SOURCE: "The Pious Mrs. Rowe," in English Studies, Netherlands, Vol. 76, No.1, January, 1995, pp. 34–51.

[In the following essay, Hansen examines the publication history of Rowe's works and suggests that male associates and editors emphasized her feminine piety and virtue as part of a larger cultural conflict.]

Although her works were in constant demand until the mid-nineteenth century, both in England and on the continent,¹ Mrs. Rowe is a writer from whom the modern sensibility has turned firmly away. Her writings are mainly devotional and moralistic, although sometimes her religious yearnings are expressed with a sensuality which though interesting and attractive to the twentieth-century reader was worrying to Isaac Watts, her literary executor. The short epistolary pieces which are her contribution to the development of prose fiction, showing as they do a contempt for worldly values, belong more to the tradition of fictionalized pietism, as practised most memorably by William Law, than to the growth of the novel.² As is implied by the title of one of her most popular works, Friendship in Death, her most urgent concern was with a different species of reality. She made no secret of the fact that she was impatient to be reunited with her father and her beloved husband, whom she presented as exemplary Christians, and regarded this life merely as a tedious time of preparation for the glorious hereafter. This is the subject of all her mature writings.

From our post-Freudian point of view this is not merely dull, but even vaguely offensive: it is easy to see her religiosity as inauthentic, and wonder what this woman's real experience of life could have been. But such an attitude may carry the dangers of historical provincialism. Certainly an iron self-discipline and rigorous self-censorship were important elements in her reconciliation to disappointment, but there is no reason to suppose that the terms in which she structured her authorial identity, and which her admirers collaborated in perpetuating, were in any way hypocritical. They were right, and significant, for the age in which she lived.

Two and a half centuries ago, Mrs. Rowe was a celebrated figure, a writer who seems to have played an important role in the psyche of the literate English middle class. Her death in February 1737 was registered at more than the usual laconic length by the Gentlemen's Magazine (GM):³

Feb. 21. Mrs. Eliz. Rowe, formerly Singer, the Widow of Mr. Tho. Rowe, Author of the Supplement to Plutarch's Lives. She was the Ornament of her Sex, and the Honour of the County of Somerset, and oblig'd the World with Friendship in Death, Letters moral and entertaining, besides several excellent Poems in the Miscellanies. (GM VII, p. 188)

It is worth noticing that this 'Ornament of her Sex' is firstly defined by her relation to her husband, whose literary production is mentioned before hers, though it is less likely to be known to the Magazine's readers. This is the common style of GM's notices of death: very few women earn a place in these columns in their own right but rather as the wife, relict, daughter or sister of some prominent gentleman. Despite her independent eminence, as an exemplary woman Mrs. Rowe had to be fitted into the same basic female pattern.

The myth of the pious Mrs. Rowe rose like a phoenix from the tomb of the mortal woman. A torrent of commemorative and hagiographic writings streamed from the pens of a mourning nation, giving her a posthumous life as a textual product. In reality, these writings tell more about the ontological needs of their authors than about the lady who is their ostensible subject: England apparently needed a female writer who was completely pure, chaste, and devoted, a woman who was all soul, her body merely its vessel during the trials of this life, and found Mrs. Rowe the most fitting repository for this image.

In one of the numerous commemorative poems to appear in GM, 'On the Death of the celebrated Mrs. Rowe (formerly Mrs. Singer) by a young Lady, her Intimate ("Amata")', the deceased lady is given the name 'Celestia' and described three times as an angel. The predominant themes of Mrs. Rowe's own writings are woven into the rhetoric:

Long had she dwelt a prisoner close confin'd,
While the dull clay oppress'd her heav'n-born mind.
Lo! time at length decays the ancient walls,
With one soft stroke the stately fabric falls.
While here the praises of her God she sung,
Celestial music tun'd a mortal's tongue.
No vulgar themes, no starts of amorous fire,
Stain'd her chaste Muse, her thoughts still centr'd higher:
She sang the wonders of redeeming love,
Still her blest subject in the realms above.
(GM VII, p. 183, lines 19–28).

As the title of Amata's poem reminds us, this exemplary writer had had a past identity as Elizabeth Singer. In this she resembles other female writers of the early modern period, for example, Catherine Trotter/Cockburn and Fanny Burney/Madame D'Arblay. Interestingly, both Catherine Trotter and Fanny Burney produced lively, entertaining works of realistic fiction, characterized by the high degree of psychological insight which betokens self-knowledge, whereas their married alter egos penned rather heavier works, sententious and didactic, in which spontaneity seems to be repressed in favour of the received wisdom of the day. Whether this development can be attributed to marriage or to maturity is uncertain, but there is no doubt that these writers grew to be more aware of their obligations to their status as women, or perhaps as ladies, as the years passed, which apparently involved a rejection of subjective immediacy.

A similar if rather more extreme process went into the construction of 'Mrs. Rowe' on the ashes of her former self, Elizabeth Singer, and much of it took place after her death. Both personæ were to a large extent the creations of the men who patronized and published her work, Elizabeth Singer, or 'Philomela', of John Dunton, and Elizabeth Rowe of her brother-in-law Theophilus Rowe.

