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“OBSERVE HER HEEDFULLY”:ELIZABETH ROSE ON WOMENWRITERSMark TowseyPublished online: 13 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Mark Towsey (2011) “OBSERVE HER HEEDFULLY”:ELIZABETH ROSE ON WOMEN WRITERS, Women's Writing, 18:1, 15-33, DOI:10.1080/09699082.2011.525006

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‘‘OBSERVE HER HEEDFULLY’’:

ELIZABETH ROSE ON WOMEN

WRITERS

Elizabeth Rose, the lady laird of Kilravock near Nairn, was a prodigious reader.She kept journals throughout her adult life in which she recorded every book sheread, and collected passages from those books in a series of voluminouscommonplace books*of which at least 10 survive. These commonplace booksprovide an exceptionally rare insight into the reading habits and strategies of anordinary female reader who lived in rural isolation in the north-east of Scotland.For Elizabeth, reading was a serious and studious activity: she apportioned timeevery morning to close study of the Bible and other devotional texts, and alsoengaged intelligently with many of the most important literary and intellectualdebates of the age. Reading was a virtuous occupation that was explicitly intendedto effect her own moral improvement*to prepare her for the world of action intowhich she had suddenly been thrust on the premature deaths of her father, her twoelder brothers and her husband of just six months; to prepare her to be a dutifullandholder, a virtuous mother, a responsible educator, an attentive reader and asympathetic friend. Using Elizabeth’s surviving commonplace books, hercorrespondence with the novelist Henry Mackenzie (her kinsman) and hermarginalia, this article evaluates Elizabeth Rose’s engagement with women writersfrom England, Ireland and further afield. It considers how Elizabeth shared herreading priorities with other readers known to her locally, arguing that sheactively sought to cultivate a specific philosophy of reading in the next generationof female readers.

In January 1771, the celebrated Scottish novelist Henry Mackenzie reflected onthe prominence of women writers in a letter to his cousin and ‘‘DearConfessor’’, Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock:

Your Sex is certainly very high in the Republic of Letters at this very Æra.Mrs McAulay in History, Mrs Montague in Criticism, Mrs Brooke in

Women’s Writing Vol. 18, No. 1 February 2011, pp. 15�33ISSN 0969-9082 print/ISSN 1747-5848 online – 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2011.525006

Mark Towsey

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Novel, & (if we take in Foreigners) Madam Durbach in Lyrics, areinferior to few; [ . . .] and, to compleat the Triumph of the Ladies, ourStage [ . . .] is to be grac’d with a new Comedy, by a Lady also, whichWoodward, I am told, has pledg’d himself for the success of.1

Mackenzie clearly had a very high opinion of Elizabeth Rose, habitually sendingdraft extracts of his novels north, eager to hear what she thought of them.Naturally enough, given his evident regard for his cousin’s intellectualcapacity, Mackenzie frequently broached the subject of literary women. Hedismissed Miss Caulfield’s ‘‘truly dull’’ Edward (1774), finding ‘‘no Purpose inwriting it, except it was to write something that might be dedicated to theQueen’’, but found ‘‘great pleasure [ . . .] as you did’’ in Hester Chapone’sLetters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773). He even sent Hannah More’s Essayson Various Subjects (1777) to Kilravock Castle in late December 1777 as ‘‘a verytrifling New-Year Gift; not so the contents however’’, for he considered More‘‘one of the best Lady-Writers of her time’’.2

Though her side of the correspondence has not yet been traced, there aresigns that Elizabeth Rose agreed with Mackenzie’s esteem for female-authoredliterature with some enthusiasm. Not only does she seem to have respondedmore positively than Mackenzie to some of the female authors they discussed,she even annotated her own copy of Mary Robinson’s ‘‘List of British FemaleLiterary Characters Living in the Eighteenth Century’’ with additional namesthat Robinson had omitted, including Chapone, Maria Edgeworth, RachelHunter, Jane Porter, Catherine Talbot, Amelia Opie and Catherine RebeccaManners.3 Such writers also feature periodically in Elizabeth’s surviving booksof extracts, but her use of women writers is enigmatic. Nowhere does sheexplicitly express her opinion of the rise of women writers, a phenomenon,after all, that coincided with her own life of reading and that precipitatedso much contemporary comment. Even her marginalia in Robinson’s Letter tothe Women of England (1799) present a conundrum, with no appraisal of thewomen writers she added to the printed list, let alone commentary on thecontent of Robinson’s text itself.

