TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD LYDIA RICHARDS loved her liberty too well to hurry into marriage. She paid little heed to the “addresses” of the men who courted her.1 Eager to be on her own, each summer she boarded with strangers and worked as a schoolteacher. In Cummington, Ashfield, Williamsburgh, and other towns in the Hampshire Hills, Lydia took on the responsibilities of the classroom. Although she considered the school “no very agreeable place” and she found teaching to be perplexing, she welcomed the wages as well as the precious freedom to read and write as she pleased during her nonworking hours.2 She would never find that possibility in marriage, and so she continued steadfastly on her solitary path until, in 1806, Charity’s return to the region planted a new desire in her heart. Marriage to a man held little appeal but, as Lydia wrote to Charity after their friendship renewed, “I could wish, if it were not in vain, to be your constant companion.”3
From their very first touch, the bond between Charity and Lydia had a distinctive power. They met on a warm summer afternoon in 1799, when Charity was one of three women teachers invited by Lydia’s father, Deacon Richards, to have tea with his daughters in the parlor. The party was a great success, and all the young women became fast friends. But the connection between Lydia and Charity had a special spark. After refreshments the women set out together to walk through Lydia’s father’s orchards. As they stepped into the woods, seeking relief from the summer heat under the shade of the dark green foliage, Charity hesitated in the unfamiliar terrain. Lydia reached out to take her guest by the hand. When the girl’s lithe fingers clamped around her own, Charity felt a powerful stirring in her chest. The feeling of Lydia’s first touch was so charged that the sense memory stuck with Charity for the rest of her life. Gathering her courage, Charity grasped Lydia’s hand and together they plunged forward.
As they walked together on that summer afternoon in 1799, Charity admired her companion. Only seventeen, five years younger than herself, Lydia had a vibrant physique. She carried herself with the modest decorum expected from a deacon’s daughter, but plain clothes could not hide her “healthfull form” from Charity’s discerning gaze. As the slight effort of the walk brought a blush to Lydia’s face, “the rose and lilly met” in perfect harmony on her cheeks. Glancing back at Charity, Lydia’s soft eyes reflected the “kind affections” in her heart. In this perfect moment, Charity’s melancholy condition escaped her mind. She felt peaceful in Lydia’s presence; “with thee all troubles were forgot.”4
If only Charity’s appreciation for female charms ended there, her peace of mind might have lasted longer. However, Charity’s irrepressible attraction to the other young women she met on the afternoon of Lydia’s party guaranteed that her troubles would soon be renewed. Lydia felt forlorn when Charity was forced by the spread of rumors about her character to leave Cummington in the spring of 1800. Despite her insecurities about the skill of her own writing voice in comparison to the eloquence that her friend possessed, Lydia wrote Charity an impassioned poem after their separation. “My Charity, my dearest, loveliest friend,” Lydia began a cascade of emotional lines that mourned the loss of the “lovely girl” who had become her “souls delight.” The poem captured Lydia’s consuming fear that their separation would be final as she imagined that “in blooming youth” death might snatch Charity “away.” Undaunted by the force of nature that seemed to separate her from her friend, Lydia defied death its victim:
Unfeeling monster, thou don’t dare divide
Those souls by nature, and by friendship tied
Thou unrelenting foe! How canst thou part
Such kindred souls and wound the tender heart.
If Lydia refused to permit death to sever the connection between herself and Charity, then gossip had no chance. Their “kindred souls” shared an unbreakable connection.5
As other friends dropped away during the early 1800s and Charity grew isolated in North Bridgewater, Lydia kept faithfully writing to the far removed woman who had made so profound an impression on her heart. After a couple of years, Lydia was the only friend from her travels with whom Charity still exchanged letters.6 Lydia treated the letters that Charity sent her as sacred objects. When one arrived, she would run into the orchard to break the seal in solitude and read each coveted word beyond the “sight of evry human eye.” Near the sacred spot where the women had first touched, she took her “pleasure” from Charity’s “precious lines.”7 Later, after she had reread the letter a number of times and regained control of her feelings, she returned to her family and read select passages aloud.8 Then Lydia tucked each letter away among the growing collection that she kept in her bed chamber.
Neither the lengthening separation nor the ongoing rumors about Charity’s character seemed to diminish the ardor Lydia professed to feel. When Charity, depressed by her circumstances, let the correspondence slip, Lydia kept writing, assuring Charity, “my lovely girl, that friendship and affection which were once engrav’d on my heart for you, the hand of time, absence or silence has not erased.”9 Nor did time seem to lessen the attraction Lydia felt for her distant friend. Lydia likened that feeling to a flame that Charity had kindled within her; it remained burning brightly long after Charity had gone.