Mrs. Rowe was particularly celebrated for her passionate loyalty, to the two authorized men in her life, her father and her husband; yet at the age of nineteen, unbeknown to her father, Elizabeth Singer had begun a correspondence with John Dunton, bookseller and founder of the Athenian Society, which was the rather grand name of an association of literary gentlemen with connections in commercial publishing. Presumably she was motivated by an overriding literary ambition: nevertheless, propriety was maintained as she did not reveal her name to Dunton, referring to herself as 'Philomela' or 'the Pindarick Lady'. From October 1693 to January 1696 she was the principal contributor of verse to The Athenian Mercury, the Society's journal, and in 1696 these writings together with some others were collected and published by Dunton under the title Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Philomela. By 1696, too, Dunton had learnt the identity of Philomela, and after the death of his wife in the following year he sought her hand in marriage. She rejected his proposals, and also those of the poet Matthew Prior, the Dissenting hymn-writer Isaac Watts, and the New England preacher Benjamin Colman.⁴

The 1696 Poems on Several Occasions is described thus by Elizabeth Napier:

A small collection of verses on earthly and divine love, pastorals, and paraphrases from the Bible, the poems are marked by a strikingly sensual use of language and a vehemence of address that recalls the work of the English mystical poets. (DLB 39, p. 410)

The little volume was very popular, but it was to be her last independent published work, until in 1728, a long-bereaved widow and daughter, she gave the world Friendship in Death. The Philomela poems also contained her last excursion into secular writing. Her subsequent publications, until she made her debut as a prose writer, were of devotional verse, in collections by several hands.⁵

More than a generation was to pass before the augmented second edition was brought out by Edmund Curll in 1736, a year before Mrs. Rowe's death—though the title-page misleadingly names the year of publication as 1737.⁶ The work is announced as 'Philomela: or, Poems by Mrs. Elizabeth Singer [now Rowe] of Frome in Somersetshire', a title clearly calculated to raise expectations of a reprint of the youthful verse of the pious author of Friendship in Death. There is a large and varied collection of prefatory material, of which the final item is a letter from the author herself to a Mr. Xxxx, strongly suggesting that the book was being published with her full knowledge and consent. She expresses her infinite obligation to this unidentified gentleman for his concern for her character, requesting that he will

Assure Mr. Curll, that, in Printing my Poems, no Body will dispute his Right, or give him any Opposition. I only desire him to own, that it's his Partiality to my writings, not my Vanity, which has occasioned the Re-publishing of them. Assure him likewise that the late Mr. Gwinnett has but one Poem in the Book, and that I never had any Correspondence with that Gentleman. (p. xx)

Naughty Mr. Curll, one is tempted to remark, sowing the seeds of scandal and at the same time denying that there is any foundation for it. Mr. Gwinnett was the author of one of the dedicatory poems in the volume, and if at the time there was any rumour that he was Mrs. Rowe's literary collaborator, or even a romantic friend, Mr. Curll is doing his best to fan the flames. All the same, we are led to believe, this most modest of writers has no objections to his publishing the volume. Thus Curll got away with publishing a work which he suspected would be of interest because of the reputation of its author's more mature writings, even though it contains poems which, as her brother-in-law makes clear in his biography of her—for which see below—she was very happy to allow to sink into oblivion. It would be enlightening to be able to examine the correspondence between Mrs. Rowe and Mr. Xxxx more fully.

This letter also just about legitimizes the reappearance of material which must have seemed rather out of place in the climate of the 1730s, especially the rallying preface which Elizabeth Johnson provided to the first edition, a good generation or more earlier. This is strongly feminist in tone: it hails Philomela as a champion of her sex, at the same time taking the opportunity to voice the militant political rhetoric associated with her contemporary Mary Astell, and in the same tone of bitter sarcasm:

We are not unwilling to allow Mankind the Brute-Advantages of Strength, they are Superior to ours in Force, they have Custom on their Side, and have Ruled, and are like to do so; and may freely do it without Disturbance or Envy; at least they should have none from us, if they could keep quiet among themselves. But when they would Monopolize Sense too, when neither that, nor Learning, nor so much as Wit must be allowed us, but all over-ruled by the Tyranny of the Prouder Sex; nay, when some of them will not let us say our Souls are our own, but would persuade us we are no more Reasonable Creatures than themselves, or their Fellow-Animals; we then must ask their Pardons if we are not yet so Compleatly Passive as to bear all without so much as a Murmur: We complain, and we think with Reason, that our Fundamental Constitutions are destroyed; that here is a plain and open Design to render us mere Slaves, perfect Turkish Wives, without Properties, or Sense, or Souls; and we are forced to Protest against it, and Appeal to all the World, whether these are not notorious Violations on the Liberties of Freeborn English-Women? This makes the meekest Worm amongst us all, ready to turn again when we are thus trampled on; But alas! what can we do to Right ourselves? Stingless and Harmless as we are, we can only kiss the Foot that hurts us. (pp. vi–vii)

This is not only inconsistent with the familiar image of Mrs. Rowe as devoted wife, but politically must, in 1736, have seemed like excessively incendiary stuff. The phrase 'the Liberties of Freeborn English Women' must have been particularly tendentious in an age which continually congratulated itself on the rights and liberties of the subject.⁷ In the 1690s, Dunton had attempted to provoke a literary battle of the sexes in the Athenian Mercury, inviting female contributors to answer attacks by male authors. Despite his particular mention of her as 'the Pindarick Lady', Elizabeth Singer did not respond; however, the 1696 preface is in the spirit of the venture, and the young Philomela must have assented passively at least to its contents, for an echo of the same tone is occasionally heard in the poems themselves. In 'A Farewel to Love', for example, she writes:

No more to its [Love's] Imperious Yoke I'll bow;
Pride and Resentment fortify me now.
My Inclinations are reverst; nor can
I but abhor the Slavery of Man,
How e'er the empty Lords of Nature boast
O'er me, their fond Prerogative is lost.
(lines 18–23)

Another feminist pronouncement is 'To Celinda', a light lyric which like Katherine Phillips's verse employs the diction of Platonic love:

Of course I am not claiming that Elizabeth Singer was covertly homoerotic, as seems to have been the case with Katherine Phillips: her ecstatic paraphrase of the Canticles, her evidently considerable attraction to and for the opposite sex, and the sublimated eroticism of her mourning tributes to her husband would obviously belie such an assertion: these are presumably a set of ideas and images which were common-place towards the end of the seventeenth century in certain circles, those which admired the verse of Orinda. Elizabeth Singer may have picked them up from her friend Elizabeth Johnson, who was certainly well versed in the male-defying discourses of the time. Her preface to 'Philomela' is replete with female mutual admiration and militant solidarity, topics with which the mature Mrs. Rowe is unlikely to have wished to be associated.

