Precarious and Fatiguing: Elizabeth Elstob and Women’s Intellectual Careers as Tragedy

Abstract

Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) has a strong claim to be considered as one of the founding mothers of our own discipline of English. She was part of the early flowering of Old English studies at Oxford around the turn of the eighteenth century, described by contemporary biographers as a ‘female student of the university’ and benefitting from access to libraries and the support of the scholar George Hickes.¹ Between 1708 and 1715, she produced an edition and translation of Aelfric’s homily on St Gregory and the first Old English grammar, as well as other extensive transcription and editing projects. In the prefaces to her published works, Elstob developed a spirited defence of the study of English and the ‘deep Learning’ of antiquarianism against the critique of writers like Jonathan Swift (who had dismissed Old English as full of unmusical monosyllables and antiquarians as pedants of ‘low Genius’).² Her goal was ‘to shew the polite Men of our Age, that the Language of their Forefathers is neither so barren nor barbarous as they affirm, with equal Ignorance and Boldness’.³

Elstob’s defence of English was inextricable from her defence of herself as a female scholar. Her preface to An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-day of St Gregory famously began with the question she expected to be asked of her: ‘What has a Woman to do with Learning?’ After responding with the familiar arguments of eighteenth-century proto-feminism – that women have souls, that learning is more ‘innocent and improving’ than society diversions, that it will not make women ‘neglect their houshold Affairs’ – she soon moves on to the second possible objection: ‘Admit a Woman may have Learning, is there no other kind of Learning to employ her time? What is this Saxon? what has she to do with this barbarous antiquated Stuff? so useless, so altogether out of the way?’ The study of this apparently obscure topic, she argues, is not only worthwhile but particularly worthwhile for women, to whom she addresses her work. In both this preface and on the title page of her Grammar, she cites the words of her mentor Hickes: ‘the Language that we speak is our MOTHER-TONGUE; And who so proper to play the Criticks in this as the FEMALES’.⁴

Elstob’s work thus serves as a foundational moment in a double sense: for English as a subject, and specifically as a subject that might serve as a more inclusive alternative to the classical basis of eighteenth-century knowledge, open to a greater variety of participants and ways of working.⁵ This is a legacy that we would surely be glad to claim today. Yet Elstob’s role as a female promoter of English has another dimension: if she is emblematic of what is possible for women within the discipline, then she is also a cautionary tale for the obstacles facing them.⁶ After 1715, with the deaths of Hickes and her brother and collaborator William, Elstob was forced by financial circumstances to abandon her works-in-progress and her library, finding work as a teacher in a provincial school. The intellectual society of which she had been a part then lost track of her, until she was ‘rediscovered’ in the mid-1730s by the antiquarian George Ballard. Through the help of friends, she eventually obtained a post as governess to the young children of the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode, where she spent her last seventeen years.

This narrative of her life has been told over and over, beginning with Elstob herself and her contemporaries, and continuing to feminist and medieval scholars in recent times. In examining its historiography – the way that it became a narrative – I seek to show how women’s intellectual careers have been shaped by the structures of tragedy, from early promise and achievement to an apparently inevitable decline and fall. It is the kind of explanatory ‘emplotment’ in a particular generic mode that Hayden White identifies in his Metahistory, with tragedy signalling the need for resignation to circumstances that ‘set the limits on what may be aspired to’ in the world.⁷ Alongside this, it is all too easy to overlay a more positive story of historical progress: that what happened to Elstob was a product of eighteenth-century conditions for women and would surely have worked out better today. I argue, however, that the kinds of contingency and interruption that characterized Elstob’s career – while doubtless shaped by her particular context – are still all too typical within modern academia. To recognize ourselves in her means confronting how hard it remains for ‘learned women’ to escape these tragic tropes.

*

The narrativization of Elstob’s life through the lens of disappointed retrospective began with Elstob herself. In 1737, the antiquarian friends who had recently found her wanted to ‘know how the Saxon Lady at Evesham was reduced to her present Condition’, and requested a biography of her to supplement her brother’s in a projected new edition of the Athenae Oxoniensis. Ballard apparently composed such ‘Memoires’ based on their conversations, but the correspondents still ‘desire[d] to see her own Life done by her own Pen’.⁸ Elstob finally obliged them the following year.