In an 1802 letter, Lydia rhapsodized about her physical longing for Charity, “‘how sweet is mutual love’ … Oh that we might once more experience its sweets, clasped in each others arms.”10 She repeated that desire in most of her letters, sometimes hinting at the forbidden quality of the love that the two women shared. “Why, alas! Are the dearest friends forbidden to enjoy the objects of their highest pleasure and most ardent affection,” Lydia complained in the fall of 1803, three years after the women’s last encounter.11 Describing her “ardent affection” for Charity as forbidden associated their attachment with illicit relations, including sodomy, which was labeled a “forbidden love” in period works.12 While Lydia’s nearby friends married one by one, she remained committed to singlehood and a forbidden friend. Despite their distance from each other, Lydia pleaded with Charity, “let our hearts, my dear, be still united.”13
After the fourth year of the women’s separation had passed, Lydia still longed for the day to come that brought “to my vacant arms that lovely friend which I so long have wish’d, but wish’d in vain, to press to this still palpitating heart.”14 Unbeknown to Lydia, the shattering conclusion to Charity’s relationship with Mercy Ford was bringing Charity’s return to the Hampshire Hills a little closer. Too saddened to put pen to paper, Charity failed to inform Lydia of her declining condition in North Bridgewater. “Why, my dear, this silence, this long silence?” Lydia begged.15 Having no honest way to answer Lydia’s insistent question, Charity wrote nothing in reply. In silence, she packed her trunk to leave North Bridgewater.
In April 1806 Charity arrived in Pelham, where her sisters Anna and Silence lived.16 For several months Charity enjoyed their hospitality. Despite Anna’s warnings about the fork-tongued vipers who still inhabited the town, Charity found a kind reception from her family. Charity’s situation, as her cousin Vesta Guild put it, called “forth all the tender feelings” from those who loved her.17 At least it prompted such feelings in her sisters. Her parents were another story. Vesta had to admit that the obstacles impeding her happiness back home seemed insurmountable.18
In August, Peter Bryant sent a medical apprentice to Pelham to collect his long-absent sister and bring her to Cummington.19 When he told the deacon’s daughter the news that at last Charity was returning to the Hampshire Hills, excitement caused Lydia’s “palpitating heart” to beat so hard that she left the second t out of palpitating on the first spelling, inserting it later at the top when she discovered the mistake. “My dear, with haste fly to your friend whose arms will be extended and waiting to receive you,” Lydia commanded, “and whose bosom will feel a void till the return of her long absent friend.” Having Charity within miles made it impossible for Lydia to wait a moment longer. “With what joy shall I again behold my dearest friend, with what friendly ardor press to my thrilling heart the object of my firmest attachment! The happy hour ‘in prospect smiles,’ and pleasure fills my heart,” Lydia wrote in overheated excitement.20 On August 14, nine days following her arrival in Cummington, Charity left the Bryants for Lydia’s family home in neighboring Plainfield. After six long years, the kindred souls were reunited.21
In the first exhilarating evenings of their reunion, as Lydia took Charity into her arms in their bed at night, the mutual longing between the women must have overpowered any shyness between them. Lydia had written so often about her desire to press Charity to her bosom. Enacting this desired wish brought their warm bodies close together. Both women likely wore shifts to sleep, thin linen garments that hung thigh length, with loose drawstring necks that easily exposed their breasts. As Lydia took Charity to her “generous bosom” and Charity wrapped her arms around Lydia’s body, bare flesh pressed bare flesh. The pleasure they shared in this embrace had sexual meaning in their time, as it would in ours.
Evidence of lesbian “bosom sex” practices in the early nineteenth century have been preserved in the rare correspondence of two African-American female lovers, schoolteacher Rebecca Primus and domestic servant Addie Brown. Separated by work, Brown wrote to Primus informing her that at the boarding school where Brown worked in service, several women sought to share her bed at night and fondle her breasts. Brown placated Primus that “I shall try to keep your f[avored] one always for you,” but added “should in my excitement forget you will pardon me I know.” When Primus apparently did not forgive her this excitement, but expressed jealousy over the thought of other women touching Brown’s breasts, Brown backtracked. In her next letter Brown promised that when she slept with another woman “I can’t say that I injoyed it very much,” and she denied recollecting what she had meant by the word “excitement” in her previous letter. The exchange paints a vivid picture of a self-consciously sexual culture of breast play among women educators and school workers in the antebellum era.22
Straight couples in the nineteenth century also eroticized the act of embracing each others’ heads to their breasts. “Could I but ley my head upon your bosom and whisper love to you,” wrote one longing nineteenth-century wife to her absent husband, “I miss you in every thing—But the nights—to wake and find you gone.” Expressions of desire for bosom embraces often served as polite means for couples to describe their other sexual longings, and it was understood that embracing a lover to one’s breast led to further demonstrations of ardor. An eager young man writing to his fiancée described his wish to “squeeze her and hug her and kiss her forehead and eyes—yes I’ll kiss them again and again, and when I have looked at them to my heart’s content I’ll kiss them again and her cheeks and lips and throat, and I’ll take liberties with her back hair and pull out her hair pins, and tousle and tumble her up generally.”23 Breast play inspired many young couples to grow more heated in their embraces. Very likely, the bosom embraces that Lydia and Charity shared in their bed at night did not represent the full extent of the erotic pleasures they took in each other’s arms.