Interestingly, both Johnson and Singer use the very seventeenth-century topos of the superior loves of the angels, which we find put to manifestly misogynistic purposes in satires on women of the 1670s and 80s, presumably authorised for such by Milton.⁸ Unlike Milton's quasi-physical male angels, however, the female variety invoked by Singer in 'To Celinda' and by Johnson in her Preface are all virtuous spirituality:

It is true, their mischievous and envious Sex have made it their utmost Endeavours to deal with me as HANNIBAL was served at Capua, and to corrupt that Virtue which they can no otherwise contaminate; and sometimes they prevailed: But, if some ANGELS fell, others remained in their Innocence and Perfection, if there were not also some Addition made to their Happiness and Glory, by their continuing stedfast. ANGELS Love; but they love virtuously and Reasonably. (p. viii)

It seems clear that this rhetoric is pointing towards an idea of womanly perfection which aims to refute misogynistic defamation, challenging the masculine imperative with a virtue which is equivalent to reason. Carnal passion must be denied, since it is an instrument of male tyranny, frequently reducing women to slaves; hence it is an enemy of the Enlightenment doctrine that as all souls are equal everyone has an equal right to freedom. Sadly, this high-minded ideal of the pure and noble woman is easily bent to the purposes of patriarchal society when all traces of feminism and female bonding are expunged, which is what happened when Elizabeth Singer was transformed into Mrs. Rowe.

Whether Curll had any motive in reprinting Philomela other than commercial self-interest is unlikely; though even he was probably aware of what a bombshell he was dropping on the reputation of the spotless Mrs. Rowe since he remarks somewhat condescendingly in his dedicatory epistle to Pope:

She, herself, is pleased to call these her early Essays, and charges them with Vanity and Impertinence. But you are sensible, Sir, that both in Poetry and Painting, the Sprightliness of Sixteen, will always captivate more than the Sedateness of Sixty, (p. xiv–xv)

In the conclusion of the dedication he offers the information that the poems

are faithfully Re-printed from the Copy published in 1696, except for a little Reformation in the Numbers of some of them, and the Addition of a few later Compositions substituted in the Room of others, which the Writer's Friends were desirous of having omitted, as savouring of Party-Reflection and the Heat of Youth, since cooled by a stricter Judgement. (p. xvii)

It is fairly certain that in the 1690s Dunton had edited Philomela's poems the better to suit his own somewhat sensational commercial purposes.⁹ In 1736–7 Curll reshaped the volume to make it more acceptable to his own age; still, it scarcely advanced the image of Mrs. Rowe along the path which led to her near canonization, and was cold-shouldered by subsequent editors and commentators.

After the death of Mrs. Rowe, which occurred shortly after the appearance of Curll's edition, her friends and relatives appeared determined that she should join the ranks of the angels, at least as far as this world was concerned. In 1739 they issued an edition of her 'miscellaneous works', which omits most of her prose writings—they are included in later editions—but includes her exemplary letters to the Countess of Hertford, prefatory verses by among others Elizabeth Carter, a collection of poems by her husband, and a memoir of her life, started by Henry Grove and completed by her brotherin-law Theophilus Rowe, the editor of the entire miscellany. The Philomela and Athenian Mercury verses are also absent, and the editor makes no mention in the preface of her association with Dunton, remarking merely that her early poems were published in 1696 'at the desire of two of her friends' (p. 7) and dismissing them from serious consideration in these words:

The small collection in verse, written in her youth, when she was at a boarding-school in the country, or soon after leaving it, appeared rather such as might be expected from this early season, and disadvantageous situation in life, than fit to accompany the productions of her maturer years: nor could I, without violating the respect due to Mrs. Rowe, endeavour to revive the memory of her first attempts in poetry, which, as juvenile follies, she thought only worthy of perpetual oblivion. (pp. 36–37)

There is absolutely no mention of Curll's edition, not even to repudiate it.

This was a tactic rather like the double-think of Orwell's 1984: many of Mrs. Rowe's admirers must have been familiar with these verses since they had been available for most of the century in The Athenian Oracle, material republished from The Athenian Mercury in various editions from 1703 to 1728, not to mention the fervent religious verse published in A Collection of Divine Hymns and Songs (1704, 1709) or those of her poems included in Pope's miscellany, Poems on Several Occasions, 1718. All went into the memory hole, as the expanded yet expurgated edition of 1739 replaced that of 1737.¹⁰ And the hagiography of Mrs. Rowe got off to a vehement start with the official version of her life and character prefaced to the 1739 edition, serialized in selection in the Gentleman's Magazine of the same year, and frequently reprinted.

As is usual in accounts of holy personages, an aura of sanctity surrounds the depiction of her parents and other close connections. The little story of the first acquaintance of her mother and father, 'both of them persons of very great worth and piety', is a perfect introductory vignette: in the reign of Charles II her father was imprisoned for his non-conformist faith, and Elizabeth Portnell,

thinking herself obliged to visit those that suffered for the sake of a good conscience, as a testimony of her regard, not to them only, but also to our common Lord, agreeably to the representation he himself makes of such kind and Christian offices; it was from hence that acquaintance first commenced between these two virtuous and well-paired minds, which afterwards proceeded to a union that death alone could dissolve. (pp. 1–2)

This, by the way, is almost the last mention made in this 'Life' of her mother, who disappears entirely from the narrative until the reader is informed of the 'solemn covenant' in which Mrs. Rowe, imitating the example of Mrs. Singer, twice dedicated herself to the service of Heaven (p. 66). Not even the date or occasion of her death is noted. Both by her biographers and by herself, Mrs. Rowe is depicted as devoted to father and husband, an allegiance which certainly gainsays the feminist tone of both Philomela (1696) and Curll's 1736 edition. In one of her 'pious addresses' she assures the Almighty that 'my infant-hands were early lifted up to thee, and I soon learned to know and acknowledge the God of my fathers'. It is interesting that in such religious musings her mother, also a pious Christian, has completely faded from sight, whereas her father has become duplicated.

