Scotch Verdict*: The Real-Life Story That Inspired The Children’s Hour

When I was twelve years old I took acting lessons. I wanted to be an actress, preferably a child star, and when a tiny school of drama, dance, and voice with the impressive name of Theatre Arts Showcase opened in my neighborhood, I convinced my mother to pay a dollar weekly for a two-hour class session in acting. There were four other prepubescent girls, none of them as fiercely determined as I. Our teacher was a forty-year-old mustachioed man who wore a brown belted suit and worked full-time as a shoe salesman, but the Executive Director of the school, his wife, told me that he had once been in professional theater in Chicago. I was awed enough, mostly by her, the most exquisite, sophisticated blond creature I had ever seen in our dark lower-middle-class community. She was my first love.

Her husband must have been perplexed about what to do with five little girls, four of them envisioning themselves as the Lana Turner of the next decade. There were few scripts for four twelve-year-old Lana Turners and one twelve-year-old Sarah Bernhardt, but for our second session he brought us a fifteen-minute scene in which we could at least all participate, and he kept us working at that scene for the next seven or eight months, until, one by one, all the girls but me dropped out of the class. The scene was from Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. I played Mary Tilford, an adolescent bully. He told us nothing about the play, and I aspired to thoroughness in my acting, so I went to the neighborhood library where I found and read a copy of The Children’s Hour. I was mystified, despite my own powerful crush on the Executive Director. I understood from that first reading that Mary Tilford had fabricated a tale, claiming that her two women teachers, who operated a girls’ boarding school, were doing things they were not supposed to be doing, but I could not quite understand what those things were.

The play was in the adult section of the small library, and since I only had a juvenile’s card I could not check it out, so I returned to reread the play three or four times over the next months. Finally I understood that the two teachers were ruined because Mary Tilford had accused them to her grandmother of being “in love with each other,” and the grandmother had informed all the other parents, who promptly removed their children from the school. No one had ever told me before that the sort of thing I felt for the Executive Director could ruin someone. I was profoundly dismayed, and I continued to be dismayed (although my devotion to the Executive Director never wavered) for the next two years, until my mother and I moved to the other side of town, where I was too far away to continue my acting lessons.

Years later, as a sophomore at NYU, I happened on the play again when I was assigned to read Hellman’s The Little Foxes for a course in American drama. By this time I had had a couple of adventures, and I had taken on a certain patina of sophistication. There was little that would have dismayed me—or rather that I would have admitted dismayed me. But the play had now some sentimental value for me. I associated it with the days of my painful naïveté and my first love. And then I came to think of it as part of a precious cache of secret knowledge, along with books such as The Well of Loneliness and Regiment of Women and We Walk Alone. That the characters in these works invariably ended badly did not surprise me, nor did it disturb me as much as it should have. I was only gratified that there was some mention of the unmentionable in print. I brought them up in conversations very rarely and always carefully—only when I suspected that the other person had had experiences such as mine and I was seeking to open the subject with her. They were sort of coming-out tools.

When I and my environment had changed so that I no longer had a need for such tools, I was furious with the authors for sending their female characters off to hell or suicide or insane asylums, and then I forgot them. I had not thought about The Children’s Hour in at least ten years, until I began research for a dissertation on the popular treatment of women under the law. I found several books by a popularizer of legal history, a Scottish law historian named William Roughead, and in one of them, Bad Companions, which had been published in 1930,1 discovered the source for The Children’s Hour.

I was intrigued by what Hellman had changed from Roughead’s thirty-page account. She set the incident in America, in her own day. It had actually taken place in Scotland, in the early nineteenth century. In her play Mary Tilford is an American girl, her grandmother’s favorite. In reality she was at least half Indian, the putative illegitimate child of a very young Scotsman who went to India and died there. The Scottish woman who accepted the title of her grandmother had many legitimate, purebred grandchildren, and she merely tolerated the girl; but she believed her tale because she could believe less that a young female under her charge could invent such a story. In Hellman’s play the two women sue the grandmother for libel, lose their suit—and one of them, with all the advantages of a Freudian knowledge of neurosis, admits she has long harbored repressed lesbian passions, and she shoots herself.

I was fascinated with the legal aspects of the case as Roughead presented it, but even more fascinated with the two women, Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie. In their fictional form I, as Mary Tilford, had once done them in, and later I had called on them as secret sisters. They had lived with me through my first love in childhood and through my cunning and fear in young adulthood. And now I discovered that they had once really existed. I knew that Roughead had based his accounts on trial records that were then extant. Since the case had been appealed to the House of Lords in London, I assumed all the transcripts were there. I wrote to the Secretary of the House of Lords Record Office, with whom I had had correspondence in looking for other trial records for my dissertation, and I received from him some incomplete pages of the appeal transcript. I was sure that many more pages of transcript must exist, and that they were probably housed somewhere in Scotland. I wanted to drop my dissertation and run to Scotland and find them, wherever they were moldering, probably in the law libraries of Edinburgh.

Instead, I finished my dissertation, which included a study of 156 other women as they were treated in popular accounts of the workings of the law. And I went on to one more project, which led to another, and then another. But although I have now forgotten most of the 156 cases I once studied, I remember Miss Woods and Miss Pirie. The Woods and Pirie case was one of a dozen I came across of women before the twentieth century who were accused in the courts of lesbianism, yet only theirs really touched me—partly because of my early associations with them, I suppose. But even more, I felt somehow that I knew them, and that I wanted to know them better. They were teachers, as I am; they had been well trained in constraint and propriety, as I was; and yet Jane Pirie, despite her training and surface calm, was fierce and given to outbursts of violent passion, just as I am. I wanted to know whether they were really guilty of what they had been accused, what words were used to make such accusations in their day, how they defended themselves, how their judges responded, what happened to women like them after such an experience in the early nineteenth century, what might have happened to me had I, with my temperament, lived then instead of now.

I knew that whether or not men truly believed it, whether or not their personal experiences bore it out, the spoken consensus about the good middle-class woman of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries in Britain was that she was passionless: both her instincts and her socialization kept her chaste until marriage, and once married she became a sexual being only to do her duty to her husband and to help repopulate Britain. If it was agreed that women had no sexual drive in relation to men, then surely it was inconceivable that they might feel sexual passion for each other.

But I wanted to know what a woman’s life would be if she did feel sexual passion for another woman. Or if someone, perhaps someone raised on a different social level or in a different culture, where women were thought of as sexual creatures, less madonna and more whore—if that person said she did. What if a girl raised in India, or among the lower orders, raised where flesh was barer, where women were segregated from men and yet exposed always to chatter about sex, or where the delicacies and stringencies of middle- and upper-class Anglo-Christianity had no hold—what if such a girl (for a lark, for revenge, or in truth, like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”) said that she saw two respectable women copulating together?

What if in 1810 in Scotland she said that in the middle of the night, night after night, in the dormitory where she slept, she had seen two school mistresses, Christian women, in bed together, not only kissing and caressing, but going through motions that resembled sexual intercourse? Whether she told the truth or she lied, who would believe her? And if she was believed, what would happen to the school mistresses?

The research I did for my dissertation gave me only cursory answers. And then I forgot about my questions for years. But tonight, for some reason—perhaps because I am between projects now, and while my body luxuriates in leisure my mind abhors it—I thought of the Scottish school mistresses and I told Ollie about them. Talking to her, I suddenly wanted very much to find out what really happened to them. I decided to go to Edinburgh this summer.

Ollie said she would like to come with me. She needs to revise her manuscript, which she has just completed in first draft, but she thinks she would be able to work in Scotland just as well as in New York.

Coming from the airport last Wednesday afternoon, our taxi sped through some residential streets not far from the university. I caught a brief glimpse of a group of about ten school girls, all dressed in green monogrammed blazers, gray skirts, and green knee-high socks. I craned to see them as we passed, wanting images I could hold in my mind for the faces of Miss Munro and Miss Stirling and all the others. The taxi moved too quickly and I could not make them out individually. I was left only with the impression of round pink cheeks and smooth brown hair. Most of them were probably ten or twelve, much younger than the important girls in my drama, but about the age of Miss Hunter and the younger Miss Dunbar. Not an Indian girl among them, but I have no trouble seeing her. Her skin is quite brown. I thought at first that she might have British features superimposed on that dark skin, but I don’t picture her that way now. She is very much Indian, of the large type rather than the delicate, with heavy eyelids.

