Journal of Aging and Identity, Vol. 4, No. 2. 1999

A Story of Her Own: Hester LynchPiozzi's Autobiography

Catherine M. Rodriguez1

This essay examines the autobiography of Hester Lynch Piozzi and contextualizesher story within eighteenth-century ideologies of gender and aging. From a narra-tive understanding of identity, autobiographical writing serves as one of the manystories that constitute an individual's identity. This reading of Piozzi's accountfinds that it functions both as an act of reminiscing and as an effort to give mean-ing to life that was often misunderstood. Considering Piozzi as a woman who livedmost of her life outside of the social and cultural expectations for a middle classfemale of her era, this essay suggests the importance of listening to and retellingthe stories of others as well as our own.

One time friend, confidante, and biographer of Samuel Johnson; literary host-ess; prolific letter writer; copious diarist; and author of several other publishedworks, Hester Lynch Piozzi lived far beyond the expected lifespan for a womanduring the eighteenth century. During her life she gave birth to twelve children—only four of whom lived into adulthood—had several miscarriages, and survivedtwo husbands, as well as most of her friends. Yet she remained physically, men-tally, and socially active until just weeks before her death on May 2,1821 at the ageof eighty-one.2 Planning her eightieth birthday party six months in advance, shecelebrated it with over 600 guests on January 27,1820 in the Assembly Rooms atBath with a concert, a ball, and a supper (Clifford, 1952, p. 451). Her biographer,

1Correspondence should be directed to Catherine M. Rodriguez, Journal of Aging and Identity, LifelongLearning Division MHH116, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620.

2By our counting, Piozzi died at age eighty; however she and others of her era counted the day theywere born as their first birthday.

KEY WORDS: Hester Lynch Piozzi; aging; identity; gender.

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James Clifford, describes this gala event as follows:

After her health was drunk to a round of cheers, Mrs. Piozzi opened the ball with Sir JohnSalusbury [her nephew], and danced 'with astonishing elasticity' until early in the morning.Yet the next day her callers found her 'mirthful and witty as usual,' and she delightedlywrote in her diary, 'Lysons called, surprised to see me up—and at breakfast, at 10 o'clock',(p. 450)

It seems that Piozzi's capacity to surprise never flagged throughout her lifetime,for as a woman of the eighteenth century, she continually defied the social normsfor her class and gender.

While Piozzi's earlier writings have been valued primarily for the wealth ofcultural history contained in them, the writings from the last ten years of Piozzi'slife have remained relatively obscure. She has received considerable attention forher friendship with Samuel Johnson, and her earlier journals have been ferreted forinformation regarding him. Her Family Book has even been reviewed by the Britishmedical society for information regarding eighteenth-century medical practices.Patricia Meyer Spacks (1970) offers one of the few studies of Piozzi's late journalsand concludes that whilst Piozzi appeared an astonishing old lady, she died anunhappy one, filled with self-doubt, self-pity, and loneliness. Certainly remarks ofloneliness, accounts of sickness—her friends and her own—and reports of deadand dying friends and acquaintances pepper her late journals and letters; however,rereading Piozzi's late writings for their contribution to the understanding of iden-tity issues for an aging woman in late eighteenth- century England may prove afruitful endeavor. This essay considers some of the ideology of aging and longevitythat circulated during Piozzi's lifetime and examines Piozzi's autobiography, writ-ten at the age of seventy-four, in light of contemporary research on aging, identity,and autobiographical memory.

Piozzi's autobiography is an atypical representation of the genre in severalrespects. Although the idea that others may one day read this account may havecrossed Piozzi's mind, she writes this autobiography in 1815 upon the request of SirJames Fellowes, a naval surgeon and one of the three young men that Piozzi met andbefriended at Bath in her later years. Disappointed by her husband's nephew whomshe had adopted as her heir and given her family name, Salusbury, Piozzi makestwo of these men, Fellowes and the actor William Augustus Conway, the objectof her maternal affections during her latter years (McCarthy, 1985). In additionto addressing a specific audience of one, this work deviates from conventionalautobiography in that it does not provide a complete narrative of Piozzi's entirelife—it spans only twenty-four pages, and its subject matter chronicles her lifeonly into her first marriage. With these generic exceptions, Piozzi's autobiographyoffers insight into issues of identity that she faced in later life.