By bringing their bodies together, Lydia and Charity opened the possibility of rubbing their thighs, knees, pelvic bones, and genitals together in the common pursuit of pleasure that led female lovers in the eighteenth century to be known as “tribades,” derived from the verb to rub in Greek, and “fricatrices,” derived from the verb to rub in Latin. Period texts depicted a range of possible sex acts between women including mutual rubbing and digital stimulation.24 Depictions of cunnilingus are less common to the period, but that does not exclude its possibility. No sources exist that can answer the question of precisely which intimate touches Lydia and Charity shared in bed at night. It may even be possible that their embraces remained chaste. Lydia’s surviving letters tell us only that she took enormous pleasure in sharing her bed with Charity and longed, when Charity was away, to have her return “to the arms of your friend.”25
The pace of letters that Lydia wrote to Charity increased tenfold after their reunion, signaling the intensification of her feelings. When the first visit drew to a close after two weeks and Charity returned to her brother’s house in Cummington, Lydia experienced an excruciating sense of loss. The first seven days of Charity’s absence, she wrote to Cummington, felt as long as the previous seven years of separation. She begged Charity to return to Plainfield as quickly as possible, dreaming that “a few days will again restore you to my arms.”26 Soon her wish was granted. Over the following six months, the women contrived to spend most of their time together, staying either at Lydia’s house, Peter’s house, or with other friends. Even so, during their inevitable intermittent separations Lydia sent Charity twenty letters—compared to the average of two a year she had written during their long separation.
Lydia filled these letters with comments about the impossibility of writing openly about her feelings, echoing the complaints of Charity’s previous lover Mercy Ford. Lydia’s first letter following Charity’s return from Plainfield to Cummington initiated this theme: “my dear, I must not write half I could say.”27 The next day she wrote another letter, although she knew better, and signed off with a plea to Charity to return as soon as possible “to your almost impolitical friend.”28 Lydia knew it was “impolitical” to commit the depth of her feelings for Charity to paper, as such repeated and passionate letter-writing had gotten Charity and her friends in trouble before, but the inflamed state of Lydia’s feelings overcame her caution. She wrote again the next day.
Charity also acted more like a lover than was wise. Although her half of the correspondence does not survive, we can catch glimpses of her actions in Lydia’s letters and in Charity’s sister-in-law Sally’s diary. In September, while Lydia taught at a school in nearby Goshen, Charity traveled to visit her sisters in Pelham again. Before leaving she sent Lydia a handkerchief pin. Gifts of jewelry, especially a piece of keepsake jewelry like a handkerchief pin, signaled courtship in the romantic culture of the nineteenth century. And a pin, with its penetrative qualities, had obvious symbolism for lovers. Lydia was delighted with the gift.29
When Charity returned later that month to Cummington she did not travel straight away to Lydia, but stayed for a couple weeks with Peter. Her delay may have been prompted by rising suspicions about the friendship within the Cummington community. The prolonged absence made Lydia distraught. She wrote to Charity complaining that she felt “cruelly depriv’d” of her company and that she had “a desire still unsatisfied which nothing but your presence and society can fulfill.” Lydia begged Charity to send a new “token of your fidelity and friendship” to prove her love.30 Charity responded with a batch of new letters, promising Lydia that she would return to Plainfield the following week. Lydia was somewhat mollified. “Six days will restore us to each other’s arms,” she sighed, and then they would have time and space to discuss the “many things which I wish to write, [and] must not.” Worrying that the friendship was troubling people within the Bryant household, Lydia included in her letter a request that Charity come to do some sewing work at the Richards house. Work created a respectable need for Charity to visit, offering a more compelling rationale for the trip than the women’s shared affection. Still, Lydia could not restrain herself from assuring Charity that what she really desired was her friend’s companionship.31
At the beginning of November, Charity returned to Lydia’s house for another two-week visit. Lydia then accompanied Charity back to Cummington and spent a night in the Bryant home, but she could not stay any longer.32 Already, Charity’s situation at Peter and Sally’s was deteriorating. The family was living in the house of Sally’s father and mother, Ebenezer and Sarah Packard Snell, old-fashioned, rigid Puritans who had taken a strong dislike to Charity.33 Some of their antagonism may have rubbed off onto their daughter, who under the stress and physical discomfort of her seventh pregnancy had little patience to spare. Peter tried to excuse Sally’s short temper: “You know the fair sex in certain circumstances are afflicted with a peculiar irritability.”34 Charity’s lack of enthusiasm for helping Sally with her endless domestic tasks could only have aggravated the pregnant woman.35
