SOURCE: "Natural, Moral and Modest: Elizabeth Rowe," in The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 81–5.

[In the following excerpt from a study of women novelists from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Spencer identifies Rowe as a model of eighteenth-century female virtue.]

… The early eighteenth century found its ideals of feminine and literary virtue embodied in the life and work of Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737). A native of Somerset, she was the daughter of a Dissenting preacher, and received a pious education that laid the foundations of her religious outlook. She was writing verse by the age of 12, and by the early 1690s her poems were appearing in periodicals. Her Poems on Several Occasions was published in 1696. In 1710 she married Thomas Rowe, 13 years her junior, and went to live with him in London. His death in 1715 at the age of 28 prompted her return to Somerset, where she spent her life in rural retirement, religious meditation, charitable works, and writing.

Rowe was most celebrated for her religious and didactic fiction, which contributed to the early eighteenth-century moralizing of the novel. Friendship in Death: or Letters from the Dead to the Living (1728) was a series of letters supposedly written by the dead and delivered during brief returns to the world in order to comfort their friends' or relatives' grief, to tell them about the joys of the afterlife, and to leave warnings about impending moral dangers. In the same year the first part of Letters Moral and Entertaining (2nd part, 1731; 3rd part, 1732) appeared. This work was built on a similar plan, except that the letter-writers were still in this world, and sometimes a series of letters from one correspondent made for a more sustained narrative line.

Friendship in Death and Letters Moral and Entertaining appeared many times during the century, sometimes separately and sometimes together. At least 13 editions of Rowe's fiction appeared before 1800. Samuel Richardson, who was the printer for the 1740 and 1743 editions, admired Rowe's work, as did Samuel Johnson, which gives some indication of her respectable standing in the middle and late eighteenth century. After her death, her works were published in two volumes with an account of her life begun by her friend Henry Frome and completed by her brother-in-law, Theophilus Rowe. These volumes, which appeared in 1739, contained her letters to the Countess of Hertford as well as some family letters, and the feeling and piety expressed here added to her reputation, which remained high until into the next century. Elizabeth Rowe's work gave her readers all the nature, morality and modesty that they could desire, and with her example before them their acceptance of the idea of the virtuous woman writer was assured.

Elizabeth Rowe's 'exquisite wit, and beautiful imagination, were scarce any thing indebted to the assistance of art or labour', reported her biographer.¹⁹ She was thought to have the spontaneity attributed to the famous Héloise; and the circumstances of publication and the reception of one of her poems suggests that her contemporaries thought of her as an eighteenth-century Héloise. In Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, published in the 1717 edition of his Works, Héloise's story was made famous. Pope conveys Eloisa's struggle to turn away from the sexual desires that can never again be fulfilled, and to translate her earthly passion into love of God. For Elosia, writing is the means of directly conveying one's self to one's reader:

Heav'n first taught letters for some wretch's aid,
Some banish'd lover, or some captive maid;
They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires,
Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires.²⁰

Yet this is obviously not the direct transmission of the self, because the poet mediates between the long-dead nun and the eighteenth-century reader. Something of the immediacy Pope's Eloisa writes of was offered to the public in 1720, when another edition of Eloisa to Abelard appeared together with an elegy for Thomas Rowe, 'Upon the Death of her Husband. By Mrs. Elizabeth Singer'. Here was an eighteenth-century Eloisa, who directly expressed her own passion in her own poetry. The poem addresses the 'gentle shade' of the departed husband:

One moment listen to my grief, and take
The softest vows that ever love can make.

Following the tradition of the heroic epistle and the letters of Eloise, the poet expresses sorrow for the loss of her lover, but whereas Eloisa's love was unsanctioned by marriage, Elizabeth Singer Rowe's is the devotion of a faithful wife. She vows to be true to the memory of her husband, keeping her love for him only:

That sacred passion I to thee confine,
My spotless faith shall be for ever thine.

Thomas Rowe's widow does not feel the conflict between heavenly vows and earthly desires expressed by Pope's Eloisa, because her love for her husband unites heavenly and earthly in a 'sacred passion'. Like Eloisa, she retires from the world, but not to a convent, out of compulsion. She goes to a country retreat, out of choice, and tells her lost husband:

For thee, all thoughts of pleasure I forego,
For thee, my tears shall never cease to flow;
For thee at once I from the world retire,
To feed in silent shades a hopeless fire.²¹

This voluntary devotion unites the ideas of strong passion and feminine virtue.

A poem 'On the Anniversary of her Husband's Death', printed in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1739, continues the mourning for 'Alexis', as she calls Thomas Rowe, and renews the promise of fidelity to his memory.²² In a letter to her sister-in-law published in 1739 she vows: 'My constancy to the charming youth, and regard to his memory, shall be the pride and glory of my life.'²³ Her constancy certainly added to her fame, and it probably gave an added attraction to Friendship in Death, concerned as it is with bereavement and the hope of reunion in heaven. One letter from the dead to the living describes the joys of a love frustrated on earth and fulfilled in heaven. Delia writes to her friend Æmilia:

The first gentle spirit that welcomed me to these happy mansions, was your charming brother … That tender innocent passion I had long conceived for him, kindled at the first interview, and has taken eternal possession of my soul…. In what figures of celestial eloquence shall I relate the loves of immortal spirits; or tell you the height, the extent, the fulness of their bliss!