According to a narrative understanding of identity, identity is created in thestories told about us, and those that we tell about ourselves (Longino and Murphy,1997). Some of the stories told about us exist in the ideology of the given historical

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moment. Because these stories change over time and are subject to revision, identityis not fixed, but fluid, and tension often exists between our own narratives and thoseof our culture. Piozzi's autobiography represents one story that she told about her-self at a particular time, under certain circumstances. Ironically, she does not tell thestory that a twentieth-century audience might expect. Rather than focusing on herfriendship with Johnson, as literary scholars have tended to, Piozzi devotes muchattention on her childhood and her upbringing and allots some space to explainingher loveless marriage to Henry Thrale. At points her writing seems a justification ofwho she was and the decisions that she made and at other moments it seems a fondrecollection of experiences from a distant past. Contextualizing Piozzi's own nar-rative within some of the stories told by the ideology that circulated during her life-time illuminates the role of autobiographical writing in the formation of her identityas an older woman and contribute to our understanding of Piozzi's narrative.

Significantly, the appearance of women in visual representations of agingroughly coincides with literary representations of female subjectivity as identifiedby Nancy Armstrong (1987). From her examination of conduct literature, educa-tional treatise, and fiction of the eighteenth century, Armstrong paints a picture ofthe domestic woman that she asserts became the cultural expectation for middleclass women by the late eighteenth century. In her schema, the construct of the"domestic woman" became the counterpart for that of the "economic man." Thisframework attributed a special province of knowledge to women that includedemotional and moral issues, as well as household surveillance. While the man wasto bring political authority and economic security to the marriage contract, thewomen should serve as the moral compass of the home, acting with prudence,modesty, and frugality (Armstrong). Under the guise of gaining authority withinthe domestic sphere, the woman, then, was safely secured from the public andpolitical realms. While in broad brushstrokes this representation depicts the cul-tural expectations for women during the eighteenth century, it certainly does notdescribe the lived lives of all, if any, women of that time period. Often, then asnow, women found themselves caught between the expectations of their society,their own desires, and the circumstances of the life they lived, as was certainly thecase with Piozzi.

To historicize the aging process, Thomas Cole (1992) traces the trajectory thaticonographical representations of aging followed as they moved from the cyclicalsacred imagery of the medieval Christian culture to a the representation of thestages of life on a rising and falling staircase with certain roles assigned to eachstage. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, women appear for the first time inthe iconography of aging. As Cole points out, "much of this significance centeredon women's new responsibility for health, beauty, and physical comportmentCleanliness, care of the skin, hair, teeth and face ... were considered essential re-sponsibilities for women properly concerned with pleasing their husbands" (p. 26).The staircase metaphor, that was widely distributed in England by the eighteenth

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century, taught that each age had its appropriate role and necessary place in theorder of life and that to acquiesce to the physical exigencies of the aging processrepresented a submission to divine purpose.

Marie Mulvey Roberts (1993) adds to the history of aging by particularizingher discussion to gender discrepancies in the concept of aging that circulated dur-ing the eighteenth century. She asserts that some enlightenment thinkers equatedlongevity with progress and that the idea that mortality as a curable conditionmay be regarded as an "ultimate threshold of Enlightenment meliorism" (p. 151).However, Roberts finds that, like today, gender considerations mediated the expe-rience of growing old and hindered a woman's sense of personal identity. MaryWollstonecraft wrote of the cultural construction of age for women:

It has been asserted by some naturalists that men do not attain their full growth and strengthtill thirty; but that women arrive at maturity by twenty. I apprehend that they reason on falseground, led astray by the male prejudice, which deems beauty the perfection of women—mere beauty of features and complexion, the vulgar acceptation of the word, whilst malebeauty is allowed to have some connection with the mind. (Qtd. in Roberts pp. 159-160)

While the idea of prolongevity for a man was appealing, assuming medical ad-vances could remedy physical decline, an aged woman had no attraction and be-came an object for derision or at best an unpleasant one to be ignored. Amidstthis ideological milieu, Piozzi lived to consider herself ironically, one of the"curiosities" and "antiquities" of Bath (McCarthy p. 262), and from this position,she tells, in writing, her own story.