Lydia worried about Charity’s growing unhappiness in her brother’s household. Sensibly, she advised Charity to “make your present home my dear as agreeable as possible, and let reason and fortitude assist you to support every trying scene.”36 Un-sensibly, she began to fantasize about creating a new home for Charity, by adopting her as a permanent companion within the Richards household. Lydia’s family was a model of understanding and emotional support compared with the Bryants and Snells. Lydia’s father had admired Charity since her first visit to the house, and he thought that an early set of verses she wrote “outdid all the female compositions he ever saw.” Deacon Richards’s affection for Charity encouraged Lydia to consider asking her parents whether her homeless friend might move in with the family way back in 1801. “I have at times thot of proposing to my parents that they should give you an invitation to come and make this your home and enjoy all the privilege which I am favor’d,” Lydia wrote to Charity back in North Bridgewater. But the idea had then seemed too “impracticable” to put into effect.37 Now, in the fall of 1806, the idea so possessed Lydia that she began questioning whether it could be made real.
For six years, Lydia had chosen to pursue a path unthinkable to young women in her parents’ generation. By rejecting suitors and working for wages, Lydia had preserved her liberty to read and write, unlike her married friends. Sharing those rewards of singlehood with Charity promised an even greater happiness than she had previously contemplated. “If you had such a family and home as I am blest with, how would it add to our mutual happiness,” she wrote. As Charity’s constant companion, Lydia dreamed, she would be able “to share with you in reading those valuable authors which employ your leisure moments.”38 They would lead a life devoted to literature and the mind. The greatest obstacle to realizing this vision lay in a lack of the imagination, a deficiency that neither Lydia nor Charity suffered. “If our ideas are confin’d our thou’ts will consequently be confin’d likewise,” Lydia wrote to Charity.39 Alarmed that troubles in Peter’s house would drive away her soul mate, Lydia set loose her thoughts and ideas.
The shared passion for reading and writing that first united Lydia and Charity held a key to imagining a new way of life together. Poetry and novels had taught the women most of what they knew about romantic friendship, and one of the most celebrated romantic friendships within the era’s literature was the lifelong attachment between Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. These two Anglo-Irish gentle-women had run away from their families in 1778 to spend their lives together in the Welsh village of Llangollen. Their romantic manner of living and their charming home and gardens attracted many famous visitors who wrote about the relationship. William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Erasmus Darwin all commented on the relationship (Anne Lister visited as well).40 Charity and Lydia most likely learned of the so-called Ladies of Llangollen in the works of Anna Seward, a celebrated British poet who devoted her pen to the subject of female friendships. Seward wrote several poems about the Ladies of Llangollen, whose style of living together she hoped to adopt with her own beloved friend Honora Sneyd.41 Seward even named one of her books for the women, The Vale of Llangollen and Other Poems (1796).42
The surest clue that Lydia in particular liked the poems of Anna Seward lies in a strange stylistic tic. Lydia repeated the word “vale” in her poetry and correspondence in the same way that Anna Seward did, to convey her appreciation for the female form.43 Vale, meaning valley, was an archaic word even in 1800, but it appeared frequently in Seward’s writing. Not only did she title her most popular poem for Butler and Ponsonby “The Vale of Llangollen,” but she also incorporated images of vales into many of her other poems, especially those devoted to her friend Honora.44 Often pairing it with words like hill, mound, or cleft, Seward used the word vale as a euphemism for female genitalia. In a poem like Seward’s 1806 “Song,” dedicated to Honora, “the Syren of my soul,” the poet used a description of nature to voice her pleasure in watching the morning light reveal her lover’s body: “Oft I saw the rosy dawn / deck the hill, the vale, the lawn / Pleas’d I found them fair, and warm.”45 Seward’s usage spread to other poets, who offered even more explicit depictions of the landscape to represent women’s lovemaking. Estelle Anna Lewis’s poem, “The Last Hour of Sappho” (1844), named for the famous lesbian poet, rhapsodized the sun that “kiss[ed] the sloping hills, and myrtle bows / And flowers, and streams, and Lesbian maiden’s brows, / As they were warbling ’long the sultry vale.”46
Lydia’s poems adapted the word vale to the same purpose. An acrostic titled “Spring,” which Lydia copied out for Charity while they were living together in January 1807, contained lines that could be interpreted as descriptive of a woman having an orgasm during oral sex:
Zephyrs gently wave oer field and groves,
While tuneful warblers breathe their pleasing notes
And rivulets murmur through the peaceful vale
Each tumult of the breast is hush’d to peace
The lover’s zephyr breath, passing over her partner’s lower groves, brings forth tuneful warblers and pleasing notes, until in the climactic moment rivulets murmur through the vale and the internal tumult is restored to peace.47
In Seward’s poems, the vale represented not only a woman’s body, but also a feminized physical space. In “the fairy palace of the Vale,” Seward wrote, the Ladies of Llangollen devote their time “to letter’d ease” and “Friendship’s blest repose.” Lydia’s fantasy of adopting Charity as her “constant companion” and, sharing “in reading those valuable authors which employ your leisure moments,” sought to replicate the Ladies’ famed arrangement. Waiting for Charity to return to Plainfield in November 1806, Lydia wrote a poem to her absent lover describing how her dreams of “promis’d pleasure” with Charity inspired her to build castles in the air.48 Lydia desperately desired a home to shelter herself and Charity, like the gothic-Tudor fairy palace that Butler and Ponsonby renovated for themselves. Unlike those Irish gentle-ladies, however, Charity and Lydia had no inheritances to pay for their independence. A castle built from air, not bricks and mortar, was the best that Lydia could construct.