Written in the third person, Elstob’s account relates her precocious love of books and languages, encouraged by a mother ‘who was also a great admirer of Learning, especially in her own Sex’. That mother’s death when she was eight placed Elstob under the guardianship of an uncle who ‘who was no Friend to Womens Learning’ and believed in ‘that common and vulgar saying that one Tongue is enough for a Woman’. With her Latin studies interrupted, she persevered in ‘her earnest endeavours to improve her mind’ and ‘with much difficulty obtain’d leave’ to learn French. Finally, she went to live with her brother William, ‘who very joyfully and readily assisted and encourag’d her, in her Studies, with whom she labour’d very hard as long as he liv’d’. A list of Elstob’s published works and transcription projects follows, before concluding:

She had several other designs, but was unhappily hinder’d, by a necessity of getting her Bread, which with much difficulty, labour, and ill health, she has endeavour’d to do for many Years, with very indifferent success. If it had not been that Almighty God, was Graciously pleas’d to raise her up lately some Generous and Good Friends, she cou’d not have subsisted.⁹

The early story of triumph over impediments to women’s learning, with an account of scholarly accomplishments suitable for a publication like Athenae Oxoniensis, is cut off with a brutal suddenness that provides little detail on the next two decades of Elstob’s life. ‘I thought it unnecessary’ for the intended context, she wrote, ‘to stuff it with the Particular misfortunes and disappointments I have met with’. In her letters, however, she voiced a rueful sense of a protracted run of ill-luck that had shaped her sense of identity: ‘I am still EE and am I believe still to meet with nothing but discouragements and disappointments’ (fol. 57r). She compared herself to the sixteenth-century poet Thomas Tusser (misremembered as ‘John Tucker’), whose life she had read as a girl: ‘He is […] describ’d to have been an Honest Industrious poor Man, but notwithstanding his indefatigable industry […] no Butter wou’d stick on his Bread.’ Her only consolation was that ‘I have rubb’d through the greatest part of my Life, and that it can be but a short time I have to Labour here’ (fol. 18v).

As the comparison to Tusser shows, the obstacles Elstob faced in the second half of her life were not all inherent to her gender. She complains, for instance, that one of her works would not have remained unpublished ‘had my Circumstances been better, or the Booksellers more Generous’. When she submitted the manuscript, they ‘were very willing to Print it, but wou’d give nothing for the Copy, but a few Books when printed, which I think is hard and unjust, that they shou’d reap the Profit of other Mens Labour’ – making Elstob only another (masculine-coded) scholar suffering from an unfair system for publishing academic works (fol. 17r). This was a situation that her correspondent George Ballard – a dressmaker and self-taught antiquarian who only gained a minor appointment at Oxford in 1747 – was likely to understand, and his own struggles were discussed in similar terms to hers. Like Elstob in her later years, he complains of having ‘very small advantages either of Books, or Conversations with learned Men’, and one of his friends expresses himself ‘sorry from my Heart to think your Circumstances will not permitt you to follow your Studys & set you above that Employment which is every way below your meritt’.¹⁰ In her 1999 article, Mechtild Gretsch makes a similar point while seeking to rescue Elstob from ‘appropriation […] by gender studies,’ stressing that her ‘failure […] had little (if anything) to do with her being a woman’.¹¹

For Elstob, however, the two halves of her biography (a woman fighting to obtain learning, followed by financial failure) were closely connected, even if not in a purely causal sense. When Ballard was disappointed by the reception of his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences in 1752, Elstob told him that ‘this is not an Age to hope for any encouragement to Learning of any kind’ and that

the Honour of the Females was the wrongest subject you could pitch upon. For you can come into no company of Ladies or Gentlemen, where you shall not hear an open and Vehement exclamation against Learned Women […]. The prospect I have of the next age is a melancholy one to me who wish Learning might flourish to the end of the world, both in men and women, but I shall not live to see it. (MS Ballard 43, fol. 89r)

Women’s greater vulnerability to economic hardship and social critique, she seems to argue, makes them a kind of canary in the coalmine for a broader culture of anti-intellectualism.