I have spent all week, since Ollie and I arrived here, peering at faces. I think if I can fix pictures of all these people in my imagination I will write about them more clearly. Fashion changes, and customs change—but faces and characters must repeat themselves through the generations. I believe I have found the modern counterparts of most of the principals in the case.

For Charlotte Whiffin, the maidservant, my image is a girl I saw Friday night in a working-class disco that we happened into after an early dinner. The place was almost empty. She was on the floor, gracelessly dancing at a distance from her partner, barely lifting her feet or moving her body. They both, but she especially, looked bored—worse than bored, lifeless, without passion or hope. She is stocky, white-skinned, pimply. Several times while she danced she nervously tucked her white blouse into her blue skirt with her thumbs. I imagine her life to be almost unalloyed drudgery. She is probably a waitress. Nothing can transform her from the drudge she has become since she left childhood, not even “going out for a good time.” I think she gossips viciously, losing herself in the meanest smears, which perhaps alone have the power to give her a jolt of life. What else could claim her interest?

I found two Marianne Woodses. The first was a young Marianne, about nineteen. I saw her on a bus that Ollie and I took to the National Library the day after we arrived here. She was very erect and stately for so young a girl, lovely and cold. She sat entirely still, aloof, removed. Noli me tangere. Who would dare to touch her? At her stop she glided off the bus. She was perfect in a manner that makes me unreasonably irritated.

The second Marianne Woods I found on Sunday. I wanted to go to St. Giles’s because it had been the largest Presbyterian church in Edinburgh even when Jane Pirie was alive, and I think she must have come there often, at least during her childhood since it is near Lady Stairs Close, where she had lived. The associate preacher is a woman. I almost didn’t notice her until Ollie said, “There is your Marianne Woods.” She was right. There was Marianne Woods at about thirty-five, still erect and lovely despite a pockmarked face that relieves her from perfection. And she had been made more human by sorrow and the years. She read the closing prayer in a voice that was self-assured and intelligent. I suppose many of her parishioners are in love with her. You would still not dare to touch her, but you might hope that from her stately position she would deign to touch you.

I could find Jane Pirie nowhere, although I searched for her harder than for any of the others. Finally, this morning, I realized that whenever I looked for her, I myself appeared in my mind’s eye: not my face but—what shall I call it?—my soul, my temperament, whatever I am inside.

Ollie has a cold. I feared that would happen to one of us, since it was 96 degrees Fahrenheit when we left New York and 41 when we got off the plane in Edinburgh. Where does one find chicken soup in Scotland?

I actually had my hands on the complete, original trial transcripts today in the Signet Library. When the librarian first brought them out to me, I felt so awed that I was almost afraid to touch them. She must have thought I believed I was looking at the Magna Charta. Finally I went through the whole lot, very gingerly, to see what was there. There are over eight hundred pages. I intend to read through all the transcripts first to get a clearer picture of Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods and the others. Then I will go back and examine the trial itself.

Thus far I have been able to find little about the mistresses’ backgrounds. Both had been governesses before they opened the girls’ boarding school. How else might they have supported themselves in that day?

If her father’s fortunes remained stable a girl of the middle class in early-nineteenth-century Britain could expect to drift into young ladyhood in the same idleness she had known from childhood, awaiting the suitor who would remove her from her patriarchal home into his. If her father’s fortunes became uncertain, however, or if his hold on middle-class status was never more than precarious, a young lady who was still unclaimed at the age of seventeen or eighteen might have felt obliged to seek employment. But there were few kinds of jobs open to her.

In previous centuries there had been a number of trades that were considered appropriate for females of her class, but gradually those trades were taken over by men and they were now thought neither appropriate for her nor attainable. The universities were closed to her so she could not hope to train for a profession. And most professions were anyway closed to her. If she had some literary talent she might join the ranks of the popular lady novelists who were just beginning to emerge at this time. If not, her choices were few: she could be a paid companion to a wealthy woman or a teacher of some sort—giving private lessons, teaching in a school, or living with a family as a governess.

Governesses had been fixtures in upper-class households since Tudor days, but in the late eighteenth century, with a rising middle class that had pretensions to refinement, the number of governess positions grew, so that a genteel young lady who had to support herself would have had little trouble finding employment—if not in an upper-class household, then in a home not too socially disparate from the one in which she had grown up.

Such a young lady would probably have learned the rudiments of culture in her own home. Perhaps she too had had a governess who taught her reading, writing, some history and geography, some mathematics, along with sewing and embroidering. Or perhaps her mother had taught her these subjects. She may have been sent to a gentleman once a week to learn French and to a lady to learn music. Or possibly she had been at a boarding school, which was becoming a popular option for the education of middle-class girls by the end of the eighteenth century. Wherever she had got her education, it was rarely thorough, but it was considered sufficient to allow her to teach other young ladies.

However, while she might have found a governess’ position without much difficulty, the literature of the period suggests that it was not very likely she would have been happy in her role. Mary Wollstonecraft complained at the end of the eighteenth century that a governess’ chances of meeting with a reasonable employer were not better than one in ten, that having hired a governess the lady of the house would “continually find fault to prove she is not ignorant, and be displeased if her daughters do not improve, but angry if the proper methods are taken to make them do so.” If a governess had some pride in her attainments and resented that a woman who was her intellectual inferior and barely her social superior should have power over her, her position would have been painful. Understanding this, it is not surprising to discover that by the mid-nineteenth century, according to the Victorian writer Harriet Martineau, governesses comprised the largest single group found in insane asylums. And by the time Martineau did her research, the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, which provided housing for unemployed governesses as well as counseling and old-age pensions, had been in existence for some years. In the early nineteenth century governesses had no such benevolent institutions to look after their interests and protect them from the vagaries of tyrannical employers.

There was little hope of escape for the governess, except through marriage—unless she could become her own employer. She could teach private students if she had some particular talent like dancing or drawing, but such employment was always uncertain—she might do very well one month and starve the next. If she was especially brave during that era when women rarely entered business, she could open a school. To be mistress of her own establishment must have seemed very attractive to a strong-minded governess. If she had some capital with which to set up a school, she could live where she was in charge rather than in the home of a family where she was a stranger, she could establish rules that she thought reasonable and effective for instruction and discipline, and she could enforce them as she believed best without having to be hourly accountable to the Lady of the house. The advertisements that were placed in Edinburgh newspapers during the early nineteenth century suggest that not a few Scottish governesses sought to liberate themselves from their subordinate role by opening their own boarding school for young ladies, as did Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods.

I discovered through the transcripts that Miss Woods and Miss Pirie met in 1802, in a Mr. Dallaway’s art class, which they both attended with the hope of adding art to those subjects they were already qualified to teach. Jane was eighteen at the time; Marianne was nineteen. Jane had already been a governess for a year, teaching the three daughters of General Dirom, and Marianne had worked for some months as a governess and then assisted her uncle as a teacher of elocution. At a time when young ladies of their class were so often silly and helpless little misses, they must have found a good deal to admire in each other.

Jane Pirie’s father was a writer of religious books. None of his works is extant. In checking the Edinburgh Postal Directory I found that he identified himself by his profession every year throughout the 1780s and 1790s; as late as 1814 he is listed as “James Pirie, writer.” Her mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. They lived in Lady Stairs Close, one of the more respectable quarters of the Old Town in Edinburgh, where Richard Steele once supped and Bobbie Burns lived briefly in his more affluent days. Jane’s older sister Margaret was a governess in the household of Sir Archibald Dunbar until she married in 1807. Through a series of circumstances, Margaret’s job was to become fateful for her sister.

According to letters of reference that are part of the court record, Jane Pirie refused to leave Edinburgh in 1805 and 1807 although her employers asked that she move with them. It seems that she could not bear to be parted from Marianne. I think the first letter helps confirm the theory that the nineteenth century found romantic friendships between women to be perfectly normal. Jane Pirie told her employer that she could not go to Glasgow because of a close friend, and he did not seem to think it odd. The letters also show that Jane was a competent teacher, rather authoritarian, probably quite dramatic. Does an “ardent” temper mean that even before she had Mrs. Woods’ antics to contend with, she flew into rages without regard to who was listening?

Letters of Reference: Miss Jane Pirie

I feel very much regret at parting with Miss Pirie, who has conducted herself very much to my satisfaction and done every duty to my little ones. At the same time, were it even in my power, I would not be so unjust as to ask her to remove with us to Glasgow when to remain in Edinburgh where she is near a dear friend is so crucial to her happiness. She informs me that she wishes to remain in Edinburgh also in order to complete herself in those branches of education she has not yet had the opportunity to do. This will certainly, in future life, be greatly to her advantage, and will make her more valuable to her employer.