The date and circumstances of her mother's death are not recorded, but that of her father is a most important landmark, pointing the way forward for his eldest daughter (no mention is ever made of his other two daughters). In her own words:

My father often felt his pulse, and complained that it was still regular, and smiled at every symptom of approaching death: he would be often crying out, Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly; come, ye holy angels, that rejoice at the conversion of a sinner, come and conduct my soul to the skies, ye propitious spirits. (p. 3)

'How lovely and tempting is such a death' exclaims her biographer (p. 3–4); and it is paralleled in his account of her own death, 'this grand event, to prepare for which she had made so much the business of her life' (p. 23), amply demonstrating her contempt for the earthly pleasures and concerns which occupy the general run of mortals. In her later years,

When her acquaintance expressed to her the joy they felt at seeing her look so well, and possessed of so much health as promised many years to come, she was wont to reply, 'That it was the same as telling a slave his fetters were like to be lasting; or complimenting him on the strength of the walls of his dungeon'. And the fervour of her wishes to commence the life of the angels, irresistibly broke from her lips in numberless other instances. (p. 26)

When the happy event at last took place, 'she was buried, according to her request, under the same stone with her father' (p. 27).¹¹ A number of letters were discovered in her cabinet, addressed to her friends: in their rapturous devotion in anticipating her end on a variety of occasions, these letters are reminiscent of nothing so much as the one written by Christina Pontifex on her premonition of her own demise as she approached another confinement (in which she survived but the child perished). This is a very clear gauge of the shift of sensibility which has taken place: Mrs. Pontifex's letter is an indication of the self-regarding hypocrisy of the Low Church Christianity she was brought up in, whereas Mrs. Rowe's similar letters, whose rhetoric shares the same multitude of exclamations and 'ohi's, were evidently admired in the mideighteenth century, both for content and style.

The other important death in Mrs. Rowe's life was of course that of her husband, who puts in a prominent appearance in the early pages of the memoir. In his eagerness to establish the superior character of this gentleman, Mrs. Rowe's biographer again makes use of material which may appear distasteful, improbable and suspicious to the modern reader, for instance when referring to his precocity:

He was able to read as soon almost as he could speak; had such a pleasure in books, as to take none at all in the diversions which children are usually so fond of; and, when he was prevailed on by his companions, which was but seldom, to make one in their little parties at play, his unreadiness and inattention plainly shewed it was not out of choice he engaged, but purely from his good nature and complaisance, to which he should offer too much violence, always to deny their importunity. (p. 10)

Having established that Mr. Rowe's indifference to the mundane pleasures of life was innate, with its origins in his infancy, the biographer emphasizes that he stuck to the path of moral earnestness all through his life. The young Thomas was naturally an excellent scholar, but his father knew him no better than to refuse to entrust his morals to one of the English universities, sending him instead to a private academy in London and from thence to Leyden to study

Jewish antiquities under Witsius, civil law under Vitriarius, the belles lettres under Perizonius, and experimental philosophy under Senguerdius … He returned from that celebrated mart of learning with … no loss in his morals, which he had preserved as uncorrupt as he could have done under the most vigilant eye and strictest hand, though left without all other restraints but those of his own virtue and prudence. (p. 11)

The 18th century reader was apparently expected to be satisfied with this assertion, and not long for the inside story.

The fact that Thomas Rowe was thirteen years younger than Elizabeth Singer is readily available in the Memoir—their respective dates of birth are given—but is never mentioned explicitly: any hint of unrefined sensuality in their union would be unthinkable. The soil from which we are to imagine their relationship blossoming is indicated by the lines quoted from a poetical epistle which Mr. Rowe addressed to a friend during his courtship of Philomela:

Youth's liveliest bloom, a never fading grace,
And more than beauty sparkles in her face;
Yet the bright form creates no loose desires,
At once she gives, and purifies our fires,
And passions chaste as her own soul inspires;
Her soul, Heav'n's noblest workmanship, design'd
To bless the ruin'd age, and succour lost mankind;
To prop abandon'd virtue's sinking cause,
And snatch from vice its undeserv'd applause.
(pp. 16–17)

The exalted nature of Mr. Rowe's passions had earlier been suggested in a metaphorical account of his political allegiances:

The love of liberty had been always one of Mr. Rowe's most darling passions. It was a kind of ideal mistress, to whose charms no-one ever had a soul more sensible than his; the generous inclination beat strong in his breast, and was not to be extinguished but with the vital flame. (pp. 11–12)

These two quotations indicate the aura with which the biographer intends to surround the enshrined image of Mrs. Rowe, one suggesting high-minded femininity and a purified, exalted sensuality. She is to be remembered as the perfect woman writer, a kind of widowed, Non-Conformist Magdalene in whom the most desirable and acceptable traits of Astrea and Orinda are fused and transcended, an ideal mistress whose charms always verge on the metaphorical. She is a paradox: a woman in attraction and sensibility, yet above her sex in all the indulgences and trivialities thought to be most characteristic of it. Much of this is suggested in the description suddenly given halfway through the preface:

Mrs. Rowe was not a regular beauty, yet she possessed a large measure of the charms of her sex. She was of a moderate stature, her hair of a fine auburn colour, and her eyes of a darkish grey inclining to blue, and full of fire. Her complexion was exquisitely fair, and a natural rosy blush glowed in her cheeks. She spoke gracefully, and her voice was exceedingly sweet and harmonious, and perfectly suited to that gentle language which always flowed from her lips. But the softness and benevolence of her aspect is beyond all description: it inspired irresistible love, yet not without some mixture of that awe and veneration, which distinguished sense and virtue apparent in the countenance, are wont to create. (pp. 39–40)

The iconic nature of this description is obvious: it presents a portrait of a figure whose attibutes—appearance and voice—are grounded in the human but are transmuted into the symbolic, as is the case with Dante's Beatrice.