A few decades later, Edward Rowe Mores’ biographical note on Elstob in his Dissertation upon English Typographical Founders and Founderies (1778) describes her in terms that both acknowledge and neutralise her femininity. She was

a northern lady of an antient family and a genteel fortune, but she pursued too much the drug called learning, and in that pursuit failed of being careful of any one thing necessary. in [sic] her latter years she was tutoress in the fam. of The Duke of Portland, where we have visited her in her sleeping-room at Bulstrode, surrounded with books and dirtiness the usual appendages of folk of learning.¹²

After quoting from this account and Elstob’s own, John Nichols in his Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century concludes that ‘this excellent woman, notwithstanding her profound learning and masculine abilities, was very unfortunate in life’ (vol. 4, pp. 130–131, 133).

If Elstob’s life is seen as a failure, as it generally is, then the question is whether this was the result of impersonal forces or individual shortcomings: a kind of ‘tragic flaw’ within her that would make sense of the outcome. Adam Rounce notes how failure is often ‘seen to be the result of a judgement on character’ or ‘a comment upon the wider morals of a society, or on the inability of writers to integrate themselves within such a social system’. In eighteenth-century discussions, ‘the issue of why and how writers fail either has a direct biographical element’ – a way in which it is their own fault – ‘or is side-stepped’ with observations on destiny and fate.¹³

Certainly, Elstob and Nichols’ references to a string of sourceless misfortunes and disappointments suggest a sense of force majeure: Elstob becomes a kind of human equivalent to the Cottonian Library fire, which devastated antiquarians in 1731.¹⁴ However, Mores’s version of the impractical scholar overly addicted to ‘the drug called learning’ has proven particularly influential for later critics – even those that attribute Elstob’s downfall to broader societal conditions. Margaret Ashdown notes that her career began ‘with something of high enthusiasm’; Gretsch describes her reaping ‘ten years of personal happiness and intellectual excitement […] from reckless abandonment to her scholarly work’, while Shaun F. D. Hughes writes that ‘She was intoxicated with learning’.¹⁵ In Hughes’s account, what Elstob failed to consider was her own status as a woman in the early eighteenth century:

Looking back over her dedications and prefaces, one gets the sense that she was not fully cognizant of just how anomalous (and fragile) her situation was [….] In a sense, her very failure to recognize the radical and threatening nature of her intellectual endeavors contributed to the desperate situation in which she found herself. (pp. 16, 20n54)

Like a tragic over-reacher, Elstob had forgotten her own precarity and was punished for it – making her life into ‘a sobering tale of intellectual talent wasted’ that acts as an antidote to her apparent earlier intoxication.¹⁶

*

Elstob herself, together with her friend Ballard, was highly interested in the stories that could be told about intellectual women. Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies was a pioneering work of biography that had a lasting impact on accounts of learned women’s lives.¹⁷ As Margaret Ezell has shown, Ballard’s is not a neutral antiquarian description but a ‘didactic narrative’ that constructs a particular idea of ‘female excellence’ for emulation, while seeking ‘to establish credibility for himself and his subject’. His ideal learned woman is virtuous and modest despite being ‘celebrated’ in her own time, and while she must have published at least one book to merit inclusion, she does not write for a commercial audience.¹⁸ There is also a ‘repetitive idealization of suffering’ that, Ezell observes, recalls the tragic narratives of novels like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and makes these women into martyrs for learning.¹⁹

It has often been noted that Elstob ‘provided the inspiration for [Ballard’s] efforts’, although, as a still-living woman at the time of publication, she was not named in the book itself.²⁰ She did so both as an embodiment of ‘the plight of learned women’ and through her own research into the subject.²¹ She was one of the many correspondents who helped to supply Ballard with references and then solicited subscriptions for the finished work – a collaborative epistolary network that has been traced by Leonie Hannan.²² Some decades earlier, however, she had also begun a similar project of her own.