Since our household must return to the country, I am happy to find that Miss Pirie has the prospect of getting into a situation in Edinburgh, where she wishes to remain, in which her abilities as a teacher will be justly appreciated. I, from my own experience, have reason to think very highly of them. Whatever she professes to teach, she teaches thoroughly. Her endeavours to facilitate the progress of her pupil are unremitting, and consequently successful; and she has ever maintained a proper authority. Miss Pirie’s language and pronunciation are uncommonly good. She is a capital English scholar, has a competent knowledge of the French language, and has, in the short time she has been with us, brought on her pupil extremely well in writing, accounts, geography, music, drawing, etc. To her character and conduct 1 can likewise bear the most ample testimony. Nor, though her temper is ardent, did I ever find that it ever hurried her into impatience. In all that related to her pupil, I found her always willing to receive advice and to follow any plans that I suggested; and, in a word, that she conducted herself truly to my satisfaction.

I have found less information about Marianne Woods. She was the daughter of an English-born clerk. Although the transcripts do not indicate why she left her parents, from the time she was fifteen she lived with her uncle, William Woods, and his wife, Ann Quelch Woods. William Woods was an Edinburgh comedy actor, and he trained Marianne in elocution, rhetoric, and literature so that she might earn her own living as a teacher. When he retired from the stage in 1802 Marianne assisted him in giving private lessons. He died at the end of that year and she went off to London, to Camden House Academy, where she had a job as an assistant mistress.

Why did she stay at Camden House for only one year? Perhaps she found London too wild or too lonesome. Perhaps she returned to Edinburgh because she felt obligated to her aunt, Ann Woods, who had given Marianne a home for four years and now was alone and had no means of support. Or perhaps she returned because she missed Jane Pirie.

Apparently they had become passionate friends almost immediately in that era when romantic friendship between women was an accepted social institution. Marianne was a year older than Jane, and the transcripts allude to her having been more “polished in manners” than Jane. But she seems to have had a careful, subdued quality about her that was very different from Jane’s forthright, energetic personality. Each must have admired in the other what she herself lacked, and they also shared interests and values—in literature, art, female self-sufficiency, competence. The only discordant note in their friendship at the beginning seems to have been Jane’s devotion to the Church of Scotland, her spending long hours in worship on Sunday, denying herself a hot meal until the Sabbath was over. Marianne had been loosely brought up as an Episcopalian and religion meant much less to her. Perhaps she had a modifying effect on Jane’s religious practices for a while.

Maybe before Marianne left for Camden House Academy they had talked about opening a school so that they might always live and work together, and Marianne went to London to see how a boarding school for young ladies was run. Or perhaps it was not until they had known one another for many years that they decided that to be their own mistresses would be a great improvement over their present lives. Or they may not have ever discussed such a move. But one day, in the spring of 1809, after Jane Pirie had been a governess with the Campbells for two years, she went with her charges to visit their friend at Drumsheugh, near the wealthy New Town section of Edinburgh.

Drumsheugh had not long before been part of the pleasure grounds of the Earl of Moray, but at the turn of the century a large portion of the property had been sold at public auction. It stood at the west end of Queen Street. Eventually the city, with its shops and markets and offices, would encroach, but now, in the spring of 1809, it was still full of blackbirds and thrushes and there was an unobstructed view across the Firth of Forth to the northwestern mountains. A few houses had lately been built there, though most of the area remained green and lush open field. Nearby, on the bank along the Water of Leith, were thick trees, and the corncrakes chirped without ceasing in the dewy grass. One could forget that the filth and noise and crowds of Edinburgh were only twenty minutes away by foot and much less by carriage.

Perhaps Jane wandered alone there on this fateful day while her charges had tea with their friend, though surely she would have been invited to join them. But at some time during this outing she came across a house that was in its final stages of construction, and the carpenter invited her in to look. Maybe she entered out of curiosity or to pass the time. It had a spacious drawing room and dining hall and several small rooms on the lower floor. The upper floor contained two very large bedrooms and two small ones. Its new wood and glass and wallpaper and brick must have been very appealing. She must have wondered how, short of marriage to a wealthy man (which was beyond her reach), she could ever become the proprietor of such a place. Maybe it was not until Jane Pirie saw the house that she thought she would like to open a school with Marianne Woods. Perhaps the sight of the house helped crystalize for her what it was she wanted to do with her life: live together with Marianne in security and stability, without the worry that an employer might move her off to Glasgow or the country. She had only recently engaged with the Campbells to serve another term, until November, but now she seemed to believe she must have that house and nothing else would do.

She had already been working for eight years and had managed to lay aside some money. True, she was only twenty-five, but she had met with nothing but success as a governess and probably could not imagine failure. Since the Edinburgh papers of the day often carried advertisements for women who were contemplating the establishment of girls’ schools, why should she believe that what so many other women dared do was beyond her? Perhaps she had the same confidence in Marianne that she had in herself because she admired her so. And after all, not only had Marianne been able to support herself through her teaching, but she had also been the very responsible, sole support of her aunt.

I suspect that Jane counted her savings upon her return to the Campbells’ that evening and then sent to Marianne Woods to tell her of the house. Perhaps Jane declared that if they pooled their resources they would have enough to rent it, buy furniture and school supplies, open the doors for business, and be their own mistresses forevermore. Marianne, the more cautious of the two, may have had reservations—the idea of the school might be a good one, but they would have to skimp too much now and it would be wiser to wait and save more; their finances were not equal so she did not know how she could claim full partnership and she would probably be dissatisfied with less; she had the responsibility of her aunt and did not know how Mrs. Woods would fit in to the school; Jane would not be free until next November and should not dare break a contract as it would surely damage her reputation, and Marianne feared she would be incapable of running the school by herself.

But Jane must have had answers to everything. Of course they would be full partners, regardless of how much or how little money each put in. Marianne should believe this to be fair since she would earn the right to claim full partnership by managing the school by herself from June until November, when Jane’s agreement with the Campbells would be fulfilled. Mrs. Woods would live in the house, and she could even assist Marianne with the preparations and the management—with both Marianne and Mrs. Woods working in this way, surely Marianne could see that the name of Woods must in all fairness be placed right alongside that of Pirie in everything having to do with the school: Miss Pirie’s and Miss Woods’ School for Young Ladies. If they delayed they would lose the house, and there would never again be one like it.

Jane and Marianne signed the lease on April 1, 1809.

According to the transcripts, Marianne and her aunt moved into the house on Whitsunday, May 15, 1809. Mrs. Woods dealt with the merchants and established their presence in the community. Marianne solicited pupils. Jane, although she still lived with the Campbells, helped pay the bills of the house. Miss Hay, Miss Sandford, who was the Bishop’s daughter, and Miss Clendenning, who had studied with Marianne before, signed to begin in September. At the beginning of December, a little over a month after Jane Pirie moved into the house, Lady Helen Cumming Gordon came to them upon the recommendation of Lady Dunbar, her daughter, in whose household Jane’s sister, Margaret, had been a governess. Lady Cumming Gordon offered her natural granddaughter, Jane Cumming, a native of India, as a scholar. Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods asked to meet the girl. She was dark-skinned. I can only guess what went on after that interview, but I have gone through enough of the transcripts to have some notion of what their respective attitudes might have been.

“She will drive the other pupils away,” Mrs. Woods must have warned. Jane Pirie agreed.

“She is related to Dame Cumming Gordon and recognized by her as her grandchild,” Marianne must have said. “If she were purple, she would not drive away pupils.”

“Don’t make a foolish mistake,” Margaret must have warned her sister. “If you accept this Indian girl your fortune is made. One word from Lady Cumming Gordon and every fine family in Scotland will be sending their daughters to you. But if you don’t accept the girl because she is dark, everyone will say how despicable your behavior is, no matter what they think in their hearts. Here Dame Cumming Gordon acknowledges her, despite Her Ladyship’s sorrow over her son’s actions, despite the girl’s color and illegitimacy, takes the child into her noble family and into her home, and here you refuse to take her into your school. Trust me. I know these ladies. There is color and then there is color. I know what a word from such a lady can do for you.”

She was persuasive and she was correct. Jane Cumming became a pupil before Christmas. By the spring, largely through Lady Cumming Gordon’s recommendations, the school enrolled the two Miss Dunbars, Miss Dewar, Miss Anstruther, Miss Hunter, the two Miss Edgars, Miss Cunynghame, and the two Miss Frasers. At the end of the following summer Miss Clendenning left and Miss Stirling and Miss Munro became pupils.