The feminine sensibility which in the poems pervades the rapturous expressions of love for her husband and wild grief at her bereavement, appears in the biographical preface in the lacrymosity of her piety and love of virtue:

As she could not command her tears of transport, when she was witness to any eminent instance of piety, so the sinking state in which the interest of Heaven now appears, rent her very soul. (p. 74)

Otherwise, she was proof against common female frailty: she was heedless of fashion and never played cards or gambled (except for one notable instance when she purposely lost to a friend whom she wished to benefit discreetly: 'This was, perhaps, the only time she touched a card in her life' (p. 63). The full force of this assertion will perhaps be lost on the modern reader, who may not be aware that an overriding passion for 'play' was notoriously one of women's failings in the early 18th century. Possibly the loose attitude to money which a love of card-playing seems to signify might have carried connotations of sexual levity. The Gentleman's Magazine carries many articles on the subject;¹² and the 3rd Canto of The Rape of the Lock may also be read as a sly comment: Belinda's honour, which is all outward show, depends on the way she plays her cards. Mrs. Rowe's honour was unquestionable.

She was also free of other vices which while they may be general to humankind repeatedly turned up in satires on women: pride, vanity, love of change and of course love of fashion. It goes almost without saying that 'she had the happiest command over her passions' (p. 43), and 'was perfectly untainted with that love of pleasure which has so universally corrupted the present age' (p. 48), though here her biographer seems to perceive that he is on shaky ground; her contempt for the pleasure of the table and her puritanical distaste for novels, romances and the theatre could border on the offensive for contemporary readers, many of whom would take a much more light-hearted view of these enjoyments. He takes pains to indicate that Mrs. Rowe is a special case: her heights of virtue are unattainable to common mortals, who are better advised to tread the accustomed paths:

such great abstinence from every kind of recreation, might, in most persons, tend to sour the mind with austere and unamiable dispositions; or, at least, to depress the spirits to such a degree of melancholy, as would unfit them for the necessary duties and offices of life. (pp. 49–50)

Of course, as a woman, indeed as a childless widow, Mrs. Rowe could better afford the complete retirement¹³ from customary society, and so can be suitably pictured leading an iconic, entirely static life. She is an entirely gendered model of piety and virtue: her extreme charitableness, for example, which often left her without the means to supply her own needs, and which exposed her to a great deal of exploitation, might have seemed simple-minded rather than saintly in a man. Where her reputation is ambiguous her sex can be adduced as an excuse: the excessive raptures of her Devout Exercises of the Heart, which were a subject of comment by their editor Dr. Watts, and which indeed are intriguingly interesting to the post-Freudian reader, are explained away by such means:

It could scarce be expected that a lady should be versed in the art of strict reasoning: and it ought to be easily forgiven, if she wrote on religious subjects, even in prose, rather with the fire and bold licence of a poet, than the accuracy of a divine and a philosopher. (p. 35)

It might be objected that the second mitigating point, that she was a poet, not a philosopher, ought to be sufficient argument; but as a woman poet she both needs and is generously provided with an additional justification for her sensual emotionalism: her ignorance is also innocence.

An instance of a trait which in the case of a male artist would no doubt be considered undesirable or suspect, but in a woman can be mitigated is her negligence of the laborious aspects of authorship. We are told:

she read no critics, nor could her genius brook the discipline of rules: and as the pains of correcting appeared to her some kind of drudgery, she seldom made any great alterations in her composures, from what they were when she first gave copies of them to her friends. For she did not set so high a value on her works, as to employ much labour in finishing them with the utmost accuracy; and she wrote verses through inclination, and rather as an amusement, than as a study and profession, to excel in which she should make the business of her life. (p. 39)

Clearly as a woman she is easily identified with nature rather than art; though of course there are the supporting reminiscences of Shakespeare, who, we are told, never blotted a line, and of the Longinian sublime, the 'grace beyond the reach of art'. Het amateurism and modest dismissal of her own work, which in a man might be suspected of betokening sloppiness, are presented as praiseworthy in their unworldliness.

So eager is her biographer to present her as exemplary that he occasionally practises a little sleight of hand. On four occasions he quotes words of praise from eminent writers, applying them freely to Mrs. Rowe when in fact they were originally intended for Cowley, Plutarch, and Dorset.¹⁴ The true facts are not exactly suppressed, but an impression is created of an eminent chorus lauding Mrs. Rowe's excellence, whereas most of the figures quoted actually had no opinion of her at all. (Prior is the exception: it is known that he admired her, and had proposed marriage to her, but this does not justify lifting his judgements on the Earl of Dorset out of their context and applying them to Philomela.) The practice might conceivably be vindicated by reference to her becoming avoidance of fame, which made it necessary for her biographer to supply it from other sources.

The fact of her being female operates in the biographical text in a variety of ways: on the one hand, she transcends her sex and its foibles;¹⁵ on the other, she epitomises the ideal of womanhood, all sensibility, humility and devotion. Cruelty, for example, is thus alien to her nature, so her works, it is pointed out, are free of the carping taint of satire and irony. This is firmly presented as a gendered trait which operates to subsume the manliness of her literary abilities to an ideally female totality, which flickers between the material and the moral:

Together with the most manly elevation of genius, she possessed all that gentleness and softness of exposition, which gives her own lovely sex such irresistible charms … Next to lewd and profane writings, she expressed the strongest aversion to satire, as it is usually so replete with personal malice and invective. No strokes of this kind can be found in her works; and her conversation was no less innocent of every appearance of ill-nature, than her writings. (pp. 43–44)

Selections from this memoir of Mrs. Rowe were serialized in the Gentleman's Magazine from May 1739 to February 1740, and the Magazine also carried a spate of contributions from correspondents and other items relating to Mrs. Rowe at the time of her death, in an apparent endeavour to fix her image and publicize it as that of a modern saint, a shining light in the murky world of commercial publishing.

