentimentality and might be entirely too revealing to third parties.

Much of the content of her letters might be thought of as maintaining webs of connection – providing and requesting updates on the health of friends and relatives, and the like. These networks included Lister’s close friends, her lovers, her immediate family, and close friends of family members such as Aunt Anne. Given the nature of the content, Aunt Anne at the very least was aware of the nature of Lister’s romantic relationships and accepted them.

The topics in Lister’s correspondence differ from her journal in some systematic ways around class. While the journal describes her encounters and interactions with a wide variety of people, from French nobility to tradespeople, her letters tend to focus more narrowly on relations with servants, such as her maid Cordingley.

Another function of letters that emerges from analysis is how they functioned in a similar way to “references” in communicating and supporting the reputation people had in their community. Mrs. Barlow read to Lister a letter from a friend back home to demonstrate the good character she had there. Lister similarly read to Mrs. Barlow letters from Mariana and Miss Maclean to demonstrate the same. The potential for letters to break as well as build relationships is illustrated by an anecdote in which Mariana’s husband read one of Lister’s letters to Mariana and it destroyed any further amicable relations between Lister and the man.