Jacqueline Pearson, the leading authority on women’s reading in Britainfrom 1750�1835, argues that ‘‘the evidence suggests that women ‘liked toread what women had written’’’. She points out, for example, that ElizabethCarter had ‘‘an extreme partiality [for] writers of her own sex’’, reading theirworks with ‘‘a mind prepared to be pleased’’.4 Pearson concentrates on ahandful of the most extraordinary women of the age (Carter is joined byLaetitia Pilkington, Frances Burney and Jane Austen), however, she does notexplore how women writers might have been received by less exalted readersin the eighteenth century. This essay therefore surveys the evidence suppliedby Elizabeth Rose, a particularly well-documented reader who never published

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anything, who lived most of her life in rural isolation in the Highlands ofScotland with little (if Mackenzie’s letters are anything to go by) but books toentertain her, to furnish her conversation and correspondence, and to occupyher hours.

I

Elizabeth was born in 1747 to one of the oldest landed families in north-eastern Scotland, the Rose family, lairds of Kilravock, near Nairn.5 As thedaughter of a relatively insignificant Highland laird, Elizabeth would haveattracted little historical attention in her own right had the minutes of herremarkable life of reading not come down to us, and had she not maintaineda studied correspondence with Mackenzie, one of the leading literarypersonalities of the day. However, she was unusual in one other sense.From 1772, the Rose family experienced a series of losses that transformedElizabeth’s carefree life forever. In November 1772, she lost first her elderbrother and then her father within a few weeks of each other. Still worse wasto follow when Elizabeth’s husband died during her pregnancy, scarcely sixmonths after their marriage in 1779, leaving her to bring up their son alone.To top it all, when her surviving brother then died childless less than a yearlater, Elizabeth was left charged with the land, responsibilities and title ofKilravock. As she wrote in her diary in 1784:

What an astonishing chain of providences in private life has the course ofthe last three years brought about to lead me back to the seat of myancestors. A wife, a widow, a mother, in this space, during which thedeath of an only brother, childless, devolves upon me the representationof my family, and rests its future hope upon one feeble reed which, Itrust, the Lord will not bruise.6

Not much is known about Elizabeth’s attitude to estate business after herformal succession to the baronetcy; indeed, Henry Mackenzie once advised herto dispose of estate correspondence ‘‘after their Purpose is served’’, and littleconsequently survives to illuminate her management of the Kilravock estates.7

We can be sure, however, that Elizabeth was a prodigious and thoroughlyconscientious reader.8 She kept commonplace books of her reading for manyyears, enough of which survive to allow us to reconstruct something of herintentions and responses to reading. She kept different notebooks for differentpurposes: of those that survive, one was dedicated entirely to David Hume’sHistory of England (1754�62), another to Mackenzie’s novels;9 some heldtranscriptions of her favourite poetry, including Burns and Ossian amongst

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many others;10 and her books of extracts stored passages from the very widerange of prose literature she consumed.11 These notebooks may simply haveserved to retain passages from books only temporarily in her possession(borrowed from friends or from a local subscription library, perhaps)12, but itis more likely that the extracts were deliberately collected to play an ongoingrole in Elizabeth’s life.

Numerous other sources survive for Elizabeth’s life of reading, not leastthe correspondence with Mackenzie in which, as we have seen, the celebrated‘‘Man of Feeling’’ discussed books freely with his cousin, often replyingdirectly to the questions or opinions she had put to him (‘‘Never be afraid oftiring me with your Queries’’, he once told her).13 Elizabeth also recorded forposterity not only the moment she decided to keep a daily journal, but also therationale and methodology that underpinned her journalizing habit:

1771, October 30th, Monday � Seeing how soon the actions of the pastday are obliterated by the incidents of the next, so that at the end of aweek we can scarcely recollect what they have been employed in, I havedetermined in this book to keep a journal of each day, and by comparingmy journals at the end of winter with the plan I have already drawn up ofmy studies and employments in it, I shall be able to know in how far Ihave fulfilled it, or in what fallen short.14

Two examples of these journals survive, separated by nearly 20 years.15 In them,Elizabeth Rose kept itemized monthly accounts of the books she had read, onlyinterrupted by the ‘‘New State of Life’’ she entered in marrying Dr Hugh Rose ofBrae and Broadley, and then again by his death a little over a year later.16 MaryCatherine Moran argues that ‘‘Elizabeth Rose emerges [from her readingaccounts] not as the stock figure of the female novel reader that so manyeighteenth-century authors decried but as something close to the ‘enlightened’female reader such authors hoped to create’’.17 She did read novels, romances,plays and poetry, but she also read widely across many more ‘‘serious’’ genres. Ifanything, religious and devotional works predominate in her reading accounts,but historical works, travel literature, natural philosophy, conduct works andmoral philosophy are also very much in evidence.