To be practical, Lydia dreamt that she and Charity might make their lives together in the bosom of the Richards family. In early December, she wrote to Charity that on her next visit to Plainfield “it will probably be convenient for you to bring your trunk—do bring every thing.”49 Never again, she hoped, would the women’s bond be sundered. In her heart, Lydia had come to imagine herself and Charity as secretly wed. She wrote to Charity in a December 1 letter that soon “I hope my dear we shall ‘take a sight of comfort.’” The quotation came from a popular play, Venice Preserv’d, which featured a secret marriage between two star-crossed lovers, Jaffeir and Belvidera. The line repeated Belvidera’s promise to her secret husband that only when they were reunited would she glimpse “a sight of comfort.” Placing herself in the role of secret wife and lover, Lydia begged Charity to bring her peace by making the move to Plainfield.50
On December 8, Charity arrived in Plainfield, trunk in tow. For nearly two months, the women shared their lives. As Lydia had desired, they spent many of their leisure hours reading and writing poetry together. Lydia presented Charity with a new year’s poem voicing her wish that nothing might interrupt their future together. “May life’s best joys distill like gentle dew,” Lydia prayed, and “Thy friends prove constant and forever true.”51 But the idyll could not last forever. Narratives of secret marriages tend to end badly. Like Jaffier and Belvidera, or the more familiar star-crossed couple Romeo and Juliet, Lydia and Charity could not protect their secret bond for long from the scrutiny of family.
Lydia’s chamber, far from being a fortified tower, lay subject to the household authority of her parents. Under this parental roof, Charity and Lydia lived in constant danger of exposure. The tension proved unbearable. At the end of January, the two women traveled together to the nearby town of Worthington to pay a visit to a friend and escape familial oversight for a spell.52 Soon the Richardses demanded Lydia return back home, alone. The pain “when I was torn from you,” Lydia wrote to Charity, was “indiscribable.” Apparently, her parents had discovered a reason to separate the friends. They may have become aware of the sexual bond between Lydia and Charity. Charity seems to have worried as much.
One letter hints that Charity feared Lydia’s parents had discovered a secret sexual object she possessed, possibly a dildo. (Leather and rag-stuffed dildos were known objects at the time, and Charity could have used her sewing skills to construct one.) Whatever the secret object was, once Lydia returned home to Plainfield, she wrote to assure Charity of its safety: “the thing which you supposed you left I have found here.” Lydia also promised that “your letter has never been expos’d.” But Charity’s greater anxiety, that Lydia’s parents had discovered they were lovers, could not be swept away.53 Lydia begged Charity to return to Plainfield, but Charity came only for a short while. Contrary to her lover’s hopes, Charity made plans to leave the Hampshire Hills once again, accepting an invitation from her old Bridgewater friends Asaph and Polly Hayward to visit them at their new home in Weybridge, Vermont.54
On the wintry day in February 1807 that Charity made her final departure from Plainfield, Lydia stood crying at the window as she watched the sleigh pull away. Moments before her departure, Charity had scribbled out a last letter and handed it to Lydia, who tucked the page within the bosom of her dress. She was crying too hard to read it straight away. Only after Charity had disappeared from sight did Lydia pull the paper from her breast. Charity had written an acrostic on the word “adieu,” five short sentences promising to love Lydia forever and to come back to her. At the bottom of the page Charity drew a dotted heart, along the outside she wrote her own name and inside she wrote Lydia’s. It was a picture of an embrace, of Charity enfolding Lydia and of Lydia’s name surrounding yet another vale. The gesture was deeply erotic, and consequently deeply dangerous. It was the sort of letter that, left in the wrong place, and seen by the wrong eyes, could get both writer and recipient in terrible trouble.