A notebook in the Ballard collection is dated ‘Elizabeth Elstob August 12^th 1709’ when Elstob was at the height of her scholarly career. Carefully ruled with space for footnotes, it contains an alphabetical list of learned women ranging from ‘Mrs Mary Astell’ to ‘Zenobia’, as well as a list of sources on the front page. Some of the entries are in Latin; most are brief, and many have been left blank. The compilation was clearly a work in progress, to be updated as Elstob came across more women and information about them. More eclectic than the selection in Ballard’s Memoirs, the list ranges from Classical figures, saints, and queens to recent published writers (Katherine Philips, Catherine Cockburn) and private individuals Elstob knew or had heard of (Deborah Milton, Elizabeth Pepys, Mary Randolph).²³

It is clear that Ballard made use of this notebook, though not from the inception of his biographical project (which he had begun by 1741). Just below Elstob’s signature, a note on the flyleaf reads ‘E. lib. Geo: Ballard. Bought of Mr Price Bookseller in Gloucester June 18. 1747’. Ballard also made additions to the text, expanding a number of the entries and citations, and often adding a bracketed ‘G. Ballard’ against his interventions. Greg Waite sees this as ‘confirming his esteem for Elizabeth’s work’ (p. 359), although it also in some measure co-opts it. The notebook becomes a collaborative antiquarian project (much as how Hannan describes the Ballard correspondence) where credit is secondary to the service of a common goal, working across gender and time.

Elstob often mourned having lost access to her books after her flight from London in 1718, and it is unclear how this one came into the possession of a bookseller in Gloucester (about 25 miles both from Ballard’s home in Chipping Camden and the site of Elstob’s school in Evesham) in 1747.²⁴ In the intervening years, however, its largely-blank pages had also been used by a third hand for a very different purpose. Turned upside-down and front-to-back, it records recipes for cooking ‘Veal Cutletts’ and pickling cucumbers, as well as instructions on how ‘To Clean Teeth’ and ‘Make Clary Wine’. As Waite concludes, ‘Thus the fate of the book rather mirrors that of its unfortunate mistress!’ (p. 356).

It is worth examining exactly where we believe this commonality of fate lies. Evidently, the notebook juxtaposes Elstob’s compilation of learned women with a very different version of women’s labour.²⁵ The filling up of blank spaces – projected by Elstob for further entries – with recipes strikes a tragic note: it is as though her intellectual project has been replaced by housework, in the same way that Elstob’s later years teaching children (first at her school and then for the Duchess of Portland) are seen by feminist biographers as a sign of her having been ‘thoroughly subdued and domesticated’.²⁶ As Mary Elizabeth Green writes, Elstob’s time at Bulstrode ‘put[s] before the modern reader a vague vision of a superannuated English nanny, tucked away in her proper place in the household, cherished and somewhat tolerated like an old family pet. It does not seem the most fitting ending to the life of a scholar’.²⁷

It might be more accurate, however, to see the tête-bêche placement less as a negation than as two sides of the same coin. The writing and testing of recipes, after all, was another type of women’s work that (as has been explored by scholars like Catherine Field) provided its own paths to authority and self-expression.²⁸ It was far less likely than Elstob’s scholarship, of course, to be recognized as a form of authorship or knowledge-production by Ballard or his successors in women’s biography: apart from needlework, Ballard never mentions his subjects’ domestic accomplishments.²⁹ Unlike Elstob and Ballard, the third contributor to the notebook remains anonymous, and no one who has studied MS Ballard 64 to date has given more than a passing glance to their upside-down additions. Yet one of the women on Elstob’s own list is Mary Kettilby, who is noted for having ‘published a collection of incomparable Receipts, with a very good Preface’ – and it is from this very collection (actually a collaborative one ‘By several Hands’) that many of the recipes in the notebook are copied or adapted.³⁰