Meanwhile, surviving source material also allows us to learn whereElizabeth sourced the books she read. A library catalogue she commissionedfor the family collection at Kilravock Castle in 1783 records the books thatwere immediately available to her.18 Amongst nearly 2000 titles in all weremany books that had been acquired by Elizabeth’s father and grandfather,including classical texts and French and Italian literature of the seventeenth andearly eighteenth centuries, as well as many legal tomes relating to theirprofessional interests. Also in the family collection, however, were many of

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the best-selling works of the modern era, including works by WilliamRobertson, David Hume and James Fordyce, many of which, like the latter’sSermons to Young Women (1766), were explicitly listed as being kept in ‘‘MrsRose’s Closet’’ rather than in the more public rooms of the house.

Mackenzie’s letters supplement this record of the books that wereimmediately available to Elizabeth Rose. Aside from his gift of More’s Essays,Henry Mackenzie often mentions books that he had sent to Kilravock(including a multi-volume collection of The British Poets [1773�76]) andupdates Elizabeth on books that she had enquired about (such as Johnson’sJourney to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), of which ‘‘no Copy [ . . .] has yetreach’d Edinr except one which Boswell got down by Post’’).19 Mackenzie alsoseems to have acted as go-between for Elizabeth Rose and the Edinburghbookseller John Balfour, demonstrating that she continued to expand theKilravock library in her own right after 1783.20

As was commonly the case, however, Elizabeth Rose was not restricted inher reading choices by the books her family actually owned. She regularlyborrowed books from friends and neighbours in what was evidently quitea close-knit*and literary-minded*community of landed families in north-eastern Scotland. The moniker ‘‘Kilravock’’ turns up repeatedly in a borrowingregister for Brodie Castle Library in the late 1780s, 1790s and early 1800s(when the designation referred to Elizabeth herself as the titular laird).21

Elizabeth could also have borrowed or consulted books on visits to TaymouthCastle, Dunrobin, Earlsmill, Castle Grant and Gordon Castle, amongst themany other country seats she stayed at which had extensive libraries.22 On onefleeting visit to Gordon Castle she had admired the ‘‘many books that I wishedfor leisure to examine’’ in the Duchess’s apartment23, while Lady Breadalbanekept William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769), Burns’s Poetic Works (1786)and Blair’s Sermons (1787) in her dressing room at Taymouth, books that shemay have shared with visiting ladies like Mrs Rose.24 In addition, it is possiblethat Elizabeth hired books from one of the local circulating libraries which hadbeen established in nearby towns in the 1780s and 1790s.25

II

It will be clear that Elizabeth Rose’s life of reading is exceptionally welldocumented; indeed, there can be few women living at any period in the pastfor which we are better furnished in terms of the ‘‘whats’’, ‘‘wheres’’, ‘‘hows’’and even the ‘‘whys’’ of her personal reading experiences.26 In searching forher attitude towards women writers, however, we need to know what shethought of the books she read, and the books of extracts provide the bestinsights into her responses to particular books. In the first place, and on the

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face of it, Elizabeth was quite a compliant and passive reader*her extractswere just that: sections of text extracted from the books she read withoutcommentary or extensive editing. Yet this does not mean that the extractsreveal little about what she thought of the books she read or how she usedthem, as some of the extracts from women writers demonstrate.

From books that particularly excited her attention, Elizabeth extractedmany such passages. From Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), for instance, shetook more than a dozen passages, each removed from its context to providesome kind of moral lesson that Elizabeth could apply to her own life andcircumstances. One such passage, obligingly, focused on the importance ofbooks to young ladies intent on self-improvement, perhaps taken as ajustification of Elizabeth’s own lifelong bookishness:

Cecilia’s next solicitude was to furnish herself with a well chosencollection of books [ . . .] She confined not her acquisitions to the limits ofher present power, but as she was laying in a stock for future as well asimmediate advantage, she was restrained by no expence from gratifyingher taste & inclinations [ . . .] & thus in the search of knowledge & theenjoyment of quiet, serenely in innocent philosophy passed the hours ofCecilia.27