Five of the pupils were day students. The others slept at the house, five girls in one of the two large bedrooms and four girls in the other. Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods each slept in one of the bedrooms, in order that the young ladies might at all times be under the observation of one of their mistresses. In another small room Mrs. Woods slept. A fourth room, which might have been used as a small bedroom, was kept instead as a general dressing room for the school.

They taught everything but dancing and writing themselves. It must have been more work than either had dreamed. Jane Pirie must have been always apprehensive that they were failing or they would fail. It was not like having charge as a governess does over one or two or even three girls. They had constant responsibility for more than a dozen girls and there were no parents to settle altercations or to intimidate their children into good behavior by their presence. The mistresses had to set the tone by themselves. If they were not stern, so many high-spirited young ladies in such close confines would soon take advantage and make a mockery of the whole endeavor. Punishment for the least transgression must be swift, they probably decided. But how were they to do all this—prepare lessons and administer them and supervise the study time and correct the work and prepare new lessons; teach the girls morals, religion, and good manners and exercise them and keep peace among them and keep them healthy? If they should fail? And how were they to find time for each other in the midst of all this? The conception must have seemed so easy, the reality so difficult.

But the worst of it, for Jane Pirie, was Mrs. Ann Quelch Woods.

William Woods, who was born in England, had been an actor with the old Theatre Royal in Edinburgh since it was built in the 1780s, and for ten years before that a player of lagos and Horatios from the Haymarket in London to wherever a Shakespearean company might travel in Scotland. Although later in his life he seems to have cultivated an image of respectability, as a young man he had been the boon companion of Robert Fergusson, the Scottish poet who died at the age of twenty-four, in 1774, in the bedlam attached to the Edinburgh poorhouse. Between the beginning of 1772 and the end of 1773, during the time when Fergusson wrote most of the poems for which he is remembered, he and William Woods were several times locked up for rowdiness by the Edinburgh City Guards. Some years afterward, Woods also drank with the poet Robert Burns at Dawney Douglas’ bawdy tavern in the Anchor Close, a dark, narrow alley decorated with ancient mottoes: “The Lord Be My Support,” “O Lord, In Thee Is All My Trust,” “Be Merciful To Me.” Woods’ friendship with both these literary lights is recorded on his tombstone.

In his later years he appears to have been a scholar and a gentleman, which did him no good on the boards when, as an aging man, he found the roles he had popularized going to younger and inferior actors, and even less good when he tried to bargain with the enterprising and devious John Jackson, manager of the Theatre Royal. After two decades with the Theatre Royal, Woods retired in 1802 with only a little over two hundred pounds to live on. He was forced to supplement his income by giving lessons in elocution.

While all educated Scots could write the English language, many could not speak it without the heavy accent that made them unintelligible outside of north Britain. Since the Napoleonic Wars had begun in 1796, the British were not welcome on the Continent, and wealthy Scots now often went on holiday to London or watering places such as Bath, where they were made very aware of their dialect. Accepting the chauvinistic view of the south, which purported to be the true center of culture, many of them sought instruction in speaking the language as it was spoken by the better classes in London. A famous actor with a genuine English accent would have had a considerable advantage in appealing to the Scots’ sense of cultural inferiority. Apparently William Woods had enough pupils so that he required Marianne to assist him in giving lessons. But he did not live long enough to amass much money from his students. He died at the end of his first year of retirement from the theater, leaving his widow, Ann Quelch Woods, with very little.

Ann Woods seems to have had the grand style of a theatrical personage, although her career as an actress was brief and not luminous. She had once been Leonora in The Mourning Bride and she had played a secondary role in the tragedy of Douglas with Mrs. Siddons in 1784. She was seen by much of Edinburgh then, since the city came to a virtual halt with the appearance of Mrs. Siddons, the most beloved British actress of her century. Everyone flocked to the theater. The General Assembly was deserted by its members, the Court was obliged to fit its important business in on alternate days, and even clergymen stood in line at the theater from the early afternoon. Perhaps Ann Woods never recovered from the dazzle of such reflected light. But that was the heyday of her career and almost the end of it. She apparently had no great talent for the stage and vanished from it after the mid-1780s. She would have had no more place in the public record were it not for her niece’s devotion to her, which brought her to the Drumsheugh school and her battle with Miss Pirie.

It was on account of Marianne’s attachment to Mrs. Woods that Jane Pirie was miserable. Had Mrs. Woods simply been content to be supported by her niece, there might not have been a problem. But she saw herself as the manager of the school, and the tradesmen and merchants made their bills out to her, since it was she who had opened the accounts in the beginning. One day, about six weeks after Jane Pirie joined the school, she decided they must have a more detailed terrestrial globe and she went to Princes Street that afternoon to buy one at a shop with which the school had an account. She was told by the owner that he could not give credit on her signature, and she must send her mistress in. She explained that she was the mistress of the school. He informed her that it was his understanding that Mrs. Woods was the mistress. She must have told him that it was largely with her money that the school began. “That is no business of mine,” he must have said. “Mrs. Woods has told me that she is the mistress. The account is in her name, she has paid the bills, and so, as far as I know, she is the mistress.”

I think that Jane Pirie must have walked out in high dudgeon, and not seeing a carriage for hire she ran almost all the mile and a half to Drumsheugh, repeating over and over the man’s insufferable words and what she would tell Mrs. Woods.

She threw open the door and shouted, “Mrs. Woods, please come here immediately,” though Miss Cunynghame and the elder Miss Dunbar were in the hallway. “You must go to Whyte’s at once,” she said to Mrs. Woods, “and tell that monstrous man to change the account into my name right away or the school will do no more business with him.”

“Surely not at once,” Mrs. Woods said. “It is only an hour to dinner.”

“At once,” Jane Pirie said.

Marianne had gone walking with the younger girls.

“I will not be ordered to do nonsense, and that so peremptorily,” Mrs. Woods replied. “I will tell Mr. Whyte to change the name, of course. I only had it put in my name temporarily, for convenience, because you were away at Mrs. Campbell’s. I had always intended to change it once you came. But tomorrow or the day after will be plenty of time, certainly.”

“That man insulted me,” Jane shouted. “I will not allow the sun to go down on his unchallenged insult. I can be vindicated only if you go to him. Please go now,” she repeated.

“You’re being childish,” Mrs. Woods whispered, “and the young ladies are listening.” She went upstairs to her room.

That was the beginning of the war, though I see that its seeds had been planted long before. Not only had Mrs. Woods assumed the management of the school from the very start, but also her conception of what the school should be was, judging from two advertisements I discovered, nothing like Jane’s conception. This is the advertisement for the school, as it was written by Jane Pirie, that was to have been placed in the Caledonian Mercury, the Aberdeen Journal, the Edinburgh Evening Courant, the Edinburgh Advertiser, and the Edinburgh Weekly Journal:

An establishment is now being formed by two Edinburgh Ladies, for a limited number of young ladies who are presently, or who have the parts to be, serious scholars. They will be taught arithmetic in all its branches on the newest and most approved plan, geography and the construction of maps geometrically, writing in its various forms and uses, and they will also be given instruction in the principles of literature, history, philosophy, religion, etc.

Then, after the Whyte’s incident, Jane probably thought herself degraded. It was clear to her that she had been represented as a mere employee in the school, even though the school would never have existed without her idea and efforts and money. Injustice galled her, and this was the most outrageous injustice. Regardless of what she felt for Marianne, how could she tolerate this—being talked back to and made to seem insignificant by this woman who had seldom done a lick of work in her life and was now a dependent at her advanced age because of her husband’s lack of prudence and foresight and her own uninventiveness?

Mrs. Woods would not go to change the name the next day or the next. Finally, Marianne, distressed by the anger between the two, went herself to change the name, but that would not placate Jane.

In the beginning the three women had always supped together. Now Marianne ate with her aunt in Mrs. Woods’ room and Jane had her evening meal alone. It seems that Jane could not forget the matter of the name and the treachery it represented to her. On Christmas Day she told Marianne she wished a certificate from Mrs. Woods stating the truth. Mrs. Woods handed a slip of paper to her the evening of December 26. “You see that I am willing to do whatever is required of me,” she must have said. The paper read:

What was it she wanted? Marianne must have asked. She had Mrs. Woods’ apology and her own promise that the mistakes would never again occur. What more could be done? Jane must have resented Marianne’s not knowing how to soothe her almost as much as she resented the injustices.