Alone in her bedroom that evening, Lydia felt a terrible loneliness take possession of her heart. After midnight, when she was sure her parents and siblings had gone to sleep, she scrawled out her feelings of abandonment in a letter to her absent friend, bemoaning her condemnation to “now sleep alone—not as formerly, when enclos’d in your friendly arms.”55 Thoughts of the physical intimacy she had lost plagued Lydia over the following months.56 She dreamed about what it would have been like to join Charity on the trip. If only she could have come along, then at night Charity’s head “should rest on my bosom, and at night you should repose in my arms!”57 Time did not diminish Lydia’s longing. She breathlessly counted the days until Charity’s return, when she hoped they would be united for good.58 She dreamed of Charity at night and thought of her by day. Lydia’s thoughts turned so intensely toward Charity that she took several chances in her writing that she probably should not have.
A month after Charity’s departure, Lydia sent Charity a letter in which she enclosed a poem written in red ink, a color typically associated with courtship. The poem, like so many of Lydia’s letters, described her pleasure in Charity’s love, her sorrow at their separation, and her longing for a physical reunion. Now Lydia imagined herself reclining on Charity’s “gentle breast,” and “guarded by her gentle hand.” The poem skimmed the boundaries of polite speech, the red ink broadcasting the passion of Lydia’s feelings. This was the twentieth letter she had written Charity since their reunion six months earlier. Read in sequence, the letters trace a rising crescendo of feeling, until Lydia’s extreme and desperate longing for her absent lover drove her to the outer limits of propriety.
Thus it is striking that the next letter in the sequence of correspondence has gone missing from the archive.59 The Henry Sheldon Museum, where Lydia’s correspondence is stored, has a record of a letter Lydia wrote to Charity three weeks after the red-ink poem. But the letter itself has vanished. In the card catalog an archivist has written the simple word “missing.” Sometime after the original indexing of the collection during the 1930s the letter disappeared. A missing document is hardly surprising in such an extensive collection. Researchers misplace documents in the wrong files. Papers get lost. But the context of this particular missing document, coming at the apogee of an arc of lesbian desire, arouses suspicion. The possibility exists that this particular letter spoke too transparently about a physical relationship between Lydia and Charity and was removed from the collection as a consequence. Many archival collections have been purged of homoerotic materials and other items deemed sexually inappropriate.60 Lydia’s missing letter is a silence that requires consideration.
In the spring of 1807, another silence troubled Lydia. At the time of her departure, Charity promised Lydia she would come back at the end of spring. Grieved at their separation, Lydia counted the days until Charity’s promised return. After a month had passed, Lydia wrote to Charity that “at the most unfavorable calculation, the time of our separation is at least a third elapsed—the rest will soon be gone, long as it may seem.” Only this reassuring thought preserved Lydia’s peace of mind. Thoughts of Charity obsessed her: “you are not only almost constantly in my mind when awake, but I very frequently dream of you.” She dreamed of Charity “returning from Vermont,” and she dreamed of their physical reunion. Seductively, she informed Charity that her parents were leaving for a weeklong visit and “I shall be almost alone in the house. O that you could be here.”61 The image was designed to arouse Charity and hurry her home, but Lydia’s confidence in the power of her physical charms to draw back her absent lover began to falter as May came and there was no word from Charity about her return.
Finally, in June, a letter arrived from Charity, written on her birthday, May 22, with the news that she intended to prolong her visit in Weybridge until the fall. Lydia wrote back sorrowfully, “I could earnestly have wish’d to see you before the expiration of so long a term.” Lydia remained committed to her dream of making a life with Charity. She informed Charity that her younger sister Sally was getting married. In early America, the marriage of a younger sister before the older suggested that the firstborn was unlikely to marry.62 By allowing Sally to marry out of birth order, the Richards family acknowledged Lydia’s chosen identity as a single woman. Confirming her exceptional path, Lydia accepted another summer teaching contract and departed to board for the summer in Hawley. She would earn her own way until Charity’s eventual return. “To your friendly bosom I commit everything,” Lydia wrote in closing. And then a final hasty postscript: “writing my dear does not satisfy me—I want something more.”63
The months stretched on. Lydia heard very little from Weybridge. She imagined that Charity must be living with Asaph and Polly Hayward, surrounded by their children, Achsah, Edwin, and Emma. She waited with “patience, resolution, prudence &c.” until she could once again press Charity to her heart. She signed her letters to Charity “yours as ever in the bonds of friendship.”64 She waited for her lover’s return. She fantasized about a device that could carry their voices to each other across the great space that separated them. How sad, she wrote,
That this silent conversation cannot be convey’d to you with that rapidity with which sounds are convey’d in the vehicle of air—At the usual calculation, could any sound be heard at so great a distance, (and it is asserted that sounds may be heard 200 miles in cold countries) ten minutes would be sufficient to convey it from me to you.65
Denied the opportunity to speak into Charity’s ear, she sent letter after letter asking when Charity was coming home.66 She directed her thoughts north like arrows.