At other times, Elizabeth could be far more ruthless in her extraction ofappealing material, removing solitary passages, often of only a few lines, frommulti-volume books she had read. From the whole of The New Clarissa (1768)by Mme LePrince de Beaumont, for instance, she extracted just a few lines onthe theme of modesty in young women ‘‘who are destined to be mothers’’.28

The same was true of Elizabeth Sibthorpe Pinchard’s novel The Blind Child(1791)*although in this case, the touching passage in which Pincharddescribed the circumstances in which young Helen Wyndham’s blindness cameto be cured was not only the climax of the whole novel, but also ran to half adozen pages when transcribed in Elizabeth’s carefully neat hand.29 Elizabeth’snote-taking was therefore highly selective, with her notebooks togetherconstituting an encyclopaedia of what she considered the most significantpassages drawn from her favourite authors.

This selectivity lay at the heart of what was a very popular reading practicein the second half of the eighteenth century. The French historian andpedagogue Charles Rollin was the first to promote such extracting as anintegral part of a girl’s education in the first half of the eighteenth century. Bycopying down extracts from the works they read, girls would not onlyproperly digest what they learned from their reading, but they would alsolearn to write for themselves with propriety and perspicuity. He thusconverted what had previously been an inherently masculine method of

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reading, associated above all with scholarly reading of the classics and theHumanist method of preparing commonplace books, to being a ‘‘school ofvirtue’’ for girls. As Dena Goodman has discovered, extracting provedenduringly influential in Rollin’s native France. Manon Phlipon (Mme Roland)included extracts from her reading in the famous letters she wrote to herfriend Sophie, often using them as a springboard for her own ideas, whileLouise D’Epinay advised her granddaughter to ‘‘transcribe everything thatrelates to the principles that you wish to engrave in your head and your heart[ . . .] this is what is called to extract a work, to make an extract’’.30

Something similar to Rollin’s method reappeared frequently in Britishwriting of the second half of the century, perhaps in large part becauseRollin was himself readily available in translation throughout the century.31

Two Scottish Enlightenment philosophers whose works Elizabeth Roseknew particularly well, James Beattie and Lord Kames, commendedextracting to readers32, and in one of her least well-known works, MaryWollstonecraft included substantial extracts in The Female Reader (1789) notonly as an illustration of the kind of material she thought young womenshould read, but also as a tacit endorsement of the method itself.33 IfWollstonecraft’s intervention perhaps came too late to influence Elizabeth’sby then mature extracting technique, she had early been alerted to thepotential benefits of extracting by her cousin Mackenzie. In the first year oftheir correspondence (which Elizabeth herself commenced), she had askedMackenzie for his advice on reading. Though protesting that ‘‘[t]o you Ifancy [ . . .] it is very little necessary’’, he obliged with an account of themethod of extracting:

There is one method which in my opinion is not a little useful in readingany Book of Excellence, especially if it is a Book of original Observation;and that is, when we find any Remark particularly impressive, to take itdown in writing, subjoining any Comments that our own View of it maysuggest: these, when we meet with Passages tending to illustrate them, inthe same, or other Authors, we may review, correct, & alter, as ourInformation on the Point is increased. This I believe will be found to givea Freedom of thinking on all subjects, & a Distinctness on that one, uponwhich we are employed.34

III

But what kind of passages did Elizabeth Rose consider ‘‘impressive’’ enough toextract? She believed fervently in the fundamentally moral implications ofreading and her extracts usually took the form of moral aphorisms, easily

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applicable to the circumstances of her own life. For instance, the climax ofElizabeth’s sole extract from The Blind Child was actually a moral sermon onthe meaning of ‘‘true sensibility’’ rather than exaggerated and affectedemotionalism. ‘‘In the course of my practice’’, says the surgeon, eagerlytranscribed by Elizabeth Rose,

I witness so much affectation, so much exaggerated feeling. I seepeople unable to attend their nearest [ . . .] when it is absolutelynecessary, running away from scenes of pain & inconvenience, with somuch selfishness as quite sickens me sometimes of sensibility. But you,my dear Miss Wyndham, have reconciled me to it, since I perceive youmake it assistant to, not destructive of your duties � This is truesensibility.35

Elizabeth’s concern for properly regulated sensibility resurfaced often in herreading of both male and female authors, and recurred again in an extractfrom Lady Morgan’s Novice of Saint Dominick (1806) outlining the ‘‘effect ofimmoderate sensibility unregulated by Reason’’ and warning against ‘‘theindulgence of emotions purely selfish’’.36

Her extracts from Burney’s Camilla (1796) featured a succession of suchepisodes, extracted to contribute to Elizabeth’s growing collection of conductmodels justifying and exemplifying the conservative contemporary virtues sheaspired to. Most seemed particularly well suited to the moral fashioning of youngladies, like the parable that taught humility:

No sophistications of Custom had warp’d the first innocence of her innatesense of right, & to triffle with the feelings of another for any gratificationof her own made success bring a blush to her Integrity not exultation toher Vanity.