“That woman must go or I must go,” Jane said in March. She had had no conversation with Mrs. Woods since that fatal day in December. Probably there were truces—or rather there were periods when Marianne and Jane could sit together and talk of things as they used to, and simply be, one with the other. And Jane barely saw Mrs. Woods during the day or evening. But invariably something would happen—perhaps Mrs. Woods would order the servant to buy pork roasts when Jane had said they must have mutton; she would cut larkspur and peonies from the terraced garden in front when Jane had said they were skimpy there and must be left to grow, and all the cut flowers should come from the back garden. And the war would begin again.

“Either she or I must go,” Jane would tell Marianne. Then perhaps there would be tearful scenes, even in front of the students, with Marianne begging Jane to have pity on her. “It is not my aunt you are hurting when you say that,” she would cry. “It is I who am tormented. If you love me as you say you do, why do you do this to me? Where am I to send her? Where can she go? I beg you, stop this if you love me.” Then Jane would be contrite and they would hold each other and cry and kiss, and there would be peace for a while.

Apparently, in the summer it was better. Marianne and Jane and the Indian girl (Jane’s namesake, to her great consternation) went to Portobello, a seaside town a few miles from Edinburgh, for a holiday—Dame Cumming Gordon paid handsomely for the mistresses to keep her granddaughter while she herself traveled to Bath. Mrs. Woods stayed alone in Drumsheugh. Jane must have fogotten she existed.

But when they returned at the beginning of August, they found that Mrs. Woods had redecorated. A large painting of her husband in costume hung in the hallway. In the dining room, a sideboard that Jane had never before seen replaced the one she had selected and paid for on the same day they rented the house. Knickknacks and geegaws were everywhere. “This is all I have left of my married life,” Mrs. Woods must have explained, “but I wished to share them with the school. I wished to give something, since I have been accused of giving nothing.”

At the end of the month Jane consulted Mrs. Hamilton, who had often been in litigation when Jane taught her niece, the Earl of Lucan’s daughter, and was advised to find an attorney or an objective party who would make an amicable financial settlement between herself and Marianne. Jane told Marianne she would leave as soon as this was done. They must have wept and remonstrated and shouted at each other. Some weeks later Marianne took away everything her aunt had put up over the summer. Then Mrs. Woods said that she would be the one to leave. At this, Jane told Marianne that she would be happy even to help support her aunt: they would find a place for her to live somewhere in Edinburgh or nearby Leith, and Marianne might visit her as often as she liked. They were agreed on Marianne’s birthday, October 12. Then they fought again late in October because, Jane said, Marianne had not yet made a single move to relocate Mrs. Woods. On November 4, however, Mrs. Woods said she would leave of her own accord if she might have a third of the profits of the school. Jane must have thought it a bargain, though she was probably resentful too. But at the end of that week Marianne announced that her aunt was developing cataracts and would very possibly be blind before long. She could not send her alone to a flat, even with a third of the profits. And after that they had another problem.

On Saturday afternoon, November 10, 1810, Jane Cumming went to her grandmother’s home at 22 Charlotte Square, where she spent the rest of the weekend. She returned to the school on Monday. On Wednesday morning her grandmother sent a servant to fetch her and her two cousins, the Miss Dunbars. Then the Edgars’ servant came for the two Miss Edgars and the Frasers’ servant came for the two Miss Frasers. The next day Mr. Stirling, Mrs. Munro, and Mrs. Anstruther came for their daughters, and then Lady Cunynghame came for her daughter. By Friday afternoon not a student remained in the school.

In 1792, George Cumming, at the age of eighteen, went to India in the service of the Honourable East India Company, as had his father and uncles before him. He was the eldest son of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Penrose Cumming of Altyre. Because of his father’s friendship with Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Control for India Affairs, George was placed in an advantageous position in Patna, and his father looked forward to his glorious career. But George died before he reached his twenty-seventh birthday. He left a natural daughter, born at the end of 1795 or at the beginning of 1796 to him and a fifteen-year-old Indian girl whose father was a minor official. The child was born about the same time George’s father inherited Gordonstoun and added to his family name the last name of Sir William Gordon, the relative who was gracious enough to die unmarried.

George’s daughter had been given a Christian name, Jane, and at the demand of her Indian grandfather the last name of Cumming. The old gentleman could accomplish no more for his granddaughter, although George continued to see her mother, apparently promised to restore her honor in the near future, and provided money for the baby’s welfare. He also hired a nurse for her so that the Indian girl would not be tied down with the child. When Jane Cumming was four, George informed his mother, Helen Cumming Gordon, of the child’s existence at the same time as he informed her that he had developed a debilitating illness. She wrote that he must return home to Scotland immediately and sent him a sum of money sufficient for the child’s upkeep for the next dozen years. She also wrote to a distant cousin who resided in Calcutta, a Mr. Palmer, begging him to assist George in his return and in setting up a trust for the child. George did not return home, and he refused all Mr. Palmer’s offers of assistance.

Ten months later he died, but not before he communicated with Mr. Palmer, asking him to take charge of Jane’s education, and enclosing the large draft that his mother had sent. Mr. Palmer immediately met with the child’s mother and grandfather and arranged to have her sent to a Christian boarding school in Calcutta. When she complained of ill treatment by the other children only weeks after her arrival—she was the only child there not entirely European—he immediately found another school for her in which there were Indian children as well as European.

George’s mother was prostrated by shock and grief at his death, which she blamed on his transgression. When her husband became seriously ill the following year she also blamed her son. With her husband’s growing illness she must have concluded that she could help save her son’s soul if she brought his natural child to Scotland and raised her. Helen Cumming Gordon must have had no difficulty convincing the girl’s Indian grandfather to have the girl sent to her. The child’s mother was now settled in Bombay and had just begun a courtship with an English military man.

In 1803 Jane Cumming arrived in Scotland and went to live with her natural grandparents at Gordonstoun. In 1804 Alexander Cumming Gordon appeared to have a remission from his illness. He was also made a baronet that year. Shortly afterward, Jane was sent to a boarding school at Elgin, near the Gordonstoun estate, operated by a Miss Charles, who had once been a governess in the Cumming family and was now training daughters of shopkeepers and craftsmen. Dame Cumming Gordon had decided that her natural granddaughter should be bred to a trade such as mantua-maker or milliner, so that she might make a living by her own efforts in a reputable but inferior station in life. The girl continued at the school for almost five years, spending only occasional holidays at Gordonstoun. In 1806 Sir Alexander died, and the following year Lady Cumming Gordon moved to Edinburgh so that she might be near her favorite daughter and namesake, Lady Helen Dunbar.

In the previous century the aristocracy avoided Edinburgh unless called there by court duties or other obligations. Because there were few decent residential areas outside of George Square, where several mansions stood, people of rank much preferred their country estates. They were loath even to visit Edinburgh, and for pleasure they made frequent trips to London or the Continent. The city was almost unrelievedly ugly, with its narrow lanes and dirty streets, noisy marketplaces, and crowded, multistoried houses. The wealthy who were forced to dwell in the city because of some duty generally inhabited the intermediate floors of the large tenement houses of ten or twelve stories which were built in the many wynds and closes that connected to the High Street. They occupied the same buildings as mechanics and sweeps and dancing masters and shopkeepers, the poor classes living on the lowest floors, where the stench from the street was very noticeable, or on the highest floors, which occasioned strenuous climbs up many flights of stairs. The stairs were usually filthy and dark, and they were worn and sloping with traffic. It was no easy task for fashionable ladies to crush their hoops of four or five yards in circumference up those narrow stairs. And one had to walk the streets of Edinburgh with great care in the eighteenth century, since it was customary for the tenement dwellers to pour their slops out of the windows. Sometimes, before pouring they practiced the delicacy of calling “gardyloo” (garde à l’eau: watch the water), and they would halt if they heard in response, “Haud yer hand.” But even the wealthy who rode in sedan chairs had no guarantee against the deafness or slow reflexes of the slop-pot emptiers.

However, all that belonged to the section of the city that came to be called the Old Town. In the late eighteenth century, the architect James Craig planned a self-contained residential area of stately streets, tree-lined walks, and lovely squares in a valley overlooking the old part of the city. In 1791 Robert Adams designed the first development, to be called Charlotte Square. The house in Charlotte Square, which Lady Cumming Gordon bought for twenty-five hundred pounds in 1806, had been built five years earlier. Like all the houses in Charlotte Square, it was three stories high, made of the best hewn stone, and enclosed by an iron railing of uniform height. Lady Cumming Gordon’s neighbors were, for the most part, magistrates and titled people. Her sister, who was the wife of Henry Mackenzie, the novelist, lived close by. The Drumsheugh school was a half mile away.