The repurposing of Elstob’s notebook thus inadvertently enacts the simultaneous conjunction and opposition of women’s intellects and their attention to (in Elstob’s words) ‘houshold Affairs’ (Homily, p. ii). The learned woman of eighteenth-century satire, like Phoebe Clinket of Three Hours After Marriage (1717, by John Gay and others), was slovenly and remiss in domestic tasks – recalling the description of an elderly Elstob ‘surrounded by books and dirtiness’ – while the exemplary one was lauded for not being so. Samuel Johnson infamously praised Elizabeth Carter, for example, by saying she ‘could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus’.³¹

In her 1925 study of Elstob, Ashdown asks: ‘Did Elizabeth devote her days entirely to study, or was she also her brother’s housekeeper? Would Dr Johnson have spoken as approvingly of this learned lady as of the excellent Mrs Carter?’ As proof that she was ‘not unskilled in womanly accomplishments’, Ashdown quotes a letter to Ballard in which Elstob describes wearing a gown partly of ‘my own Spinning, and I wear no other Stockings but what I knit myself’ and cites the Bible for ‘the Glorious Character of a Virtuous Woman’ who ‘seeketh Wool and Flax and worketh willing with her hands’ (pp. 129–30). At the same time, however, Elstob is reluctant to pursue a teaching position in which she would have to instruct pupils in ‘the two Accomplishments of a good House-wife, Spinning and Knitting. Not that I wd be thought to be above doing any commendable Work proper for my sex […] yet I do not think my self proficient enough in these Arts, to become a teacher of them’ (MS Ballard 43, fols 17r-v). Just as in her citation of Kettilby, Elstob seems to recognize these skills as requiring their own form of specialization and expertise.

Both willingness and success at domestic tasks, however, serve as a kind of proof of femininity for a learned woman, who always risks being seen as both insufficiently learned and insufficiently a woman. The same is true of age and beauty, which are similarly emphasized in accounts of Elstob’s life. Ballard’s Memoirs frequently note the reported beauty of the subjects alongside their learning (pp. 5, 62, 154, 182, 157, 284, 352, 439) or once, reluctantly, that ‘her person was not very graceful’ (p. 248). Nearly two centuries later, it matters equally for Ashdown that ‘Elstob produced no work of the first importance’ and that she ‘left no fragrance of personal charm’ (though her story still ‘has in it enough of pity and humanity to command a sympathetic hearing’) (p. 125). Claims for her attractiveness have been based on the initial G in her edition of An English-Saxon Homily, which is reputed to be a portrait, but these are ‘denied with rather brutal emphasis’ by the report in Nichols that ‘Mrs. Elstob was in the later part of her life, though very agreeable in her temper and conversation, a remarkably plain woman’.³²

At the time when Elstob undertook her scholarly projects, of course, she was in her twenties – meaning that she could be described as ‘the Saxon nymph’ and ‘this learned Virgin’.³³ Later biographers characterize the young Elstob as ‘an attractive woman, graced by engaging personal qualities’ that may have influenced contemporaries’ judgment of her work: ‘the pet and female prodigy of the male Anglo-Saxon establishment.³⁴ By the time that ‘her career was over’, she was thirty-two – ‘young in years for a scholar’, as Ada Wallas puts it, but a critical age for a woman, when beauty and marriage prospects are assumed to wane sharply.³⁵ When she came to know Ballard two decades later, Elstob described herself as ‘a poor little contemptible old maid generally Vapour’d up to the ears, but very chearfull, when she meets with an agreeable conversation’ (MS Ballard 43, fol. 5v).

Spinsterhood – the descent from ‘learned Virgin’ to ‘poor little contemptible old maid’ – is a double-edged sword in biographies of female scholars. On the one hand, it removes the dangers of childbirth and the work of raising children, which still continues to be a barrier to women’s career progression today. But on the other hand, it signals a tragic undesirability and lost potential that mirrors the ‘abortive’ termination of Elstob’s work.³⁶ Such a link between physical and intellectual occlusion or barrenness creeps into the writing even of twentieth-century feminists, who might often stress that a female writer received proposals of marriage (and thus the interest of men) even if she did not accept them.³⁷ Similarly, Sylvia Harcstark Myers’ study of the Bluestockings notes that ‘Although Elizabeth Carter avoided marriage at least partially in order to be free to continue her studies, she was not very productive. It is possible that marriage to another scholar might have helped her to pursue work in a more systematic way’.³⁸ Scholarship and domestic life thus somehow reinforce each other in constructing the ideal path to which real women fail to live up: to fail at one often means failing at both.

