Literary history can seem full of women frustrated with their lack of time for reading. Florence Nightingale rails in Cassandra (1852)
against the way women are constantly interrupted and never protected in
their study, complaining that “there is no time appointed for this
purpose and the difficulty is that, in our social life, we must always
be doubtful whether we ought not to be with somebody else or be doing
something else.” Virginia Woolf makes this frustration into the
beautiful manifesto, A Room of One’s Own (1929). Few, however,
seem quite as angry about their lack of time as Catherine Talbot. She
rages in her unpublished journals about not having enough time, she
muses on her lack of time in her published pieces of writing, and she
makes time a constant theme of her letters to Elizabeth Carter.
As friends, Talbot and Carter had much in common. Neither married,
both belonged loosely to what we now think of as the Bluestocking
Circle, both knew Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson, and both were
nourished to different degrees by their Christian faith. But Talbot’s
situation was particular because she grew up under the protection of her
father’s friend, the Bishop Secker, and was obliged to him for
including her in his busy, affluent, and often very public household.
The intensity of this situation comes out at one point when Talbot
erupts in fury at Carter’s failure to understand that her business is of
a special degree: “You suppose that when I complained of wanting
leisure I had several hours. You forget that you rise three hours
earlier than I am allowed to do; that we visit 18 families at from three
to 14 miles distant, and 20 I believe in Oxford, and are besides
eternal riders, walkers, and airers. That I have many correspondents,
and cannot for my life write short letters. And with all that crowded
together, at first I had scarce one hour.”
Comparing her own days to Carter’s more provincial and less
privileged ones, Talbot describes a round of social and secretarial
duties requiring her attention as adjunct to Secker’s ecclesiastical
role. As often as Carter urges her to see the advantages of social life
in London, Talbot complains of the disadvantages of that life to
scholarship. Her letters appear as written under impossible conditions:
“I have absolutely no time,” she begins one letter to Carter, “well,
that is no matter, for positively you shall write to Miss Carter, before
you are half an hour older—half an hour, why in that half hour I have
half an hundred things to do.”
At various points Talbot rails as fully as any 18th-century Christian
woman could against a system that precludes her from having what Nigel
Thrift calls her “own time.” “How much rather would I stay at home this
evening and study,” she exclaims to Carter, “than to go out shivering in
the cold and to pay half a score of unedifying visits.” Although Talbot
was recognized early on as a literary teenage protégée and valued by
Secker as an interlocutor throughout her life, she found it harder as
she grew older to justify her education. And while she played key roles
in literary coteries that Betty Schellenberg identifies as two of the
most important of her day—the one that formed in the late 1750s around
Elizabeth Montagu, and the one around Samuel Richardson—Talbot was a
conservative producer of manuscript and wary of writing for even limited
publics. She complains to Carter that what skills she has cannot endure
the life she’s obliged to lead: “By some means or other my golden hours
are all engrossed and I cannot help feeling a perpetual
dissatisfaction—feeling that my little genius was not made to take in so
large a round, even of proper and laudable engagements.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/have-we-ever-had-enough-time-to-read/
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