The New Town was indeed lovely and placid seeming. It had no more resemblance to the Old Town, as one nineteenth-century observer noted, than if each had been built by distant nations or in different quarters of the globe. But it was exposed to very violent winds, even worse than those which raged in the Old Town with incredible fury. Houses were sometimes blown down. Large trees were torn up by the roots. People were carried off their feet.

After Lady Cumming Gordon moved to Edinburgh, Jane did not see her grandmother for two years. But one night in her Charlotte Square home Lady Cumming Gordon had a dream, and the next morning she sent for her natural granddaughter. She informed the girl that she was no longer to be educated for business. She would be introduced into the world as a daughter of the family.

Lady Cumming Gordon then determined to place the girl at an Edinburgh boarding school, believing that she would have more benefit of masters, and other advantages that could not be obtained in the country. She learned from her daughter Lady Dunbar that a new school for young ladies was to be opened at Drumsheugh, which was so near Lady Cumming Gordon’s home in Charlotte Square. Since one of the mistresses was the sister of Margaret Pirie, who, Lady Dunbar said, had been the most excellent governess she ever employed for her children, Lady Dunbar had reason to believe that the school would be superior. But she must have had some reservations about her mother’s new enthusiasm over the Indian girl.

How difficult it must have been for Lady Cumming Gordon to have a relationship with this girl. There was so much sadness and ambivalence in it, even from its beginning: to lose an eldest son, as Lady Cumming Gordon did, in a distant, frightening country. Whose idea of shoving him into manhood was it to send the boy there at the age of eighteen? Certainly not a mother’s. In those days boys as young as eleven or twelve were sent off as midshipmen in the Navy. But what mother, especially of the upper class where there would have been no relief at one less mouth to feed, could have been happy at such a separation? And what was worse, he had been sent to the other side of the world. India was the white man’s burden and loot, and it was wealthy British fathers who handed it down to their sons. So he was severed from her while he was still only a child, and it was impressed upon him that in India he must prove himself a man. Didn’t white men in those days often lay their first claim to manhood in the beds of dark-skinned women, those manhood bestowers who were often themselves all of fourteen or fifteen? George Cumming found one, or perhaps he found many—but one he made pregnant (or was told he made pregnant). That must have happened often enough in India, but this young man acknowledged that the child was his, and he continued his affair with its mother after it was born. Perhaps that was as much testimony to his naïveté as to his good heart.

Had George lived, certainly the child would have been nothing to Lady Cumming Gordon, because undoubtedly he would have had many more, and of the right color. But he died, as did so many young white men in that distant country which hated them and expelled them, often by disease when it could find no other way to rid itself of the dark man’s burden.

I can imagine the initial response Lady Cumming Gordon must have gotten from her husband and sons and daughters when she announced that she was bringing an illegitimate half-breed into Scotland and into her home. One did not acknowledge in Britain what went on in the heart of darkness. What the British did in India belonged in India. And now Lady Cumming Gordon proposed the insanity of mixing the two.

But how long could her family have held out against her when she insisted with a frenzy, which seemed to be born as much of superstition as of her sense of dreadful loss, that she must have the only fruit of her eldest son’s seed?

Was the good lady horrified from the first moment she looked at Jane Cumming? Had she thought that the girl would resemble her son, and was she angry and chagrined when she could find no resemblance? Is that why she quickly shipped her off to a school for daughters of tradesmen? Did she recognize once the girl stood before her that it would be impossible to pass this very dark skinned child off as the genuine article, either to herself or to her narrow aristocratic circle? Or had she thought that she had shouldered enough of the white woman’s burden by taking the girl from her heathen country and assuming financial responsibility for her?

It was probably nerve-racking to think what to do with the girl once she arrived. When Lady Cumming Gordon decided to send her to a school where she would learn a trade, the decision was probably made with guilt and ambivalence. Then it must have been in another frenzy born of superstitious anxiety that she determined that the girl must be treated as if she had legitimate claim to the family. During all this time the family looked on, probably with a mixture of skepticism and apprehension. How could it end well? If she were trained for a trade they would have a tradeswoman among them. Would they have to invite a tradeswoman and her tradeshusband to Christmas dinner along with the Duchess of Gordon? If she were removed from the trade school and educated for society, what could become of her when she reached adulthood? What young man who respected himself would take an illegitimate girl, and of her color too? Perhaps a fortune hunter would marry her to get hold of whatever would be the manifestation of Lady Cumming Gordon’s generosity; and how could they accept him into the family? Lady Cumming Gordon must have been aware herself of the terrible dilemma that her grief and superstition had occasioned. But she must have believed that there was no way out of it.

Miss Woods and Miss Pirie had, in December of 1809, only one boarder and two day pupils in the school. Lady Cumming Gordon probably saw that the mistresses were hesitant to accept her granddaughter because she was a girl of color. She was explicit in pointing out to them that the tinge was just barely perceptible. And she more than hinted that she could be very generous if she were pleased. Just before Christmas Lady Cumming Gordon left her granddaughter at the school and went to spend the holidays at Gordonstoun, but not before she recommended the school to three other families. A few months later she also persuaded Lady Dunbar to send two of her children to the school as day scholars. With the advent of so many pupils from such distinguished families, the mistresses were grateful to Lady Cumming Gordon, believing she had made their fortune.

I think Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie loved each other. In the early nineteenth century that bare fact would not have had such power to elicit shock as it did a century later. They lived at a time when Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, the “Ladies of Llangollen,” two women who eloped together and lived for fifty-three years in romantic friendship, were looked on by the arbiters of taste and morality as “fair and noble ornaments of their sex” and “sisters in love.” In 1810, not long after Jane Pirie came to join Marianne Woods in the school they had established, she gave her beloved a present of the just-published poetical works of Anna Seward, with its laudatory preface by the great lion of Scotland, Sir Walter Scott. It surprised neither woman, nor any other British reader, that many of the poems were love lyrics to Honora Sneyd, who, Anna Seward said, was dearer to her than life itself.

This was the way romantic friends wrote of each other at the time:

Honora fled, I seek her favourite scene

With hasty step, as I should meet her there;

The hasty step and the disorder’d mien

Fond expectation’s anxious semblance wear.

This bowery terrace, where she frequent stray’d,

And frequent cull’d for me the floral wreath,

That tower, that lake,—yon willow’s ample shade,

All, all the vale her spirit seems to breathe.

I seize the loved resemblance it displays,

With mixture strange of anguish and delight;

I bend on vacancy an earnest gaze,

Where strong illusion cheats my straining sight.

But ah, it fades!—and no relief I find,

Save that which silence, memory, hope confer;

Too soon the local semblance leaves my mind,

E’en where each object seem’d so full of her.

And Memory, only Memory, can impart

The dear enduring image to my view;

Has she not drawn thee, loveliest, on my heart

In faithful tints, and permanent as true?

Transcending all associate forms disclose

Of evanescent likeness; or each grace

The breathing pencil’s happiest effort throws

O’er the bright lines that imitate thy face.

As much too fix’d as theirs too fleeting found,

The pencil but one look, one gesture brings;

But varying charms, each accent’s thrilling sound

From Recollection’s juster portrait springs.

Be then th’ embosom’d image only sought,

Since perfect only can its magic prove!

O! rise with all HONORA’s sweetness fraught,

Vivid, and perfect, as her ANNA’S love.

Shew me how fair she seems, when on the gale

Her waving locks, in soft luxuriance, play;

As lightly bounding down the dewy vale,

She pours her rival beauties on the day!

How fair, e’en when displeasure’s darkening frown,

And scorn itself are lovely on her brow;

Like summer shades, that sweep the vale adown,

Pass o’er the flowers, and heighten all their glow;

Yet fairer, when her brightening spirit spreads,

In blest vicissitude, the cheering ray,

As Sensibility, quick veering, sheds

Its clouds and sun-shine o’er her April-day.

But fairest when her vermeil lips disclose,

In many a magic smile and melting tone,

The varied accent through the pearly rows,

That proves the mental graces all her own.

I think that Jane Pirie may have told Marianne Woods that her love for Marianne was “vivid, and perfect,” and Marianne may have said the same to Jane. I think that in opening the school they had planned to be together forever, just as Mary Wollstonecraft planned to be with her beloved Fanny Blood when they opened a girls’ boarding school a few decades earlier.