In May 1740, GM carries an article whose aim is to clear Mrs. Rowe's name from any suspicion that she was capable of writing satire or hostile criticism of particular persons. Some verses signed 'Philomel', actually written by Mr. Richard Yate, a Shropshire farmer, were apparently in danger of being mistakenly attributed to 'Philomela' of Somersetshire (both counties capable of being designated S—shire.) They rebuke Stephen Duck for repeating a figure of speech which had been used previously by Prior, Pope and Gay, but was considered foolish and impious by Philomel. These verses being pointed out to Mrs. Rowe, with the implication that they were intended to pass for hers, she had written to the Magazine repudiating them and asserting that 'she never writ a Line of Ridicule on the meanest Person, nor could read any thing of that kind without a secret Uneasiness; and as to the Persons named in the Lines she had the greatest Esteem of their Merit and Genius' (GM X, 234). She was apparently satisfied with having sent off this self-vindication despite the fact that it was not published in her lifetime, which sheds suspicion on the whole story. The purity of her character does not seem to have developed into a burning public issue until after her death.

Apparently the correspondence continued. The Magazine replied with a letter explaining the whole business, which Mrs. Rowe answered expressing her satisfaction and withholding any blame from Mr. Yate, in a most forgiving and womanly manner:

I am perfectly easy, and believe the Author had a good Design. I am no Critic, and those are Subjects superior to my Understanding and Censure. (ibid)

Together with this letter she sent the Magazine 'a Copy of Verses to Mr. Thomson on hearing Lady xxxx commend his Seasons'. This was published in Vol. VI p. 741. It praises both Thomson and Lady xxxx whilst recommending rural retirement and the cause of 'abandon'd Virtue', a subject 'much more agreeable to the Softness of my Sex, as well as my natural Temper'. The editor comments:

Such was the Modesty, such the good Sense, and such the Benevolence of Mrs. Rowe, least sensible of her own Merit, ready to own a Mistake when she believed it to be so, and uneasy to see even the meanest Person ridiculed. (ibid)

Why should the Magazine be so eager to publicize this old editorial business? What did Mr. Cave, an astute and ambitious businessman,¹⁶ hope to get out of an affirmation of Mrs. Rowe's perfections? The answer is obvious: he hoped that her reputation for virtue and piety would rub off on the Magazine, and thus put down his detractors. For GM had been hand in glove with her:

we were not only favoured with her Approbation, but honoured with her Correspondence, and had the pleasure of obliging the World with several Pieces of Poetry, from her own Original Manuscripts … We are persuaded that the Correspondence and Approbation of Mrs. Rowe will have much more Weight than any thing we could reply to the little spiteful Invectives that have been thrown out against us. (ibid)

In clearing Mrs. Rowe of the accusation of satire, Cave is enlisting himself behind the banner of purity in the struggle between virtue and vice, magnanimity and mean-mindedness, which in its commercial manifestation was a struggle for solid, middle-class readers. He had a vested interest in Mrs. Rowe's image.

The same volume of the Magazine bears witness to the readiness of his correspondents to aid him in the task of maintaining Mrs. Rowe's reputation. In December 1740 a certain EP submitted the manuscript of 'The Story of Veterana', a moral tale which s/he suspects, on what grounds we are not informed, to be the work of Mrs. Rowe. Needless to say it was not published among her collected works, and indeed has never appeared in later editions. Confirmation is requested; and Mrs. Rowe's acquaintance are asked to search among their papers and effects for any additional unpublished writings; for, says EP,

I am a zealous Admirer of Mrs. Rowe, and consequently of Opinion, that the Public will suffer by the suppression of any Particulars that may contribute to illustrate her Character … (p. 597)

'The Story of Veterana' recounts the exemplary life of a poor but industrious and pious countrywoman, and also contains lengthy reflections on the perils of idle imagination, 'the blissful Dreams of a luxuriant Fancy' (p. 598). It might indeed be by Mrs. Rowe, if it is not in fact the work of the adulating EP, who is clearly eager to boost her idol's reputation by the discovery of more of the right kind of stuff and may have predated Chatterton and Macpherson in this strange kind of literary falsification.

At times some doubt may be cast on the delicacy of the Magazine's approach. The poetry section for February 1740 carries a contribution headed by this rubric:

The following was sent us as a genuine Copy of Mrs. Rowe's Verses on the Death of her Husband. As they much excel those printed in her Works, we thought proper to insert them. (GM X, 89)

The verses printed are a greatly worked-over version of Mrs. Rowe's most celebrated poem, 'On the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe' (1717), published first in Pope's miscellany and republished in 1720 between the same covers as his Eloisa to Abelard, which echoes its mood of passionate renunciation, and even some few of its lines.¹⁷

The difference between the two versions is striking: the new version, some 30 lines shorter than the original, is an outpouring of egocentric emotionalism, whereas the original is a far more balanced composition, celebrating the character of Thomas Rowe in the context of virtue and piety characteristic of Mrs. Rowe's mature works. In the new version, while the ecstasy of grief is greatly intensified, the religious faith is largely deleted. Thus, whereas the original version opens with a celebration of the husband and a rueful confession of the writer's amorous frailty, in the new version the emphasis has shifted so that love is itself celebrated as a religion; the thirty-five lines of the original first three paragraphs are condensed to a single paragraph of sixteen lines by focussing solely on the feelings of the speaker. The editorial pronouncement that these new lines—which appear never to have been adopted as authentic—'much excel those printed in her Works' does not seem consistent with the vaunted virtue, piety and purity in whose name the Magazine was exploiting Mrs. Rowe's memory for commercial purposes. Clearly too, the poems of the young Philomela were still associated with the expurgated Mrs. Rowe, possibly thanks to the efforts of Curii, and the pious reputation could serve as a passport for amorous fantasies.

But it is surprising, and culturally interesting, that the difference in style and tendency was not more obvious to either editor or readers. In April 1740, two months after the revised copy was printed, the Magazine carried a reader's letter refuting its authenticity on the basis of internal evidence:

There is one Passage wherein I think the beautiful Copy sent you of Mrs. Rowe's Verses is really inferior to the other …

—My pray'rs to heav'n were all for thee,
And Love inspir'd me first with Piety.

This Thought is by no means suitable to the Character of Mrs. Rowe, who (as the Writer of her Life informs us) was endowed with a very early Piety. The other Copy has it thus, and is therefore, no doubt, the genuine Copy:

My warmest vows to heav'n were made for thee,
And Love still mingled with my Piety.