Recent studies of autobiographical memory serve to elucidate the contents andthe themes that emerge in Piozzi's account. On the one hand it contains elements ofreminiscence and creates a sense of companionship between her and Fellowes, andon the other hand, it represents an attempt to give meaning to and explain an oftenmisunderstood portion of her life. In their study of memory distribution across thelifespan, David C. Rubin, Scott E. Wetzler, and Robert D. Nebes (1986) observethat in creating their self narrative, older adults tend to recall a disproportionatenumber of memories from their earlier lives, a phenomenon termed the reminiscenteffect. Joseph M. Fitzgerald (1996) graphs memories produced by younger andolder adults to show that when asked what memories they would include in a bookof their lives, fifty percent of the memories that older adults recount are drawnfrom their childhood and adolescence between the ages of six and twenty-five.This pattern can be observed in Piozzi's autobiography as she devotes thirteen ofher twenty-four pages to her life prior to her marriage to Henry Thrale that tookplace when she was 22 years of age.

With her work on aging and reminiscence, Kathleen Woodward (1997) be-gins to interpret reminiscence and distinguishes it from life review, asserting that"it is more fragmentary and partial ... concerned with certain moments in thepast" (p. 151). Rather than attempting to arrive at some sort of truth or meaningabout life, reminiscence endeavors to create a mood or an atmosphere of compan-ionableness. She asserts that reminiscence may be analogous to certain moments

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within autobiographical writing and finds the significance of reminiscing for olderadults in the mood that it creates, a mood that she describes as generative andrestorative. When one reminisces about the past, that individual invites his or heraudience to share in the created mood. Furthermore, when reminiscence occursbetween generations and when the recalled experience was not initially shared byboth parties, Woodward posits that it creates a sense of continuity with the past atthe same time that it stretches into another generation.

Piozzi's narrative displays aspects of reminiscence, according to Woodward'sdefinition. It is fragmentary, sprinkled with snapshot-type stories, scenes that shefondly recollects from her life. She zooms in and describes an incident from aparticular period in her life with some detail, such as learning to ride horses ather aunt's estate, and then moves on to another moment. At several points duringher narrative she interrupts to address Fellowes directly, conveying to the readerthe mood of companionship between herself and him. Breaking from the narrativeof her childhood, Piozzi imagines Fellowes' reaction, "What baby anecdotes arethese, you cry. "Tis so, but your poor friend certainly ceased being in any wise awonder after she was five years old" (p. 12). Her interruption suggests that shefears Fellowes will not appreciate the seemingly trivial details that she includesfrom her childhood, but referring to herself as his poor friend, she implores himto indulge her further and continues with her story. By the end of her narrative shehas grown more comfortable with her audience; recalling experiences with JamesHarris, she stops in the middle of her anecdote to exclaim in delight, "Oh, whatconversations! What correspondences were these!" (p. 29).

Examined separately the anecdotes that Piozzi includes in her autobiographyconjure a mood that she invites her audience to share; read as a whole, a fewrelated themes begin to surface in the collection. Focusing on the schematizationof autobiographical memories, Joseph M. Fitzgerald (1996) and Craig R. Barclay(1986) link the self narrative with identity formation. Fitzgerald suggests thatan individual constructs a self narrative to provide an understandable order andclear theme for his or her life. Barclay adds that "autobiographical recollectionsare based on facts that have been interpreted and fitted into a consistent story orschema.. .[that] functions to provide consistency between one's life as lived and theabbreviated story told at any given time" (p. 83). He asserts that autobiographicalmaterial must maintain the integrity of one's life.