Probably along with their romantic friendship Jane and Marianne, like Mary Wollstonecraft, had notions about female independence and achievement. Apparently they were both somewhat “bluestocking,” although they must have known that Scottish wits called bluestockings “the very flour of their sex.” They took themselves seriously as autonomous, thinking beings. Probably they would not have been happy in a conventional nineteenth-century marriage.

They were children during the French Revolution, which fostered the beginnings of a women’s movement throughout western Europe among those who believed that great changes were coming not only for the lower classes but for women also. They may have been among that small group of women who demanded for themselves, as Mary Wollstonecraft did just before them, fulfilling work together with loving companionship outside of the constraints of tradition.

They were daughters of the middle class. Had they not grown up in the midst of revolutionary fervor, they might not have been able to formulate such a vision of what they wanted their lives to be. But had they grown up 100 years later, they would have found themselves comfortable in the midst of a large feminist movement where their revolutionary avowals to find fulfilling work and loving companionship on their own terms had become as commonplace as a slogan. Had they grown up 150 years later, after Freud became a household word, they would have found there was a name not at all to their liking for their dual desires.

In 1810, before the rise of a large feminist movement and before the advent of Freud and the Freudians, almost no one bothered with such names. If a few women wished to be proprietors of girls’ schools, let them. There were not enough men with the patience and adaptability required to teach the young when more and more of the rising middle class as well as the upper class were desiring that all their young be taught. These school mistresses had a role in an upwardly mobile society. Nor did they demand that all females neglect their womanly duties in such pursuits. A few mistresses hardly made a women’s liberation movement.

And that such independent women might find substitutes with each other for the marriage act was unthinkable. Good women—middle-class women—were considered to be without sexual passions. Prostitutes and actresses and French queens might pollute themselves in vile, unspeakable ways, but decent women never had such urges.

I have been reading some letters that passed between Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie during the last weeks of the school’s existence. They refer to other letters that were consigned to the flames in anger, so I have probably seen all that survived. The earliest piece was a note that Jane Pirie wrote to accompany a present of a Bible, which she gave to Marianne Woods on her birthday, October 12, 1810:

They had been back from their Portobello vacation for more than two months, they had fought over Mrs. Woods’ redecorations in their absence, and they had made up and fought again. Now Mrs. Woods agreed to leave their establishment and to live by herself. Jane Pirie must have seen stretched before her a great peaceful vista, where she could lay down her arms and travel on, for as long as they both lived, with her dearest earthly friend, her beloved. But when a whole week passed, and then another, and no more mention was made of Mrs. Woods leaving, Jane Pirie vented her fury again. Two weeks after Marianne’s birthday, her anger must have erupted. In a letter written by Marianne on October 28, 1810, she alluded to some “papers” belonging to her that Jane Pirie had burned. I think they may have been impassioned notes that Jane had once written Marianne and then stolen from her, since Marianne demanded in exchange for the burned papers that “every note and letter be returned which I unfortunately addressed to you.”

If the girls had seen Jane Pirie rifling through Marianne’s possessions to find those papers, what would they have made of such a scene? How might it have affected Jane Cumming in particular? Perhaps the mistresses had come to be something like parents to her during the many weeks she was alone with them at Portobello. Whether she loved them or not, they may have represented to her the only stability she had in life now, and to see them in battle with each other must have been as jarring to her as it would be to a child who saw her parents in such combat. Maybe their instability after the peaceful hiatus of the vacation so upset her that she sought a bizarre way to punish them.

Even if she and the other girls had not seen Jane Pirie rifling through Marianne’s drawers or heard their squabbles, it would have been impossible for the mistresses to hide the animosity that brought forth so cold a letter as this one that Marianne wrote to Jane Pirie, who had called her “beloved” only two weeks earlier:

I have been made deeply sensible of my error in supposing that business might be transacted between those who are termed friends in a manner different from that between declared foes. I am willing to share the blame of this oversight with you, but I shall ever deplore its consequences. It is an old saying, but its truth is more to be trusted on that account, that it is needless to look back on the past. The experience I have gained from it, however, teaches me to prepare for the future. On that subject, therefore, I wish to address you.

Marianne goes on in this letter to propose terms by which she might “retire from this uncomfortable and unadvantageous situation”: they will part at the end of the spring; they will announce their intention to the parents no sooner than three months before they separate (had she extended their union so far into the future because she hoped for another reconciliation?); they will dispose of their furniture at public auction. She also warns Jane that for as long as they continue together, “I require that all the pupils should be governed by the same rules, served with the same accommodation, treated with equal attention, and in every respect taught to consider themselves as members of one family—since discord and discontent must be the result of unequal treatment.” Had Jane Pirie allowed her initial repugnance to her namesake to show again? Was it Jane Cumming’s discontent to which Marianne referred—and to the discord she had sown as a result? How much more she would soon sow Marianne could not have known on October 28.

The next extant letter was written the following day. Jane Pirie does not deign to open with even so cold an address as “Madam.” She simply begins, “I will not answer the greater part of your epistle till I can fully adjust myself to your willingness to sacrifice me to fame, interest, etc.” One accusation follows another in this letter, whose theme is Marianne’s untrustworthiness: “God sees all hearts, and He knows that I was willing to sacrifice everything on earth for her who professed to be my friend. But I believe that you knew the line of conduct you meant to pursue in respect to Mrs. Woods and me, and you must have told her you would sacrifice me at the same time that you were declaring sincere love and friendship for your too credulous friend. I see now that your system of establishing Mrs. Woods in opposition to my interests has been uniformly pursued from the very start of our school.” Jane does not acknowledge Marianne’s proposal to leave, but says that she will herself give three months’ notice “before I quit this abode of misery—this is all you can reasonably expect from me.” She ends, “The letters I unfortunately received from you shall never be left tossing about for anyone’s perusal as you left mine”—which was her excuse for having gone through Marianne’s papers to reclaim what she sent her. They must have exchanged proclamations of devotion in those letters or Jane would not now, in her anger, have described their receipt as unfortunate. Would the girls who read those letters that were left “tossing about” have laughed at the excess of passion in what Jane Pirie wrote, or would they have found it frightening, or would they simply have accepted it as a usual manifestation of romantic friendship?

Two days later, on October 31, the first anniversary of Jane’s move to the school, she received a response to this October 29 letter, but what Marianne said we will never know. “I have just received your last production,” Jane immediately wrote back, “and have tossed it to the fire where it belongs.” She thanks Marianne, with bitter irony, “for sending it on an evening when you knew it would be doubly pleasant.” And then she continues to harp on her old theme—that Mrs. Woods and Marianne wished to steal from her her hard-earned position as a head of the school and relegate her to being a mere servant: “I shall oblige you to consider me as your equal, although you have worked hard to bring me from respectability to a situation I think contemptible. / could never attempt to establish myself by degrading you in the eyes of the world as you have done to me. Nor could I have, by any dishonourable means, tried to establish myself as head of the school and ’Lady of this house,’ etc., since I could not have conceived of such mean intentions…. I pray that the Almighty will enable me to be indifferent to a person who has proved herself unworthy of the confidence I placed in her, and that He will make your selfish conduct a means of showing me to trust Him alone.”

There is no evidence that Marianne had such dastardly intentions toward her friend, although perhaps she should have given more scrupulous directions to her aunt: to establish the accounts in Jane’s and Marianne’s names only, to advertise the school as Jane wished it advertised, to list it in the postal directory as the Woods and Pirie school rather than the Woods and Woods school.

Ollie says that Jane’s concerns were petty, that it should not have mattered how the school was listed as long as it was clear between Marianne and Jane that they were equal partners. She cannot understand how Jane could have loved Marianne yet still believed she would cheat her. But Ollie’s father owns a chain of restaurants all over the Southwest and she went to Bennington and Yale. I tell her that she probably has little idea of what it is like to begin with no one behind you and with nothing but your ambition, to know that you must be a self-made woman if you are to be anything at all.

“I have no trouble believing that Jane loved Marianne fiercely,” I say, “but she wanted every damned crumb she had coming to her—because no one had ever given her anything, and she was determined that no one would take away what little she had managed to wrest from the world with her hard labor.”

I found one more letter concerning the two mistresses, dated November 5. It was addressed to Mrs. Hamilton, whom it seems Jane called on for advice on several occasions and used as a confidante. In this letter, Jane was somewhat relieved because the matter of Mrs. Woods had been finally settled. Following Mrs. Hamilton’s earlier advice, Jane had demanded that an impartial party be called in, and Mrs. Woods agreed to accept the services of Mr. Reid, an English clergyman and acquaintance of hers, who helped them come to the agreement that Mrs. Woods would retire with a third of the profits.