*

As well as being symbolically representative of ‘the cultural work of femininity’, however, domestic labour also raises the problem of finite time and how this is spent.³⁹ Neither Elstob nor Ballard’s lists ever conclusively settle, after all, whether learning for women is an adjective or a verb: an attribute that a woman has or an action that she performs.

While Ballard restricts inclusion in his catalogue to women ‘who had left behind them at least one book’, this could equally well be a publication that someone else had written about them: Ballard’s investment is in textual evidence, rather the work that the composition of a book implies.⁴⁰ His title, naming those ‘Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences,’ suggests that ‘skill’ might be a passive value to be praised without being practised. Elstob’s entry for Ann Baynard, for example, states that ‘she was perhaps one of the greatest Women that any age has produc’d, both for parts and their Improvement; as her great skill in the Languages and all manner of Learning and Philosophy, has sufficiently made appear’. Her evidence for what makes this apparent, however, is a funeral sermon preached by John Prude in 1697, as none of Baynard’s own writings or even their titles have survived (MS Ballard 64, p. 13). Similarly, Ballard includes Catherine Bovey despite having no works by her, as her ‘exemplary life […] great genius and good judgement improved by reading the finest authors […] if she was not a writer, may at least make us wish that she had been so’ (p. 438). It as though the less a woman is actually known to have done, the more superlative things can be said about her. Many of the examples on both lists are young prodigies who, like Baynard, had died by their mid-twenties—giving evidence of their acquisition of learning and great potential, but without having to show how (or if) this might be realized in their later years. In this context, Elstob’s question ‘What has a Woman to do with Learning?’ takes on an additional meaning. Having beaten the odds in acquiring it and surviving past the prodigy age, what exactly is a woman to do with her learning, and under what material conditions can this take place?

Apart from the loss of books and learned conversation, what Elstob most laments not having after 1715 is focused time: ‘the unhappy Circumstances […] which depriv’d me of Leisure to follow those Studies, which were my only delight and employment when I had nothing else to do’ (MS Ballard 43, fol. 3v). While she often described Old English study as pleasurable and easy, it is also work (both delight and employment) that takes resources, application, and assistance – from her brother, and from the servant they trained to help them with transcriptions.⁴¹ Descriptions of Elstob’s scholarship emphasize her ‘incredible industry’ as ‘an exceptional, hard-working woman’ – or, more pejoratively, as ‘as one “whose understanding appears to have been of that slow but steadily progressive species, which often outstrips genius itself in the race of literature,”’ equipped with ‘thoroughness and unflagging enthusiasm […] rather than to brilliance’.⁴²

Looking back at Elstob’s autobiography above, we can see her using multiple meanings of the word ‘labour’: with William, ‘she labour’d very hard as long as he liv’d’, before trying to earn a living ‘with much difficulty, labour, and ill health’, and having now but ‘a short time […] to Labour here’ on earth before her death (Ballard MS 43, fols 59r-v, 18v). Labour can be vocation, employment for money, and simple existence, and it can be hard to disentangle or assign value to these separate threads.