Charity sent a letter promising to come home in November, then another letter putting off the date again. When November came, Lydia heard from acquaintances who had visited Weybridge that Charity was living with a young woman apprentice. The realization of her betrayal fell like a blow. Earlier, she conceded, “I yielded a kind of unwilling consent to your longer stay in Weybridge,” but she had not consented to a permanent separation. Now “you seem to express some doubt respecting your return in the winter.” When, she asked, would their long separation come to an end? “When shall I once more clasp you to this palpitating heart?”67 She followed this stinging letter with an even more powerful rebuke, copying out a plaintive poem from the 1791 seduction novel Charlotte Temple in which the title character laments her ruin and abandonment by her lover, Montraville. Like Charlotte, Lydia mourned that her “weary breast / can neither peace nor comfort find / Or friend where on to rest.”68 Charity’s abandonment had left Lydia so bereft that she took the tremendous risk of sending Charity a letter that clearly identified herself as a forsaken lover.69
Still she hoped, waited, and believed against all evidence that Charity would come back to her. In January 1808, Lydia wrote to tell Charity that she had turned down another offer of marriage. She remained “yours as ever, L. Richards.”70 A year had passed since Charity’s departure. “How little my dear, do we know of futurity! And how little did we see or know of it at the moment of our separation,” Lydia wrote.71 More months passed and no letters came from Charity. Lydia began to imagine that Charity had died. But she reassured herself that if Charity were dead, or even incapacitated by illness, people in Weybridge would write to let Peter know, and Lydia would hear it from him.72 She wrote one more time, “if you ever write again my dear do tell me when I may hope to see you—how little did I believe when I parted with you that so long a separation would ensue.”73
Only after Charity returned to visit Massachusetts in the spring of 1808 with her “apprentice” in tow did Lydia accept that her beloved companion had left her forever. Lydia recognized the time had come to write Charity a letter of farewell. To protect their privacy, Lydia enclosed the letter in a wrapper, an extra piece of paper intended to guard the contents within. Before the invention of envelopes in the mid-nineteenth century, letter-writers typically folded and sealed their pages, then wrote the address across a square left blank for that purpose. Lydia, who was an especially verbose letter-writer, never used wrappers and always squeezed as many words as possible into her correspondence. But on this occasion she took precautions, both covering the letter and asking Charity to “burn this if you please as soon as read.”74
Even with those guards in place, Lydia chose her words cautiously. She tried to express her feelings in terms that might read clearly to Charity, but would be obscure to snoopers. Lydia acknowledged her agony over the change in the women’s relationship. “Such fleeting hours and days I have indeed enjoy’d with you,” Lydia wrote, “but they are gone.” Then, intermixing her own words with a series of pointed quotations from the hymns of Isaac Watts, Lydia bid farewell to Charity as a lover:
‘To boundless joy, and solid mirth, our nobler tho’ts aspire’ And how often has our own experience witness’d the fallacy, and the vanity of earthly good—But to abandon all the pleasures of life, and deny that there is any earthly good worth possessing, would still, in my opinion, be unreasonable, and absurd—Can those who have ever enjoy’d the sublime pleasures of exalted friendship, sincerely say, there is nothing in it worth enjoying? I think not. But alas, how many ‘thorns’ lie hid in this choicest ‘rose’! ‘Friendship divides the shares, and lengthens out the store’ And I have sometimes for a moment almost doubted whether an affectionate and endearing friendship was productive, on the whole, of more real pleasure and enjoyment, than of pain and anxiety—at least in many instances—and indeed I this moment doubt it. But our life must be fill’d up with varieties—pleasure and pain must chequer the scene—And if this variety, this instability and insufficiency of sublunary things might lead us to the unchanging, the all-sufficient and inexhaustible Fountain of substantial happiness, we might then receive real benefit from them—But O, how much of my heart, and how many of my thoughts are engross’d by earthly friends and terrestrial enjoyments!—‘How they divide our wavering minds, And leave not ‘half for God.’—O my dear, I have become wholly undeserving of the blessing of friends, by too great an attachment to them, and forgetfulness of the great giver.