Jane says in this letter that she is gratified that Mrs. Woods is finally leaving, but she does not seem able to overcome her suspicions of her beloved friend, though she loves her still:

When I give way to doubts, I feel miserable beyond description, but circumstances are daily occurring to prove that she would sacrifice me to her aunt’s comfort and pride. Dear Madam, how should I act? I can never conquer my affection, should she even declare herself my enemy. I have loved her for eight years with sincere and ardent affection, and I have accustomed my mind to contemplate her as the model of every virtue. And if I cannot regard her as superior to everything that is unworthy of a great and exalted mind, I feel that misery must be my portion in this life. You must aid me with your advice, as you can enter into my feelings, and perhaps you can administer an opiate that can assuage the heart-rending sorrow I frequently experience.

I believe Ollie is too hard on her. “Don’t you think Jane Pirie had reason to be hurt and even suspicious, since Marianne allowed her aunt to act like a proprietor when she wasn’t and to rob Jane of her little taste of glory?”

“Perhaps,” Ollie says. “But there is something fantastical in her reactions—her overreactions. A kind of morbidity. She was certainly a bit odd, maybe even a little crazy.”

“They’re all for you, my love,” Ollie says. “All I want is the pleasure of seeing you devour them, every damned crumb”

But I do not have to press her very hard to eat half of them herself.

By Friday afternoon, November 16, 1810, not a student remained in the school. Parents or servants had come to fetch the girls in carriages, on foot, with sedan chairs. The house in Drumsheugh must have been in chaos, and with the appearance of each tightlipped adult and the departure of each student, the mistresses must have gotten more and more frantic. No one would tell them why the girls were being removed. The parents and servants refused to utter anything except that they had come to take away their young ladies immediately.

It did not take long for the mistresses to discern that Jane Cumming was the source of their ruin. Did they know because they understood that she had caught them in some guilty act—or did they assume their new tragedy was traceable to her because she and her cousins were the first to be removed upon her visit home? On Wednesday morning, November 14, the mistresses had received this terse note from Lady Cumming Gordon: “Lady Cumming Gordon presents compliments to Miss Woods and Miss Pirie. She will be obliged to them to send her a statement of the Miss Dunbars’ and Miss Jane Cumming’s accounts. She intends to dispatch a servant immediately for her grandchildren as she does not find it convenient to allow them to return to school any more. She will likewise be obliged to Miss Woods and Miss Pirie to send Miss Jane Cumming’s and the Miss Dunbars’ clothes, books, music, etc.”

It came without warning, but the mistresses recognized it as the death knell of their school, and the events of the next few hours proved them right. In the afternoon of that day they sent a card to Lady Cumming Gordon, to which they received no answer: “Miss Woods and Miss Pirie beg leave to address Lady Cumming Gordon. There has been some delay in the execution of her Ladyship’s commands, but as soon as possible they will be attended to. The extreme anxiety of mind Miss Woods and Miss Pirie are in can alone excuse the earnest entreaty they will now make to her Ladyship that she will candidly state to them every circumstance which has occasioned her Ladyship’s disapproval, and by its consequence seems to threaten their total ruin.”

By then Lady Cumming Gordon had written to the parents of some students and several girls had just been removed. Two of Lady Cumming Gordon’s notes to the parents are extant. The first is dated Wednesday afternoon and addressed to the wife of General Anstruther, who, upon Lady Cumming Gordon’s recommendation, had placed her daughter in the school: “Lady Cumming Gordon presents best compliments to Mrs. Anstruther. She thinks it right to inform her that she has found it necessary today, for serious reasons, to take away her grandchildren from Miss Woods’ and Miss Pirie’s school. As Lady Cumming Gordon recommended the school for Miss Anstruther, she wishes to give her the earliest information. Lady Cumming Gordon sent for her children home without assigning any reason but a wish to have them home. She will call and give Mrs. Anstruther her reasons for what she has done tomorrow.”

The second extant note is dated Thursday morning and is addressed to Lady Cunynghame, whose daughter Mary became a student at the school after Lady Cumming Gordon had praised the mistresses to Lady Cunynghame. Lady Cunynghame did not call for her daughter until Friday, and she alone spoke to the mistresses and showed them this note: “Lady Cumming Gordon presents her best compliments to Lady Cunynghame and begs to inform her Ladyship that she has, for very serious reasons, taken her grandchildren from Miss Woods’ and Miss Pirie’s school. As Lady Cumming Gordon was one of those who recommended the school to Lady Cunynghame, she feels it her duty to advise her very strongly to the same measure, as soon as possible.”

On Friday morning the mistresses went together to Lady Cumming Gordon’s home in Charlotte Square, but she refused to see them. A daughter who resided with Lady Cumming Gordon, Mary Cumming, said her mother was ill and shut the door in their faces. On Friday afternoon Jane Pirie wrote to Mary Cumming. It is clear that by now Jane Pirie had absolutely no doubt that her namesake was the cause of all that had transpired in the preceding days: “If you ever expect mercy from the God of mercy, tell what your niece has said to injure two innocent persons who have laboured for nearly twelve months to improve her in every religious and moral virtue, and who are thus cruelly repaid by her. We never did anything to offend her, except perhaps to discharge our duty towards her too rigidly and to tell her of her faults too freely. You are again implored, for the sake of that God from whom you hope for mercy, to tell us of what she accuses us. The calumny has been traced to her and she appears to be the sole author of it. If ever Christian mercy or pity had place in your heart, do not delay to state all she says against us, as every hour’s delay increases the misery she has already occasioned.” But this plea too went unanswered.

Whether or not they surmised what Jane Cumming told her grandmother, whether or not they had reason to feel guilty, they must have suffered agonies. Jane Pirie must have been utterly hysterical. But if they knew what the Indian girl had said and if there was any truth in it, their next step was bold beyond belief. How did they muster such courage, such audacity?

They took themselves to the firm of John Clerk, the most successful lawyer in Edinburgh, and they told John Clerk himself that they wished to sue Lady Cumming Gordon for libel.

John Clerk never married. His biographer says he died surrounded only by ten cats, his companions. Yet his contemporaries all agreed he was brilliant. At one period during his career as a lawyer, Clerk had nearly half the business of the important Court of Session on his hands. He was plain, shrewd, sarcastic. His disdainful smile was famous. A younger lawyer, who often scrutinized him in court for the tricks of the trade such observation might yield, wrote that Clerk was affected with the most delightful and balmy feelings by the contemplation of any lesser legal light, some soft-headed, prosy driveller, racking his poor brain or bellowing his lungs out—all about something that he, the smiler, saw through so thoroughly, so distinctly. How chilling he must have been in a cross-examination.

He was a man’s man. Only a year or two before he took on Miss Woods and Miss Pirie’s case, he had been presented with a silver trophy from the British navy because, they proclaimed, his essay on naval tactics had rendered his country indebted to him: Clerk had analyzed and invented infallible countermaneuvers to the sly naval maneuvers of the French, and now the skill and courage of the British would no longer be baffled by Bony and the “mounseers” at his back. Clerk could not fight himself—he had a deformed leg and he limped—but he was wonderful at war games.

Nor did he divert himself much with women, but in his spare time he was an artist, and he was fond of drawing Bathsheba with her foot in the water. His biographer says he disliked the sex.

He was elevated to a judgeship in the Court of Session in 1823, shortly after the Woods and Pirie case was concluded. By that time, however, he was approaching senility. It was not long after his appointment that his memory failed entirely. On one occasion he heard a lengthy debate, begun one day and concluded the next. At its conclusion he announced that he did not know what the parties were talking about and requested that they begin at the beginning. Some months later he was asked by his brother judges to leave the Court, a sad end for one who had prided himself on his superior mentality.

How did the two approach such a man? What might they have said to him the first time they walked into his office? “We have been accused of …” What? “We want you to say in our defense …” Whether or not they felt guilty, how could they present their feeling for each other or their agony over their plight to a disdainful, misogynistic war tactician who painted pictures of fat, naked Bathshebas dangling toes in the water?

They told him they had no money to pay beforehand. Why would such a successful lawyer undertake to represent two virtually impoverished women? Perhaps because, as a Whig, he had no love for the aristocracy, or he believed he might earn a great deal in a suit against a woman as wealthy as Lady Cumming Gordon. Or perhaps the case appealed to a morbid if not prurient curiosity in him. He agreed to represent the mistresses and to defer charges until he won their case for them.