Here the Sentiment is much juster, and nothing said that is not agreeable to the strictest Rules of Religion. As to the Advantage which the Copy you inserted in other Respects has, particularly in Mr. Rowe's last Words, which are finely turn'd, it is generally allow'd, that Mrs. Rowe did not correct her first Thoughts. (p. 196)

The evidence adduced by this correspondent is thus neither stylistic, aesthetic nor modal, but is deduced entirely from the memoir of Mrs. Rowe's life, that is, from her reputation for strict piety from her earliest years and her reported practice of never revising her writing. Otherwise, no discrepancy is perceived. Readers were apparently more than willing to accept and admire reckless emotionalism if it carried the guarantee of unshakeable virtue.

What the anonymous reviser of Mrs. Rowe's lament on the death of her husband actually thought s/he was doing is open to question. Maybe the intention was to use the famous name as a passport to publication, or, even more self-effacingly, to enhance the reputation of an already celebrated writer. Perhaps, as suggested above, this is another instance of the eighteenth-century compulsion to revise classics to suit contemporary preconceptions, just as Shakespeare's tragedies were rewritten, Milton's Comus turned into an operetta, Horace and Donne imitated, and the canon of mediæval literature regularised, romanticised and augmented by Percy, Macpherson and Chatterton. Mrs. Rowe's poem was clearly considered important enough for cultural readjustment.

Truly, if we are to understand the cultural climate of the years immediately preceding the appearance of Richardson's novels we cannot afford to ignore Mrs. Rowe.

Notes

¹ The Royal Library in Copenhagen, where this article has largely been written, possesses five 18th-century editions of Friendship in Death (1728), one in French (Amsterdam 1734), three in German (Hamburg 1734; Göttz 1744; Frankfurt u. Leipzig 1770), and two in English (London 1746, 1760): for the Danes, Mrs. Rowe spoke French and especially German before she spoke English. The Royal Library also possesses a German edition of Devout Exercises of the Heart, with a translation of the memoir of her life and a portrait (Lebensbeschreibung, Andachtsübungen und Herzengespräch, Zurich 1761), and a four-volume collected Works (Edinburgh 1770). Unless otherwise stated, all references to Mrs. Rowe's works will be to this edition.

² According to John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (Oxford, 1969), p. 245: 'among the various scribbling ladies who contributed to the mass of prose fiction … Mrs. Rowe was probably the most highly respected and remembered during the eighteenth century itself. It is hard to understand why. Her most popular work is a deadening book, written in ecstatic and inflated prose and full of the most explicit and tedious moralizing about the pains of a life of sin and the comforts of living virtuously. Its situations and characters are mechanical and verbose, and strike any modern reader as almost comically unreal. There is none of the erotic sensationalism that… made the love novella so attractive … Worst of all for us, perhaps, Mrs. Rowe's book reeks of what must be called morbidity about death.'

³ The same issue of GM provides four consecutive examples of the kind of death notice women usually received in its pages:

March 3. The Lady Bligh, at Dublin. She was Grandmother to the E. of Darnley.

Lady Cooke, Wife of Sir George Cooke, Kt. Prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas. Mrs. East, Wife of Wm East, Esq; late Member of Parliament for St Maws, Cornwall.

March 4. Hon. Mrs. Lumley, Relict of Gen. Lumley. (GM VII, p. 188)

The same basic model provides the skeleton for the notice of Mrs. Rowe's death, though there is more flesh on the bones.

⁴ For information on the life and works of Elizabeth Singer Rowe, see the entries on her in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB), Vol. 39, British Novelists, 1660–1800, Part 2, pp. 409–13, and Vol. 95, Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, pp. 248–56, by Elizabeth R. Napier and Madeleine Forell respectively.

⁵Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Ocasions … by Philomela, and several other ingenious persons (1/04), which appeared in a revised edition as A Collection of Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Occasions, 1709, 1719.

⁶ 1737 saw the publication of her Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy, Prayer and Praise, edited by Isaac Watts at the request of the author and published after her death; possibly she had wished to redress the balance disturbed by the appearance of Curll's Philomela.

⁷ See GM in the 1730s, almost passim. The phrase was useful in discussing any subject of topical interest, e.g. GM IV, p. 11, 'On Liberty, and the Rights of the People', which deals with popular opposition to the projected excise on tobacco and wine. A satirical essay which appeared in GM IX, 'A BILL for a Charitable Lottery for the relief of the distress'd Virgins of Great Britain', actually proposed disposing of unmarried women by lottery; it concludes thus: 'Ill-affected seditious Persons … may go about to represent this present Act, as an Attempt to introduce Arbitrary Power, by putting a grievous Yoke on the Necks of his Majesty's faithful Subjects; Be it declared, that there is nothing in this present Act contrary to Magna Charta, the Petition of Rights, or the Act of Settlement; and the Liberty and Rights of the People are safe and inviolate, no Man being compell'd to take a Ticket, but only advised and exhorted thereto.' (p. 150) This writer at least was not willing to allow 'Freeborn Englishwomen' any part in 'the Liberty and Rights of the People'.

⁸ In Paradise Lost VIII, Raphael warns Adam against excessive uxoriousness:

For what admir'st thou, what transports thee so?
An outside; fair, no doubt, and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honouring and thy love;
Not thy subjection: weigh with her thyself;
Then value: oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed.
(567–73)

Shortly after this stern reprimand, the angel blushingly admits to a personal knowledge of erotic joys: the heavenly spirits, all masculine, practise total interpenetration:

Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring
(626–8)

Dryden, in his translation from the Fourth Book of Lucretius, 'Concerning the Nature of Love', gives memorable expression to the insufficiency of human sexual intercourse in its striving to satisfy infinite longings. Neither platonic nor fleshly love can be fully gratifying, 'For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost' (78). In the misogynistic satires Love Given O're by Robert Gould (1682), The Folly of Love by Richard Ames (1691), and the anonymous Mysogynus: or, a Satyr upon Women, parodies of the creation and paradise myths are devised in which men live together and procreate their kind without the troublesome aid of the female sex, 'like trees', as Gould rather ignorantly imagines it.