While Piozzi's narrative contains elements of reminiscence, it concomitantlyfunctions as a story designed to explain and give meaning to her life. Piozzi's au-tobiography falls roughly into three segments: her ancestry, her childhood and lifebefore Thrale, and her married life with Thrale. As she moves through representa-tive anecdotes from these periods, feminism, intellectual freedom, and the strugglefor financial security emerge and intertwine as the dominant themes in her story.Throughout her account, she emphasizes the strong women in her family who wereinfluential in her life and who faced circumstances similar to those that she con-fronted. Several of the vignettes that she includes focus on her early education, an

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education unusual for a female in mid eighteenth-century England. Furthermore,she weaves in through her narrative the details of her family's financial strugglesas they effected her.

In a narrative understanding of identity one's name carries a story, the story ofone's lineage in which each individual occupies a space and continues the family'sstory linking it to past and future generations. For women, in cultures where theycustomarily take their husband's name upon marriage, a portion of their identitybecomes subsumed under the family name of their husband. Often the story oftheir lineage is lost as they assume a place in another's. Upon Piozzi's marriage toThrale, she took up a position in his narrative, becoming known as the mistress ofStreatham and moving in his circle of friends and acquaintances. Upon her secondmarriage, to Piozzi, her name changes again, and again she is defined, to an extentby this choice and her new name, as she is ostracized by her children and formerfriends. However, as this was a marriage made from love of both parties, thistime Hester retained much of her own personhood. Freed from the expectations ofher position at Streatham and the responsibilities of bearing and rearing children,Piozzi pursued more freely her literary interests; nearly all of her published workappeared after this second marriage. Furthermore, she and Gabriel Piozzi wouldlater refurbish and take up residence at her family estate, Bachygraig. As if to havethe last word in the narrative of her identity, she and Piozzi adopt his nephew,raise him as their own son, give him her family name—Salusbury—and name himheir to the Salusbury estate. Unfortunately, this nephew appreciated his adoptivemother for little more than her money. Yet for Piozzi the family name carried astory that she considered worth remembering and passing on to future generations.

In her autobiography, Piozzi celebrates her ancestry as she concomitantlyannounces her feminist theme with her opening statement: "I heard it asserted inmixed company that few men of ever so good a family could recollect, immediatelyon being challenged, the maiden names of their four great grandmothers: they werenot Welsh men" (p. 6). Piozzi's implication that a Welsh man would rememberhis maternal heritage reflects her pride in her own ethnicity as a Welsh womanand suggests that Welsh women by nature are remarkable and influence their maledescendants so profoundly that their stories will be recounted by their male heirs.As Piozzi herself had no living male descendent who would preserve her memoryor family lineage, perhaps she imagines Fellowes as her "great grandson" whowould recall her as his Welsh "great grandmother." Piozzi proceeds to tell of herown four great grandmothers and delineate her ancestry, possibly in an effort tovalidate her identity. She traces her roots back to Adam de Saltzberg, claiming thatin 1070 de Saltzberg obtained a "faire house in Lancashire" (p. 6). Piozzi cites avisit that she and her late second husband, Gabriel Piozzi, made to the Herald'soffice in Saltzburg where officials acknowledged her as a true descendent of thehouse. Her story, replete with various deeds of valor performed by her ancestors,traces both her father's and her mother's ancestry to the Salusbury line.

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Some of the circumstances that Piozzi delineates surrounding her mother'smarriage resemble elements of those surrounding Piozzi's own marriages. Shewrites that her mother refused all suitors attracted by money, her merits, andbeauty; instead she married for love, her "rakish cousin," John Salusbury (p. 10).Later in her story, Piozzi recalls herself being put on display when suitors beganto call for her: "Those who could read were shown my verses; those who couldnot, were judges of my prowess in the field" (p. 18). However, with her tutor's(Dr. Collier) approval, Piozzi made sport of keeping these suitors at bay. Forcedinto her first marriage to Henry Thrale by pressure from her mother and financialexigencies, Piozzi does not exercises free choice and marry for love as her motherdid until her second marriage.

Piozzi tells that her mother married beneath herself in financial status anddescribes the results of this choice, perhaps in an effort to reconcile her ownchoice in her second husband and the consequences of that decision. Piozzi'sparents raised their only child in genteel poverty, dependent upon the generosityof relatives, spending their married life cajoling wealthy family members in hopesof gaining their support and an inheritance for their daughter. She specifies hermother's income of 10,000 /. and another 125 /. per annum in an annuity for herown mother's life, "an excellent fortune in those days" (9).