To see her later teaching work as being below Elstob’s abilities as a scholar (‘an insult […] to her intellect’) would be to deny the very real satisfaction that she evidently took in it.⁴³ She writes of ‘the pleasure [she] enjoy[ed] in’ her small pupils and touchingly describes a little girl who ‘learns exceedingly well, and loves her book and me entirely; nor is she ever more happy than when she is with me, and we study together, even by candle-light, like two old folks’.⁴⁴ Yet it undeniably took up both time and energy, which, as she grew older and her health declined, were ever more limited. As she wrote to Ballard, ‘I have at present a School to my mind, and it wou’d not be without great reluctance, that I cou’d leave it. It is a way of Life I must confess I am fond of, if it were not precarious, and fatiguing, but with that I am content’ (MS Ballard 43, fol. 24v). In other letters, she excuses herself from further helping his antiquarian enquiries by describing how she has ‘no time to do any thing till six at night when I have done the Duty of the day and am then frequently so fatigu’d that I am oblig’d to lye down for an hour or two to rest’; ‘I have but little time to think or do any thing else’ (MS Ballard 43, fols. 5r, 9v). Anne Granville reported that this exhaustion extended even to basic subsistence: ‘when she wants health and spirits to provide better for herself she frequently dines upon a toasted peice [sic] of bread’.⁴⁵

The position of governess at Bulstrode has been seen as a reprieve from these demands. Myra Reynolds speculates that these ‘were comfortable, leisurely, studious years, a delightful haven after her twenty years of hardship, penury, and intellectual starvation. But she was fifty-six when she went to Bulstrode, and the ease and security of her life there came too late to rouse into life the mental activity so long dormant’.⁴⁶ These sentiments are echoed by many later accounts: ‘By the time she was rescued from obscurity and poverty, it was too late’; the appointment ‘restored her in some measure at least to that former world of learning […] But if Elstob’s new security was welcome, the restoration of scholarly links came too late’.⁴⁷

Yet, while the move to Bulstrode in 1739 mitigated Elstob’s feelings of financial precariousness, it did not necessarily provide her with unimpeded time. Portland’s friend and Granville’s sister, the Bluestocking Mary Pendarves (later Delany), optimistically thought that ‘it would be most imprudent of her to refuse such an offer, when no fatigue will be imposed upon her, but all imaginable care will be taken of her’: she feared that Elstob’s health ‘will make her incapable of application, but being settled in a good family where she will have no cares, may be more beneficial to her than the skill of all the physicians’.⁴⁸ Of the post as governess, Pendarves wrote that

all [the Duchess of Portland] requires and hopes of Mrs Elstob is to instruct her children in the principles of religion and virtue, to teach them to speak, read, and understand English well, to cultivate their minds as far as their capacity will allow, and to keep them company in the house, and when her strength and health will permit to take the air with them. All this surely she is well qualified to do, and it would be a sincere joy to me to have our worthy Duchess possest of so valuable a person. (p. 33)

The Duchess being ‘possest’ of Elstob suggests a passive role that justifies Green’s description of her as a ‘family pet’: it is almost as if Elstob herself becomes part of the extensive Portland antiquarian collections. Yet the list of proposed duties is in fact an extensive one, requiring her to spend nearly all of her time with the Duchess’s three (eventually six) children. Elstob enthusiastically described her ‘happiness in this noble family,’ but admitted that ‘my dear little charmers allow me but very little leisure’ – they ‘take up my time so entirely that I have not the least leisure to do anything, from the time they rise till they go to bed they are constantly with me, except when they are with her Grace, which is not long at a time.’ In sum, ‘I have less time than I ever had in my life to command because it is not my own’ (pp. 68, 85; MS Ballard 43, fols 67r-v, 70r).

Her letters from this period bear witness to constant interruption: before leaving Evesham, she had hoped to employ ‘some of my time […] in transcribing some old Charters which by chance I met with’, but only completed one before receiving ‘an unexpected Summons to wait on my Charming Dutchess’ (MS Ballard 43, fol. 65r). With pain and weakness in her right hand increasingly requiring one of her pupils to act as a scribe, ‘I am oblig’d to catch opportunities as they happen’ to write anything (fol. 91r). Conversations with her patroness, in which Elstob hoped to recommend Ballard to some preferment, are stopped just as they begin because ‘some body or other has come in’ (fol. 67r). Indeed, her one complaint about her life is the limited opportunities it gives her to spend time with the Duchess and her Bluestocking friends.⁴⁹ Although, as Hannan argues, Elstob in her later years continued to think of herself as an intellectual, any communication between her and the likes of Portland and Pendarves was always limited by her status as an employee.⁵⁰