Knowing that this was written by a widow longing to meet her husband again in heaven, Rowe's readers must have found this kind of writing a moving tribute to married love. In celebrating marriage, 'the most holy union that nature knows',²⁴ Elizabeth Rowe was in tune with eighteenth-century ideals far more than Jane Barker, who celebrated virginity. Rowe offered her readers exactly what they wanted in a woman writer: all Eloisa's sensibility, without any of Eloisa's guilt.

From the time her first poems were published, Rowe was hailed as the virtuous exception to the immoral rule governing women's wit. Her 1696 collection of Poems on Several Occasions included a preface by a woman called Elizabeth Johnson, who followed normal practice of the time in presenting women writers as female champions in the war between the sexes: 'we have … Sappho's, and Behn's, and Schurman's and Orinda's, who have humbled the most haughty of our Antagonists, and made 'em do Homage to our Wit, as well as our Beauty'. (Anna van Schurman was a Dutch writer whose defence of women scholars was translated into English as The Learned Maid in 1659.) Despite this confident opening, Elizabeth Johnson is worried about women writers, because she considers that if men cannot rival the women's poetry they can still win the battle by seducing the poets. Men, she reports, tried 'to Corrupt that Virtue which they can no otherwise overcome: and sometimes they prevail'd'. The surest argument against women writer's enemies, she contends, is provided by the example of the uncorrupted woman poet: 'if some Angels fell, others remained in their Innocence and Perfection—…Angles Love, but they love Virtuously and Reasonably … And if all our Poetesses had done the same, I wonder what our Enemies cou'd have found out to have objected against us: However, here they are silenc'd'.²⁵

If anything further was needed to establish Rowe's virtue it was her modesty, revealed both by the chastity of her language and the attempts to avoid fame which made her so different from the publicly visible professional playwright. Her early contributions to periodicals were anonymous, and so was her 1696 volume of poetry, 'by Philomela'. Elizabeth Johnson's perface assured the reader that the poems 'were actually Writ by a young Lady … whose NAME had been prefix'd, had not her own Modesty absolutely forbidden it' (Poems, sig. A5r). Although a few years afterwards her maiden and her married names both became famous her life of seclusion from the world still provided evidence of a modest retreat from fame.

After Rowe's death, her friend the Countess of Hertford recalled her devotion to her dead husband, writing:

Faithful to him, she from the world retir'd,
Tho' by that world distinguish'd and admir'd.²⁶

Thus Rowe's modest withdrawal from fame could be seen as another proof of her tender nature. The logical result of the importance of modesty is that a woman writer who tries to avoid fame is distinguished and admired—rewarded with the very praise she shuns.

Rowe's life was celebrated in several poems. One of her admirers was Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), linguist and scholar, who praised her for having redeemed the virtue of the intellectual woman. In a poem written to mark Rowe's death she painted a gloomy picture of women's writing in previous times:

OFT did intrigue its guilty arts unite,
To blacken the records of female wit;
The tuneful song lost ev'ry modest grace,
And lawless freedoms triumph'd in their place.

Rowe, Carter claims, has mended matters by dedicating her female wit to religion and the moral improvement of her readers. Carter vows to take Rowe's religious and chaste writing as a model:

Fix'd on my soul shall thy example grow,
And be my genius and my guide below:
To this I'll point my first, my noblest views,
Thy spotless verse shall regulate my muse.²⁷

Rowe, then, had become a new example to be followed by women writers worried about being classed with Behn, Manley and Haywood. Herself often compared to Orinda, she added to Orinda's purity two elements very important to eighteenth-century readers—a new emphasis on religious devotion and a new exaltation of married love….

Notes

…¹⁹ 'The Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe' (1739) rpt in Friendship in Death: In Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. To which are added, Letters Moral and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse (Edinburgh: William Gray, 1755), p. xxix.

²⁰ 'Eloisa to Abelard', lines 51–5, in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt (Twickenham I-volume edn, London: Methuen and Co., 1975), p. 253.

²¹Eloisa to Abelard. Written by Mr. Pope. The Second Edition (London: Bernard Lintot, 1720), p. 52.

²²Gentleman's Magazine 9 (May, 1739), p. 98.

²³ Letter XV in Miscellaneous Works In Prose and Verse of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (London, 1739), II, p. 200.

²⁴Friendship in Death, p. 14.

²⁵ Preface to the Reader, in Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Philomela (London, 1696), A3v-A5r.

²⁶ 'Verses to the Memory of Mrs. Rowe. By a Friend', in Miscellaneous Works, I, p. cix.

²⁷ 'On the Death of Mrs. Rowe' [by Elizabeth Carter] in Miscellaneous Works, I, p. cx–cxii….