Although Piozzi does not sacrifice financial security as her mother had, withher decision to remarry, she does find herself ostracized. Family and friends ob-jected to her choice of Gabriel Piozzi for several reasons: As a musician, he wassocially beneath her and brought no financial advancement to her estate; her daugh-ters feared he lowered their social status and endangered their stakes in the marriagemarket. Because he was Catholic and Italian, Johnson interpreted her choice as anabandonment of her religion and country. Because marrying for love violated theeighteenth-century conventions of femininity that excluded emotional and sexualneeds from the feminine image, her female friends and acquaintances, such asFanny Burney and Elizabeth Montagu found her an embarrassment to her sex.

As for the theme of intellectual freedom Piozzi describes herself as a preco-cious young child, whose educational achievements extended beyond the normsfor young ladies of the eighteenth century. Performing such feats as memorizingSatan's speech to the sun in Paradise Lost, she learned early how to impress otherswith her intellectual accomplishments, including the Duke and Duchess of Leedsand the actors, James Quin and David Garrick. She writes, "although educationwas a word then unknown as applied to females, they had taught [her] to read andspeak and think and translate from French" (p. 16). Yet, as she relates her narrative,it seems that the purpose of her education was to delight well-to-do relatives inorder to gain monetary favors.

She recalls her mother overruling a meeting between Hester and her father'sbrother, thinking it best to "conciliate her own [Piozzi's mother's] relations"(p. 16). Therefore, under her mother's instruction, she writes a letter to her uncle,

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Sir Robert Salusbury Cotton who was recently widowed, without children, and inpossession of Bachygraig. Piozzi reports, "the scheme prospered" and tells of herfamily receiving an invitation to her uncle's home, Lleweney, which they accepted(pp. 16-17). There, her uncle doted fondly upon her, and she amused him withher precocity. She recounts one interchange with him in which he asks if she canspell Clough, the name of a family invited for dinner. " 'No' was the reply; 'I neverheard the name; but if it had been spelt like buff, you would not have asked methe question. They write it perhaps as we write enough—c-1-o-u-g-h'" (pp. 11-12). She includes in her narrative that her uncle promised to make a new will andprovide 10,000 /. to her, but died suddenly before following through with this plan.

In another episode that focuses on her early education, Piozzi tells of herfather's departure for Nova Scotia; however, rather than explaining the reasonsfor her father's taking leave or her own feelings about these circumstances, sheemphasizes the pains that her mother took to educate young Hester in his absence."Poor dear mamma was left sine pane almost, I believe, certainly sine nummo, withher odd charge, a girl without a guinea, whose mind she ceased not to cultivatein every possible manner" (p. 14). Piozzi recalls that during this time, her motherinstructed her in French, arithmetic, and writing. She reports that at age eight, shequalified for a teacher rather than a learner at the "great school in Queen Square,"where she attended until illness caused her to leave and stay with her mother ather grandmother Cotton's country seat, East Hyde (p. 14).

Piozzi's recollection of her stay at East Hyde leads her to celebrate anotherstrong female figure in her life as she recounts her grandmother's story of triumphover life's obstacles. She tells of her grandmother having possessed an immensefortune in Jamaica, but, as she was orphaned at five years of age, she was dispos-sessed of it by her uncle. Perhaps Piozzi identifies with her grandmother as shetoo was twice denied an inheritance as a child by two separate uncles, once by anaccident of death—in the case of her uncle, Sir Robert Cotton—and the second,by an act of marriage in the case of her father's brother, Dr. Thomas Salusbury.Furthermore, Piozzi's account of Lady Cotton's second marriage bears an affinityto Piozzi's own second marriage. Left a widow at thirty-seven years of age, LadyCotton made her choice, "with many children, all mortally offended at her marry-ing again." However, circumstances turned out more favorable for Cotton than forPiozzi; her children all reconciled with her.

