2 March. On this day in 1793 a banker named George Smith had an “execution” against him for bankruptcy in his house at Bath. His eldest daughter (and second child), Elizabeth, was then sixteen; her youngest sibling was a baby brother just a few months old. George Smith loved books and architecture: at this date Piercefield Park, his mansion near Chepstow, was being redesigned and rebuilt by Sir John Soane – the second ambitious building project Soane had done for him. After the bankruptcy the family had no home, constantly moving in search of cheapness, or staying with friends between one temporary perch and the next. A gentry family without money was an anomaly. George Smith enlisted in the army.
His wife, Julia, was a gracious hostess and the whole family was talented, but Elizabeth was a youthful prodigy. She had already been taken up by the writer Henrietta Maria Bowdler (member of another singularly talented family), and after the crash the Bowdlers provided the Smiths their first, immediate refuge. Elizabeth continued to study, moving from learning German, Spanish, history, English literature, religion, astronomy, and botany, to Arabic, Persian, Latin, Greek and algebra, and even beginning on Chinese, Welsh, and African languages.
Elizabeth Smith is a splendid example of the way learning could provide a challenge and an outlet to women whose daily lives were by modern standards terribly cramped. (It does not seem that any surviving correspondence suggests that the girls in the family should seek employment.) She is also an example of the women’s tradition: though dying before she was thirty, she was remembered for years, with admiration, by other women endeavouring to think or write. She shows too, less pleasingly, how reactionary cultural forces joined ranks against a woman stepping out of line, even when she did so in her mind rather than her behaviour.
The scholar Elizabeth Smith never got near an ivory tower. After the family lost its money she served as a governess to the little ones and made all her own clothes. She loved reading and writing best, but saw them as very private activities and suffered a good deal from no longer having a room of her own. Her mother, Julia, wrote: “She was a living library; but locked up except to a chosen few,” because of her horror of being seen as a learned lady. After Elizabeth’s early death Julia even judged that her “excess of modest reserve [had been] the greatest defect in her character.” Her daughter, however, was not politically naive about this. One of her many aphorisms reads: “A woman must have uncommon sweetness of disposition and manners, to be forgiven for possessing superiour talents and acquirements.” By some she was not forgiven.
Elizabeth’s poems and meditations are original, thoughtful, and still highly readable. She was no self-isolated pedant but, like today’s professional scholars, a contributor to the republic of learning, serving her peers by, for instance, making Klopstock and other modern German authors available in English translation. Nor was she a mere bookworm. She loved walking, and in July 1798 climbed Snowdon to see the sunrise from the top, thereby missing a night’s sleep and being up for “thirty-nine hours of almost constant exercise.” She set out with her mother, an aunt, and a local guide who spoke no English. The other women turned back when the path got steep, but Elizabeth and the guide kept on, reaching the summit at a quarter past four in the morning in “beautiful rose-coloured light.”
“After this I think you will not take the trouble to enquire after my health,” she wrote in her account of this adventure. Yet only seven years later disaster struck. Sitting reading on a rock at the end of a very hot day, she felt a violent pain in her chest. She walked the two miles home without telling anyone, and next day (which was again very hot) she thought exercise would do her good, and worked all day in the hay-field. From then on she was gravely ill, sometimes paralysed, and she died just fourteen months from the original attack.
Henrietta Bowdler took on the task of publishing her friend. She first edited Fragments in Prose and Verse: by a Young Lady, with Some Account of her Life and Character, 1808. This book sold rapidly in many successive editions in Britain and the USA: many people, apparently, wanted to read the poems and the thoughts of a young, female, self-taught polymath. Hannah More ranked Smith with the great scholar Elizabeth Carter, as a woman whose talents would have shone in a university. The Victorians Harriet Martineau and Margaret Gatty praised her writings.
But her story also presented a voyeuristic appeal, that of the female prodigy or female victim. Her popularity celebrity encouraged conservatives to rubbish her. The Critical Review insisted that if she had lived to publish her works herself “nobody would have regarded them,” that her letters were no different from “those of other young ladies, excepting that they talk of books instead of bonnets” (that is, her colloquial tone made the reviewer blind to her unusual insights), and that her poetry was largely “rhymeless rubbish”. The old Dictionary of National Biography admitted that she expressed herself gracefully but asserted that her reflections were obvious and her “verses have no merit.” The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography amended this rather than actually changing it: it calls her poetry “graceful if unremarkable” and her reflections “conventional” – whereas to a feminist reader the remarkable thing is the way she scrutinizes convention, sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting it.
Furthermore the old DNB, not content with devaluing this woman’s scholarship, implied that it had, culpably, brought about her own demise. “Evidently,” it asserted, “she was overtaxing every faculty.” This woman dared to use her brain; no wonder a mystery illness struck her down!
All this information about Smith comes from the entry on her in Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, an electronic resource published by Cambridge University Press, by subscription, at http://orlando.cambridge.org