Some warned about the consequences of immoral, self-absorbed behaviour, likethe reminder that: ‘‘With her Hopes she could play, with her wishes she couldtriffle, her intentions she could defend, her designs she could relinquish � butwith her conscience she could not Combat. It pointed beyond the presentmoment’’.37

Certain extracts were perfectly adapted to the rural isolation of the Rosefamily’s ancestral home, containing advice on moral conduct in such anenvironment. Extracting from Cecilia this time, she noted down the followinglengthy stricture that must have seemed particularly apposite, given her ownpropensity to hero-worship contemporary intellectual figures like James Beattie,Lord Kames and, inevitably, Henry Mackenzie:

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Those who live in the Country have little power of selection, confined toa small circle they must be content with what it offers & however theymay Idolise Extraordinary merit when they meet with it, they must notregard it as essential to Friendship, for in their Circumscribed Rotation,whatever may be their discontent they can make but little change.38

Meanwhile, many of Elizabeth’s extracts, taken from books penned by bothmen and women, entrenched the standard contemporary view of the divisionof the sexes into separate spheres. In this way, in spite (or perhaps because) ofher own unlooked-for exposure to the masculine world of business as abaronet suo jure, Elizabeth ensured her books of extracts were entirely rootedin what Pearson calls the ‘‘domestic ideology’’ propagated by the vast majorityof eighteenth-century conduct writers.39 A long passage she extracted fromHarriet Lee’s Canterbury Tales (1797�99) explained a woman’s natural role inparticularly detailed terms:

While her Lord imbibed from her a sense of pleasure, which the activesoul of man is not so exquisitely alive to, as the more passive, but not lessenlivened nature of woman, that sex, destined in a manner to becomestationary in the world, is by wise Heaven endowed with such Tastes asshall, well considered, make pleasures of their duties. It is theirs to reignat Home � with varying elegance to improve the spot on which they areto dwell, & by bountifully dispencing around the blessing they inherit orobtain, they perhaps enjoy as perfect a delight as moving in the enlargedcircle of power of Politics, can give the Man they are to share existencewith.40

While such extracts might mark Elizabeth out as the ‘‘ideal’’ female readerimagined in contemporary literature, her choice of extracts also fits well withthe melancholy disposition of many women readers of the time, at least asWilliam St Clair has portrayed it. St Clair suggests women’s commonplacebooks of the Napoleonic era ‘‘emit a sense of loss, of parting, of wasted youth,of hopeless love, death of friends. Separation, loneliness and loss were the realexperiences of many women, whether unmarried, married or widows’’.41

While many of Elizabeth’s extracts do address suffering and loss, I would arguethat they do so in a more constructive manner than St Clair implies was oftenthe case. From Cecilia, for instance, she took the following eminentlydevotional extract:

We came not hither to enjoy but to suffer & happy only are those whosesufferings have neither by folly been sought, not by guilt been merited,

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but arising merely from the imperfection of Humanity, have been resistedwith fortitude � or endured with Patience.42

An extract from Agnes Maria Bennett’s Vicissitudes Abroad (1806) expressedsimilarly conventional sentiments, at the same time providing a tacitjustification for Elizabeth’s habit of keeping a diary:

I retrace in my Journals the ‘‘sad no more’’ & unseen by mortal eye,anticipate a reunion with those blessed spirits, who it is my delight tobelieve approve my Fidelity to a trust rendered Infinitely more sacred bythe misfortunes to which it has been exposed.43

The Novice of Saint Dominick furnished a more succinct reminder of the veryessence of existence, perhaps proving particularly uplifting to a woman readerwho endured personal tragedy in her own life: ‘‘It is a sorry truth my sweetyoung friend, that this life is but probationary to another, a scene of trial & ofsuffering’’.44