In recalling her time at East Hyde, Piozzi reminisces about learning to lovehorses and "learning to drive of the old coachman; who like every body else, smalland great, delighted in taking me for a pupil." (p. 16). She tells this anecdotewith delight and some detail including the names of her grandmother's warhorses.Carrying her readers back to her childhood exuberance, she writes:

when after long practice I showed her and my mother how two of them (poor Colonel andPeacock) would lick my hand for a lump of sugar or fine white bread, much were theyamazed; much more when my skill in guiding them round the court-yard on the break couldno longer be denied, though strictly prohibited for the future, (p. 16)

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Later in her life, Henry Thrale would indeed forbid his wife to ride horses on thegrounds that it was a activity.

Piozzi's aunt by marriage on her father's side of the family, Lady Salusbury,provides another example of a strong influential woman in Piozzi's life. Piozzidescribes her mother's ill use by her uncle, Dr. Thomas Salusbury, while her fatherwas out of the country. Her father had left Salusbury with power of attorney to doeverything for Hester and her mother in his absence. However, Salusbury neglectedthis responsibility until his marriage brought him into his father-in-law's fortune. Atthis time, Piozzi and her mother came to live with Salusbury and his wife at OffleyPlace. Piozzi's account makes it clear that Lady Salusbury's inheritance bringsabout this fortunate turn in their circumstances and emphasizes Lady Salusbury'skindness to her, rather than her uncle's. She exclaims, "here I reigned, long, afondled favorite" and tells how both of the Salusburys became attached to her asif she were their own, for they had no children (p. 16). But, it was upon the Lady'surging that Piozzi studied Latin, Italian, and Spanish, recalling, "study was mydelight, and such a patroness would have made students of stones" (p. 17). Piozzireminisces about this happy time in her life as she tells of translating a sermonfor her aunt, who in recompense rewarded her with a "set of pearl and garnetornaments" (p. 18).

In Piozzi's account several factors contributed to the unraveling of her happi-ness and her union with Thrale. Her Aunt's (Lady Salusbury) death at age forty-oneupset her tenure at Offley place. The tenuous relationship between her father andher uncle, strained by her father's irascibility, further alienated her from her wid-owed uncle's, Thomas Salusbury's fond affection. According to Piozzi's narrative,her uncle's remarriage denies her, for the second time, an inheritance and financialsecurity for her future. After telling of her father's temper and the threat that itposed to their relationship with her uncle she remarks, "We should have madehome more agreeable. My uncle would not then have run to the smiling Widowof Wellbury," the woman whom he marries after Lady Salusbury's death (p. 19).Sadly, at seventy-four years old, Piozzi still seems to believe that somehow shewas to blame for her uncle's remarriage and the lost inheritance.

Piozzi paints the circumstances under which she met and married HenryThrale as a conspiracy between her uncle and Thrale against her in which hermother becomes their pawn. With her father and Dr. Collier, her tutor, away,Hester and her mother stayed at Offley Place with her uncle. Prior to bringingThrale home with him, Salusbury announced, perhaps to gain Hester's attention,that Thrale is a "real Sportsman" (p. 19). As Piozzi describes the introduction,Thrale applied himself diligently to gain her mother's attention. Maybe he hadbeen coached ahead of time that this was the way to win Hester's hand. Piozziremarks, "there was no doubt of her approving the pretensions of so very showy asuitor—if suitor he was to me" (p. 20). Telling that her father swore that his daughterwould not be "exchanged for a barrel of porter" and recalling "vain were all myassurances that nothing resembled love less than Mr. Thrale's behavior," and "vain

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my protestations that no step on my part should be taken without [Dr. Collier's]concurrence," Piozzi makes it clear that she was coerced into this match againsther own desires (p. 20). According to Piozzi's account, Salusbury made his favorand inheritance conditional upon this marriage. Describing in some detail the finalevents that led to her marriage, Piozzi relates that news came to her in a letter fromCollier of her uncle's upcoming marriage. When her attempt to conceal this letterfrom her father failed, he took the news poorly and died the following day. Withher father dead, under pressure from her mother and uncle, Hester was married toHenry Thrale.