The passage may seem unremarkable to modern readers, but like a rebus it contains a hidden message that was clear to Charity, who knew the hymns of Isaac Watts as well as Lydia did. It begins with a quotation from Watts’s poem “Parting with Carnal Joys.” The term “carnal joy” referred to sexual or sensual pleasures in the Christian tradition. Lydia sent a clear message that their sexual relationship had come to an end by quoting this poem, which instructed Christians to bid farewell to the world’s sensual pleasures.75 Watts’s hymn offered an ascetic rejection of earthly love as a “base” pleasure, but Lydia distinguished her own reasons for “parting with carnal joys” from the ascetic rationale. She refused to deny the “sublime pleasures” of friendship; instead she explained that it was the thorns hidden in the rose of friendship that drove her off. Again she was quoting Watts, referencing another of his poems rejecting sensual pleasures. This second poem, “Earth and Heaven,” instructed Christians to beware “mortal joy” because every “pleasure must be dash’d with pain.” Pleasure never came without a cost, “so roses grow on thorns, and honey wears a sting.”76 The pleasures of friendship were meaningful and good, Lydia insisted. Quoting Watts’s elegy for his friend Thomas Gunston, Lydia wrote of how friendship lengthens out the store.77 But the pains brought by friendship were real. Lydia wondered whether friendship’s pleasures could really compensate for its pains. “Indeed I this moment doubt it,” she reflected. Finally, Lydia expressed the hope that her disappointment in love might lead her to a renewed relationship with God. And here she quoted Watts one last time. Friends, she wrote, “divide our wavering minds, and leave not ‘half for God.’” The line came from a poem Watts composed after a poetess named Elizabeth Singer turned down his proposal of marriage. His marital hopes dashed, Watts bemoaned that every “pleasure has its poison, too.”78 He never married. Lydia used this last Watts reference to identify herself as a rejected suitor. She had offered Charity companionship for life, but Charity rejected her offer. Now Lydia recommitted herself to God. Like Watts, Lydia turned away from dreams of companionship and devoted herself to religious causes.79
That Lydia chose to remain unmarried after her breakup with Charity, and did not simply fall into spinsterhood, is clear from the first letter that she wrote in the wake of this farewell missive. The close of Charity and Lydia’s romantic relationship did not end their friendship. Perhaps this was one of the benefits of having a relationship that defied conventional categorization. Lydia could not claim the name of scorned woman, and Charity did not get marked down as a rake or seducer. When they ceased to be lovers the two women reinvented their relationship as friends instead of becoming litigants in a breach-of-promise suit. The first letter that Lydia wrote in her new capacity opened again with a quotation from Isaac Watts. “My dear,” Lydia wrote, “Life’s a long tragedy.” This time she was quoting from the oddly titled “The Mourning-Piece,” which Watts wrote to a friend shortly after the friend’s marriage. The title foreshadows the antipathy toward marriage Watts expresses within the poem. Although he intended the lines to celebrate his friend’s wedding, he did a better job describing marriage’s pains than its pleasures. (Later Watts apologized in a prefatory “epistle” for the “mortifying lines.”)
“The Mourning-Piece” opens with a character named Dianthe making a declaration of her decision to avoid marriage: “Dianthe acts her little part alone, / Nor wishes an associate. So she glides / Single thro’ all the storm, and more secure.” Dianthe rejects marriage because coupling exposes a person to too much pain. Although she is frequently pursued in love, “firm she stood, / And bold repulsed the bright temptation still, / Nor put the chains on.” Dianthe, named after the Roman goddess of chastity Diana, rejects the chains of marriage on principle. Lydia’s letter drew repeatedly from “The Mourning-Piece” in order to send a clear message to Charity. The references to the poem both offered recognition of the new relationship that Charity had formed and announced Lydia’s own intention to remain unmarried. Life is indeed “a long and tumultuous scene, full of perplexity and care,” Lydia wrote to Charity, echoing Watts’s lines “What kind perplexities tumultuous rise, / If but the absence of a day divide / Thee from thy fair beloved!” Her own soft heart could not hold up under the pain of being divided from her lover, so she like Dianthe would remain unmarried on principle.80
Lydia could expect Charity to understand her meaning. Poetry was always their common language, from the first acrostics they exchanged in 1799 to the last poem Charity wrote for Lydia two months before Lydia’s death in 1846. Reading poetry together was their favorite way to spend their time. Lydia never directly quoted Dianthe’s pledge to remain single; the meaning would be too obvious to prying eyes. But she knew that Charity’s brilliant mind could complete the lines that she began. Charity was as familiar with Dianthe’s pledge as Lydia was; the lines had special meaning to her. Eight years earlier Charity had made the same pledge. It took meeting Sylvia Drake to change her mind.