A Feminine
Anthology
Representative Women: General Editor : Francis Birrell. (Gerald Howe. 3s. 6d. each.)
Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston. By Beatrice Curtis Brown.
-Lady Hester Stanhope. By Martin Armstrong. Aphra Behn. By V. Sackville-West.
Tnese nicely bound, well-printed nut-shell- biographies of more or less celebrated women are of varying interest. The compiler of the series has a catholic taste that must be eommended, but we hardly understand why some of them conic within the same category, and why they should be linked together. What have Annie Besant, Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Elizabeth Chudleigh to do with each other ? It is true that each was remarkable in her own way, but there seems no special link save in the fact that each belongs to the feminine gender. Yet no one would group together in a series of representative men—taking a few names at random—Guy Fawkes (a most reputable gentleman, by the way), Beau Brummell and Dean Inge.
The three volumes that we have before us are concerned with three very different types of women. Elizabeth Chudlcigh (1726-1788) has not, so her biographer declares, been treated well by writers. She is truly representative of the cosmopolitan society woman of the eighteenth century ; she is a comprehensible and normal woman.
The story is well told. The Maid of Honour who married secretly and continued to pose as a maiden, refusing the most advantageous offers of marriage, lived the life of a gay woman about town ; she was a favourite at Court and had a host of friends, and not a few enemies. She lived with the Duke of Kingston for many years before she was free to marry him, or . rather before she thought that she had got rid of her inconvenient first husband. Her trial for bigamy was one of the sensations of her later years, and she ended her life
abroad. The Virgin Chudleigh," as her contemporaries called her, certainly - had an adventurous career -she was gifted with a gay, rather mordant wit. She broke a blood- vessel after indulging in a fit of passion, brought on by hearing that she had lost a law-suit ; three days afterwards she called for a large glass of -her " fine Madeira,- drank it, and died quietly in her sleep.
Lady Hester Stanhope has been the subject of so many memoirs and articles; that it is difficult to find anything new to say. Her own writings and the memoirs written by her doctor afford the groundwork on which modern writers have based their studies. If Mr. Martin Armstrong has nothing new to tell us the story is always interesting.
The most interesting volume of the three is that devoted to Aphra Behn by V. Sackville-West. The subject of her memoir is far less hackneyed-than are the others that we have Mentioned, and it is exceptionally well treated. Aphra Behn, if that were her name, " the incomparable Astraete" (1640-1689), was ardent, lively, coarse, good-humoured, a Writer, poet, playwright, and a Government spy sent to Holland during the war with the Dutch, and afterwards Sent to prison for debt because her secret service was unpaid. As the pioneer of women writers she certainly has her place in this series, for, as her biographer says, " She was the first woman in England to earn her living by her pen." Her plays were booed, because of her sex : " A woeful play, God damn him, for it was a woman's " is one comment. She wrote novels, translations, plays, and poems in a continuous Stream, and was never daunted by male opposition. She vied with the male writers of that licentious age in profligacy, yet was capable of writing :
" Take back your gold, and give me current love, The treasure of your heart, not of your purse."
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