Her uncle saw Hester wed, then married the widow that he had been courting,and dropped out of Hester's life, leaving her to "conciliate as I could, a husbandwho was indeed much kinder than I counted on to a plain girl who had not oneattraction in his eyes, and on whom he never had thrown five minutes of histime away, in any interview unwitnessed by company, even til after the weddingday was done!" (p. 22). Of the five pages that Piozzi devotes to her marriedlife, two and a half are given to short anecdotes and bits of information thatillustrate the unpleasant circumstances of her marriage. The remaining half of thissection contains a detailed account of a major financial crisis brought on by herhusband's irresponsibility. Piozzi portrays her marriage to Thrale as a lovelessone of convenience for him. She learned after the wedding from one of Thrale'sfriends that he had proposed to several women prior to her. They refused to live inthe Borough where Thrale's winter home and brewery were located. When Hestermade no such objection, he settled on her for his wife. She recalls her narrowlycircumscribed life with Thrale who told her that her place was in the drawing roomor the bedchamber. Although they kept a pack of foxhounds, she was forbiddento ride; they "kept the finest table possible at Streatham but his wife was not tothink of the kitchen" (p. 24). She writes of literature and her children as her soleresource during this time and mentions Johnson's comment that she "lived like herhusband's kept mistress,—shut from the world, its pleasures or its cares" (p. 25).According to Piozzi, the scene began to change when Thrale ran for Parliament.Then she became "useful, almost necessary," as she wrote advertisements for hiscampaign and played the hostess for his supporters. She fancies that people musthave "admired how happy Mr. Thrale must be with such a wonder of a wife"(p. 25).

Piozzi's account of her marriage foregrounds Thrale's lack of trust in her.Of her personal relationship with Thrale, she remarks, "confidence was no wordin our vocabulary, and I tormented myself to guess who possessed that ofMr. Thrale" (p. 24). She attributes Thrale's business debacle to his misplacedconfidence, remarking, "I wondered all the while where his heart lay; but it wasfound at last, too soon for joy, too late almost for sorrow" (p. 25). Guided by a"vulgar fellow, by the name of Humphrey Jackson," Thrale had taken unwise risksin his business, leaving them nearly bankrupt. Employing Johnson as her authority,she recalls him exclaiming, "Fear not the menaces of suicide ... the man who has

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two such females [Hester and her mother] to console him, never yet killed himself,and will not now" (p. 26). Piozzi tells how she used her mother's money and drove,while big with child, to Brighthelmstone to borrow more in order to salvage boththe brewery and their livelihood. As she tells in detail from whom she borrowedand how much, she remarks with some pride, "yet in nine years was every shillingpaid; one if not two elections contested; and we might, at Mr. Thrale's death, havehad money, had he been willing to listen to advice" (p. 27). As she closes thisepisode in her life she reveals the cost at which she saved the day: "the baby thatI carried lived an hour" (p. 27).

In the remaining few pages of her autobiography, Piozzi returns to the actof reminiscing as she depicts various scenes from her youth. She recalls thatduring the "happy years when I reigned Queen at Offley Place all summer,...Hogarth made me sit for his fine picture the Lady's Last Stake" (p. 28). "It wasthen too,... that I took a fancy in the 'St. James Chronicle,' unknown to myparents and my tutor too; it was my sport to see them reading, studying, blamingor praising their own little whimsical girl's performances" (p. 28). Although filledwith happy scenes, Hester's childhood had not prepared her for confinement tothe conventional realm of the eighteenth-century woman. She had been broughtup to display her intellectual abilities to people whom she believed appreciatedher for them. She had been allowed to engage and cultivate the outdoor sportsfrom which her marriage barred her. Individually, the vignettes that compose herautobiography provide opportunities for her to reminisce. Taken collectively, theyplace Piozzi within a history of the women in her family that helps her explainwho she is. A statement toward the end of her account reveals the dual purpose ofher writing. Breaking the continuity of her narrative, she addresses Fellowes, "buthere I am vexing your tired ear with past afflictions as you have probably thoughtmore of my literary, than my moral or social existence, though I hope not" (28).Perhaps she writes to explain her moral and social existence with hopes that, aswell as sharing the mood that she creates with her stories, Fellowes, her listener,will understand a life that was often misunderstood.

