Recognition came posthumously and was due entirely to the efforts of Sir Walter Scott. Eight years after Anne’s death and the publication of ‘Auld Robin Grey’, William Wordsworth called it one of ‘the two best ballads perhaps of modern times’. The great literary critic William Hazlitt said that the effect of reading it was ‘as if all our hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of the heart, and we felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair!’ Leigh Hunt, another influential romantic poet, thought ‘Auld Robin’ ‘the most pathetic ballad that ever was written’.1 Among the Victorians it gained a huge following. Thomas Hardy was impressed enough to record the first time he read it, while Francis Turner Palgrave wrote in his anthology, The Golden Treasury: ‘There can hardly exist a poem more truly tragic in the highest sense than this: nor, except Sappho, has any Poetess known to the Editor equalled it in excellence.’2
What, then, of Anne Barnard’s other poems? The answer is that, thanks to her decision to suppress The Lays of the Lindsays, none has been published. Taken together, however, they do not seem likely to earn her belated appreciation as a significant romantic poet. Even to an unlearned eye, the quality appears too uneven from, on the one hand, ‘The Rose and the Thorn’, an agonising meditation on her passion for Windham, to, on the other, ‘The Slave of Africa’, a bold but trite reflection on inter-racial love.
It is rather as a chronicler of her own life and times that Lady Anne Barnard may be remembered. The author Anthony Powell, whose knowledge of her was limited to a few of her letters to Macartney, wrote in 1928 that ‘on the whole she is perhaps less well known than she deserves’.3 It would be interesting to know what Powell would have made of her other writings, the memoirs in particular.
Like any major work, the memoirs were the source of much anxiety to their creator – over the quality, but also whether she should be writing them at all, given the need to be at the same time candid and discreet. Because these principles were irreconcilable, Anne managed to justify the work on the grounds that it was ‘a tale to caution as well as to encourage’.4 The Hardwickes’ disapproval, along with a perception common at the time that authorship was not compatible with respectability, still had a restraining effect. She abandoned writing at one point and even after resuming concealed identities in the original manuscript with pseudonyms, titling it The History of the Family of St Aubin and the Memoirs of Louisa Melford. Only after further assurances from the nephews James and Lindsay were identities restored in two more editions, one intended for each of them. Even then she felt a need to assure her surviving siblings that ‘no brother or sister of mine can ever have reason to be uneasy at what may fall from my pen, affectionately attached as I am to all’; and she may have become constrained as the last two volumes are comparatively prosaic.5
In large part her purpose was to explain her life, to exculpate herself from what she saw as the charge sheet levelled against her by society, but also – and more significantly – by family. Although the precise nature of these sins was not stated, we have discovered enough of her unconventional ways to see what she alluded to when writing of her attempts
to preserve the real account of some events in our family which might otherwise be handed down as traditional blame on one who (though she may have been injudicious) deserved no such sentence as has sometimes been inflicted on her.6
Her confidence, never robust, had become more fragile, and here the influence of family may again be discerned. Reading the memoirs, we see her evolve from a defiant young woman to an anxious older one, unable to accept compliments without embarrassment, unwilling to trust her own judgement. Her sister Elizabeth, having tried to interfere with the memoirs, had also – in effect – prevented her receiving due recognition for ‘Auld Robin Grey’ until Scott took matters into his own hands and had it published, with further verses added by Anne, along with his formal declaration that ‘this beautiful and long-contested ballad’ was hers. Whether she lived to see this final validation is not clear, but the odds are against it. Anne died less than halfway into the year it came off the press.*
Her diffidence has continued to stand in the way of further appreciation since. James Lindsay was a dutiful custodian of an archive taken to Balcarres and, under Anne’s absolute prohibition on publication of her writings, preserved from outside eyes.
A slight breach of the injunction was made by the Twenty-fifth Earl of Crawford, grandson of Anne’s brother Alexander, who included her Cape journal in his three-volume family history Lives of the Lindsays, first published in 1849. This excited subsequent interest in South Africa, and a would-be biographer presented herself. Although Dorothea Fairbridge was able to see the memoirs, the book published in 1924 contained no extracts and was essentially confined to letters from the Barnards at the Cape to Macartney. Another South African author, Madeleine Masson, wrote a biography without any access to Anne’s papers at all. By now attention had been properly roused, but though South African academics edited a series of volumes devoted to her letters, journals and diaries from the Cape, the bigger picture – the story of her extraordinary life – remained unseen. When the present author wrote to the Twenty-ninth Earl of Crawford in 2012, requesting access to Anne’s papers, the memoirs were largely unexplored as a biographical and historical resource, and virtually unknown.