*

Sooner or later, everyone writing about Elizabeth Elstob runs into the unknowable barrier of all that she did not do. ‘Elstob’s intellectual passions were denied full expression; her creative vigour was stalled [….] What she might have done, thought or written, and the impact she might have had on succeeding generations of female scholars in the eighteenth century can only be imagined’.⁵¹ Similarly, Yvonne Seale writes that ‘we can only imagine what she might have accomplished if her intellectual activities had not been so thoroughly frustrated when she was just coming into her prime’.⁵²

Faced with this call to imagine, twentieth-century historians of women’s writing sometimes indulge in wistful counterfactuals. The earliest of these is Ada Wallas in 1929, writing that ‘If Elizabeth Elstob had lived to-day, she might have filled a post in a college, or in a girls’ school where advanced work was being done; but in 1715 there were no such schools or colleges’.⁵³ In 1999, Gretsch concludes that

If Elizabeth Elstob had lived in our days, she would, perhaps, have found a post in an English department, which would have provided her with some (moderate) financial base to pursue her scholarly inclinations. Failing to obtain such a post, she could have become a schoolteacher, which, in our days, would have earned her an easier living than she had from her girls’ school at Evesham.⁵⁴

This rhetorical move underlines that Elstob’s fate was a consequence of ‘the restrictions which 18^th-century society placed on women’s scholarship’, and thus both a product of and a testament to her time: ‘That she was able to do so much at this time in history says a great deal about the changes that were rippling through English society at the beginning of the long eighteenth century. That she accomplished so little […] is a reminder of how superficial some of these changes were’.⁵⁵

Yet to place her and the obstacles she faced thus safely into the past, against a narrative of historical progress and improving conditions for women, means denying all that we might find familiar in studying Elstob’s life: the great challenges and small financial rewards of academic publishing; the wreck of unfinished projects interrupted by external circumstances; the difficulty of combining teaching and research (especially when teaching is conceptualized as a kind of ‘carework’ akin to domestic labour); the popular but unhelpful suggestion that precariously-employed academics should find work in schools – and even the temptations of exhaustedly having toast for dinner.⁵⁶

It is true that Gretsch acknowledges that working as a modern schoolteacher (questionably an easy living) ‘would just as well have spelled the end of [Elstob’s] scholarly career,’ and that if she tried to publish her edition of the Catholic Homilies today, she might have run into difficulties obtaining funding or securing a contract with a university press (p. 524). Yet Gretsch sees this as a comment on the state of Anglo-Saxon studies in particular, rather than – as has become increasingly clear over the past two decades – a widespread system of academic precarity in which women working in the humanities are disproportionately likely to be caught.⁵⁷ It is hard not to conclude, with Elstob, that ‘this is not an Age to hope for any encouragement to Learning’.

I am all the more acutely aware of these facts, having begun my own work on Elstob as a Fellow of an Oxford college – albeit in a fixed-term, teaching-focused role – planning my second academic monograph on the contribution of women to the study of English Literature in the eighteenth century, as well as the role that fragmentation and incompletion played in their careers. I am now finishing this article while unemployed in my late thirties, with that larger project abandoned, and likely as my final academic publication. Many of my peers have also left academia, or else are facing redundancy or ever-more exhausting rounds of short-term employment. To be precarious is to teeter over a precipice, with professional status and financial security on one side and oblivion on the other.

It is difficult, in such a context, to reach for the more optimistic conclusion this study was once to have had. I intended to have challenged the framing of Elstob’s life as a tragedy by focusing on what she did accomplish, both before and after 1715. I might have agreed with the position put forward by Anna Smol, who focuses on how Elstob’s scholarship – being ‘amateur’ in the positive sense of the word – could serve as an alternative to the joyless, obfuscatory professionalism she finds in contemporary medieval academia.⁵⁸ I would have argued that we must find value in the work as a process (and often a collaborative one), even if it is never published or cited – that we must value lives and intellectual contributions that do not conform to metrics of achievement or the triumphant arc of a ‘career’. Like Elstob, there is ultimately a great deal I might have done, if either I or the world had been different.

Footnotes