Piozzi closes her narrattive on a a pathetic note with an address to Fellowes:

But you make me an egoist, and force me to remember scenes and ideas I never dreamed ofcommunicating. The less so, because finding my fortune of late circumscribed in a mannerwholly new to me, no doubt remained of all celebrity following my lost power of entertainingcompany, giving parties, &c; and my heart prepared to shut itself up, convinced there existednot a human creature who cared one atom for poor H.L.P. now she had no longer money tobe robbed of. (p. 30)

In her work on stories that older people tell, Barbara Myerhoff emphasizes thesignificance of the listener, for it is the listener who enters into a partnership withthe narrator and acts as the transformative agent: "the past is recovered in andthrough the listener's intervention" (Kaminsky, 1992, p. 317). Marc Kaminskysuggests that through his or her mirroring gaze, the listener creates a space for thestory and surrounds the teller with a sense of being beloved, believed, and heard,

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and, thereby, co-authors the story. By soliciting this autobiography from Piozzi,Fellowes performs this function for her.

For her "listeners," which would include all who read her story, Piozzi hasassembled a fragmentary scrapbook of her life: the memories that she thoughtimportant to put into writing at a particular time, collected and left for somefuture generation to interpret. Presumably, the vignettes that she includes and thepeople that she describes were meaningful in her life, enough so that she chose toremember them. From Kaminsky's (1992) perspective, one with which I concur,stories provide "arms with which to fight death, arms for mortal oarsmen to goback over the wide water of forgetfulness, so that we may continue to make theround trips toward meaning that stories make possible" (p. 324). Herein lies theimportance of listening to, telling, and retelling our stories and those of others. Aswe listen to and read the stories of elders we act as mortal oarsmen, traversing thesea of meaning. We become the co-authors of these stories as we reread them andrenegotiate the tides of meaning; as these meanings touch our lives, their authorscontribute to the collage of stories that constitute our own identities. And thusthe story of identity continues, not in isolation, but through the rich matrix ofrelationships that exists and grows through time.

REFERENCES

Armstrong, Nancy. (1987). Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York:Oxford University Press.

Clifford, James L. (1987). Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale). New York: Columbia University Press.Cole, Thomas. (1992). The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Barclay, Craig R. (1986). "Schematization of Autobiographical Memory." In David Rubin (ed).

Autobiographical Memory, (pp. 82-99) London: Cambridge University Press. 202-224.Fitzgerald, Joseph M. (1996) "Intersecting Meanings of Reminiscence in Adult Development and

Aging." In David C. Rubin (ed). Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory(pp. 360-383). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kaminsky, Marc. (1992). "The Story of the Shoebox: The Meaning and the Practice of TransmittingStories." In Thomas R. Cole, David D. Van Tassel and Robert Kastenbaum (Eds.). Handbook ofthe Humanities and Aging, (pp. 307-327). New York: Springer.

McCarthy, William. (1985). Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman. Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press.

Murphy, John W., and Longino, Chailiot. (1997). Toward a Postmodern Understanding of Aging andIdentity. Journal of Aging and Identity 2 (2), 81-91.

Piozzi, Hester Lynch (Salusbury) Thrale. (1861). Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains ofMrs.Piozzi. Ed. A. Hayward. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.

Roberts, Marie Mulvey. (1993). 'A Physic Against Death': Eternal Life and the Enlightenment—Gender and Gerontology. In Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (Eds.), Literature and MedicineDuring the Eighteenth Century (pp. 151-167). London: Routledge.

Rubin, David C., Scott E. Wetzler, and Robert D. Nebes. (1986). "Autobiographical Memory Acrossthe Lifespan." In David Rubin (Ed.). Autobiographical Memory (202-221). London: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. (1970). "Scrapbook of a Self: Mrs. Piozzi's Late Journals." Harvard LibraryBulletin 18 (3) 221-47.

Woodward, Kathleen. (1997), "Telling Stories: Aging Reminiscence and the Life Review." Journal ofAging and Identity 2 (3), 149-163.

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