What then of the flaws in these lavish volumes? Prolixity is a problem. Going back on them, Anne regretted that ‘I had not passed them under the eye of some merciless reviser who would have pruned them without remorse’. Another passage begins, ‘I fancy I have nothing to mark down, but the pen once in my hand & the first page wrote . . .’ then sets off on another ramble, before she comes back to remind herself that wordiness is ‘a species of disease’.7 She is fallible in chronology as well, especially dates. ‘My memory will go,’ she wrote in 1802. ‘It was never a good one and it is not now worth two-pence-halfpenny.’8
There are other defects. She closed herself resolutely to high-society gossip and, as readers of this book will have discerned, she was too sensitive, too forgiving, to count among the sharpest chroniclers of her times. This she knew as well.
If my reader may have been disappointed on some occasions when I have told little when I have obviously known much, let my forbearance be my praise, for surely there is more merit in suppressing the foibles of poor human nature or withholding the brilliant and pointed observation one could make, than in placing error or ridicule in an incontrovertible light.9
The fundamental question that arises is, did she tell the truth? Can she be trusted?
It has been suggested that, having become aware of contemporary women authors, Anne was exploring her life in the form of a novel.10 It is true that the early volumes are especially vivid and dramatic – and when it comes to extended passages of dialogue, she was clearly drawing on memory rather than record. It may be recalled that in relating her early courtships in Edinburgh she chided herself:
These memoirs – I speak it with shame – are becoming a mere novel I see. ‘Why not?’ say you . . . Indeed, I do not know why they should not, except that I had intended they should be something better. But the past is a novel.11
There is a novelistic aspect to the memoirs, apparent not only in her use of dialogue but her relish for a good story. She is very persuasive, and the reader, drawn in by the intimacy of address and confessional tone, needs to guard against accepting all she has to say as an absolute record. She was, after all, seeking redemption; and she is subject to the failings intrinsic to memoirists – selectiveness, subjectivity and simple camouflage.
But she avoids those other common sins of self-aggrandisement and fabrication. It is possible to go further and say that Anne may have made omissions by choice, but she did not tamper with the truth (as she remembered it), nor flinch from a degree of self-disclosure so searing as to appear from another age from that other indefatigable memoirist, Fanny Burney. Where her version of events can be checked against other records, it stands up. The stern lecturing of her own conscience obliged her to be honest.
Dr Johnson said people propagate falsehoods in many ways without intending it. On hearing an extraordinary circumstance told he would say, ‘it is not so, do not tell this again.’ He inculcated in all his friends the importance of perpetual vigilance . . . Those who have been of his school have a love of truth and accuracy.12
Biographers agree that a ‘Life’ cannot give a precise picture of a life, because no individual can be reduced properly to words. The complexity and ambiguity of human perception came into Anne’s own observations. ‘How odd it is,’ she noted, ‘that people have always given me credit for many good things which I have not, and denied me others which I have.’13 However, a desire to reach the heart of a matter was an instinct she shared with Burney, and it helps to account for their wordiness. One biographer of Burney has observed that in recording her life in minute detail, she was acknowledging that experience has a complex texture and the truth about it is elusive.14 Anne would have agreed; in relating her dilemmas at length, she was reviewing her behaviour from a range of perspectives, and addressing each of them.
Spontaneity is another quality, and here are grounds for suggesting that although it is right to say that a ‘Life’ cannot fully reveal a life, Anne provided more than the usual materials to assist a biographer. Margaret Lenta, who brought her to a wider audience through editions of the Cape diaries and journals, noted Anne’s ‘penchant for thinking aloud on paper as she confronted her day-to-day problems and dilemmas’.15 It is this meditative tone that conveys intimacy and can lead the reader to a sense that he or she is close to understanding Anne Barnard.
The memoirs are in part a confession of Anne’s need to be loved – in effect, a final act of reaching out to those who knew her and who she hoped would remember her fondly. They may show too great a desire to explain herself, be too prolix for commercial publication today. They still cast a profoundly revealing light on an era, and on life as a painful quest for truth and vindication – one which she was able set down, reflect upon and, unlike so many other women of her time, bequeath to later generations. There she is to be seen, in her own words, with all her paradoxes: high-born but egalitarian, daring yet compassionate, frightened but resolute, a figure of the Georgian age who speaks to the modern world.
We may leave her at 21 Berkeley Square, pen in hand towards the end.
My friends press me to go out to amuse myself – but I should go without any interest beyond the charm of getting home again; by the side of my fire I have got into the habit of living in other days with those I loved, reflecting on the past, hoping in the future, and sometimes looking back with a sorrowful retrospect when I fear I may have erred. Together with these mental employments I have various sources of amusement – I compile and arrange my memorandums of past observations and events . . . With such entertainment for my mornings and a house full of nephews and nieces, together with the near connections of my dear Barnard, all tenderly attached to me, I have great, great reason to bless God, who, in taking much from me, has left me so much! 16
* It may have been a result of Scott’s editing that the title was altered from ‘Auld Robin Grey’, as it was always referred to in Anne’s hand, to ‘Auld Robin Gray’, by which it has since been known.