⁹ For a discussion of Dunton's presentation of Elizabeth Singer, see Joanna Lipking's 'Fair Originals: Women Poets in Male Commendatory Poems', Eighteenth-Century Life 12, n.s. 2, pp. 58–72.

¹⁰ I do not find that any of the Philomela poems survive in the authorized Collected Works, though thirteen of them are reprinted in Divine Hymns and Poems. Curll prints all but the most topical and occasional; he adds fifteen later poems, two of which are by Thomas Rowe. Of these additions, Mrs. Rowe's elegy to the memory of her husband is in the Collected Works, as are a paraphrase of Job XXXVIII, 'A Pastoral on our Saviour's Nativity' and 'A Hymn on the Three Eastern Magi'.

¹¹ Her self-abnegation and identification with her father are a recurring theme in this account of her life; see, for instance, p. 54: 'The same modest disposition of mind, appears in the orders she left in writing to her servant, in which, after having desired that her funeral might be by night, and attended only by a small number of friends, she adds, "Charge Mr. Bowden not to say one word of me in the sermon. I would lie in my father's grave, and have no stone nor inscription over my vile dust, which I gladly leave to oblivion and corruption, till it rise to a glorious immortality".'

¹² See, for example, 'Carding censured', reprinted from The Prompter No. 75, in GM V (1735) pp. 480–1, where women who are addicted to cards are denied both humanity and femininity: 'A carding Woman is a fashionable Monster; too common to be carried about for a Shew; and too Ugly to bear looking at: Else there is not among the Mis-shapen, grim Animals, which are proclaim'd unnatural by sound of Trumpet, any thing so detestably the Reverse of what she was intended for as this Rational Grimalkin! this voracious dry Harpy in Masquerade! this half human Tyger in Petticoats! Let nobody tell me of the Respect due to Ladies—These are no Ladies—They have renounc'd whatever is tender and amiable in Woman; and the Rights of the Sex are advantages they are too mannish to lay any claim to.' (p. 480). Or, perhaps even more to the point, 'Cautions against Quadrille', GM VI (1736), p. 514, which inveighs against 'the great Increase of Play in private Houses': 'In these Places it is, that young Ladies of moderate Fortunes are drawn in to the infallible Ruin of their Reputations: And when by false Cards, Slipping, Signs, and Crimp, they are strip of their last Guinea, their wretched Companions will either not know them, or if they do, it is in order to turn the Penny, by selling a pretty Creature to Lechery, and Diseases.' The fall of the 'pretty Creature' is led up to by the innuendo implicit in 'Ruin of their Reputations … false … Slipping … stript'.

¹³ Her retirement was not altogether complete. Her biographer, with his usual uncanny knowledge of her mind and heart, informs the reader that 'When she forsook the town, she determined to return to it no more, but to conceal the remainder of her life in an absolute retirement; yet on some few occasions she thought it her duty to violate this resolution' (p. 20); upon which follows a list of fairly lengthy visits paid to friends in London and at their country seats. 'Yet even on these occasions, she never quitted her retreat without very sincere regret; and always returned to it again, as soon as ever she could with decency disengage herself from the importunity of her noble friends' (p. 21).

Interestingly, even when she quits her retirement Mrs. Rowe is seen to be a model of self-denying duty; and her innate nobility is recognised and respected by her conventionally 'noble friends'.

¹⁴ See p. 22: 'But this excellent lady, (as was observed of an *eminent genius of the last age [Mr Cowley]), "possessed so much strength and firmness of mind, and such a perfect natural goodness, as could not be perverted by the largeness of her wit, and was proof against the art of poetry itself".'

See also p. 43: 'The uncommon kind of praise that is given to Mr Cowley, by the author of his life, "that no one had ever reason to wish his wit had been less", is equally due to Mrs Rowe'.

And p. 38–9, a particularly blatant example: 'Mr Prior, who, in the preface to his poems, has done justice to the fineness of her genius, might, with equal truth, have applied to her what he has said of an *eminent wit of the last age [*The Earl of Dorset]. "Such were the natural faculties and strength of her mind, that she had occasion to borrow very little from education; and she owed those advantages to her own good parts, which others acquire by study and imitation. Her wit was abundant, noble, bold. Wit, in most writers, is like a fountain in a garden, supplied by several streams, brought through artful pipes, and playing sometimes agreeably: but Mrs Rowe's was a source arising from the top of a mountain, which forced its own way, and with inexhaustible supplies delighted and enriched the country through which it passed".'

On p. 38 also, Dryden's expressions concerning Plutarch are unceremoniously applied to Mrs. Rowe: 'Her "life was not varied with accidents to divert the reader: it was more pleasant for herself to live, than for an historian to describe".'

¹⁵ For example, despite her seriousness of mind she was not prey as other women were to fashionable hypochondria, or spleen: 'This happy disposition of mind, which is more than once recommended in the sacred writings, and is so great an ornament to sincere piety, continued with Mrs Rowe to her last moments, and was never interrupted by any of those fantastic disorders that so often cloud the imaginations of the softer sex.' (p. 76)

¹⁶ For the character of Edward Cave, see C. Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the Gentleman's Magazine (Brown University Studies, Vol. IV), Providence, 1938, Chap. 1; for example, pp. 13–14: 'In time, the Gentleman's was to become the most important periodical publication of the eighteenth century…. The changes which it eventually underwent appears as the surest signs of Cave's editorial ability, of his foresightedness, his tenacity of purpose, and his ability to judge public taste…. Once his magazine had been established, Cave lived for it. Though he lacked critical self-expression and wrote the weakest of bathetic verse, he had a business man's ability for projecting, organizing, arranging.'

¹⁷ Cf. Poems of Alexander Pope, London and New Haven, Vol. II, Second edition 1954, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, p. 307.