By extracting such passages, Elizabeth hoped to come better to terms withher own losses, perhaps to minimize what she called elsewhere ‘‘theirdepredations on domestic delight’’, so that her deeply felt grief would notcompromise her virtuous emotions and plunge her into an orgy ofuncontrolled self-pity. Such passages could also help her cultivate thesympathetic fellow feeling required to console and uplift her closest friendsat their time of grief*hence, her earnest pledge to the Russell sisters ofEarlsmill on the death of their father ‘‘to soften for a moment the weight oftheir affliction’’.45 As with most of the extracts she made throughout her life,these melancholy passages ultimately served to strengthen Elizabeth’s deeplydevotional religious faith. Nowhere was this fundamental principle of herreading strategies more evident than in an extract taken from Rachel Hunter’sLetitia (1801):

You will see in this excellent woman what the Christian school can effect.You will see her going on in the uprightness of her mind, undeviatingduty dispensing blessings all around her; living in peace & charity with all,& cheerfully contented with obedience; believing that her futurehappiness will not be measured by her wisdom, but by her Good Works� observe her heedfully, you will be taught to appreciate genuine piety &goodness at its full worth, for she will convince you that these are thefoundations of the Building & without these the most elaborate ornamentsare Rubbish.46

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IV

The inherently moral function of reading was often cited by female readersthroughout Britain and beyond. Jacqueline Pearson argues that reading ‘‘ispresented not as time-wasting self-indulgence, but as the result of, indeedidentical to, virtue’’. In early nineteenth-century novels, reading was ‘‘acentral moral metaphor’’, with a character’s choice of reading reflecting hermoral compass, a crucial key in helping a reader to understand who she was.Quoting Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Pearson argues that ‘‘women not only readbut discussed them [novels] as models of conduct’’.47 Ned Landsman finds themoral combined with the devotional in his interpretation of the readingstrategies of young women in the American colonies in the mid eighteenthcentury. In New Jersey, Esther Edwards Burr, daughter of the celebratedtheologian Jonathan Edwards, attempted to ‘‘refine her moral life througheducation and discussion in the pursuit of piety and virtue’’, especially in herextended epistolary discussion of Richardson’s Pamela (1740) with Sally Princeof Boston. Landsman contends that a ‘‘Protestant moral aesthetic contributedto the growing popularity of novels among a Protestant readership’’,concluding ‘‘that novels, beyond allowing readers unprecedented opportunitiesfor reflection and self-assertion, were helping as well to inculcate moralprinciples in a spirit of self-improvement’’.48

These themes apply equally well to Elizabeth Rose’s reading strategies, butthey run consistently throughout her extracting career, irrespective of whetherher source was written by a man or a woman. Elizabeth took consolatorypassages from numerous sources, including printed sermons and Ossianic poetryas well as the novels of Bennett, Burney and Morgan, whilst her extensiveextracts from both William Robertson’s Charles V and Adam Ferguson’s Essay onthe History of Civil Society (1769) (which she placed consecutively in a volumeof extracts compiled in 1775) combined to illustrate the role of friendship,fellow feeling and sympathy in securing the moral well-being of society.Indeed, her treatment of historical texts clearly laid the groundwork for herlater reading of Cecilia and Camilla, with Robertson, Hume and Voltairefurnishing her with a vast collection of moral exempla from the past.49

In fact, of Elizabeth Rose’s three surviving books of extracts, passagestaken from women writers predominate only in the last. Of 23 titles extractedin a notebook started in 1775, Elizabeth chose to extract material from justone book written by a woman (The New Clarissa).50 By contrast, the notebookshe started in 1806 featured material taken from at least 10 books written byfemale authors*out of 30 titles in all.51 This is peculiar not least becauseElizabeth was nearly 60 when she started work on this particular volume, yet

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in it she collected a succession of conduct models for young ladies*includingFrances Burney’s Camilla Tyrold and Cecilia Beverley, Elizabeth Pinchard’sEmily Wyndham and Harriet Lee’s Emily Arden.

The key to this proliferation of extracts from female-authored novels inElizabeth Rose’s last commonplace book lies in the reading strategies she haddeveloped over the previous four decades. At varying stages in her life,Elizabeth’s reading priorities clearly reflected pedagogical intentions. An earlynotebook devoted solely to Hume’s mammoth History helped her to readcritically, with her extracting technique maturing markedly as she progressed,while she took detailed advice on how to read particular genres from DugaldStewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792). In the 1780s,priorities inevitably changed to reflect Elizabeth’s changing circumstances, andher extracts often reflected close study of books that might help her effect herson Hugh’s moral education. Indeed, in a poem she composed at the end of1788, ‘‘an infant son to truth engage’’ is clearly identified as the centralambition of her reading life. Consequently, a surviving commonplace bookstarted in 1790 is devoted almost in its entirety to the critical issue ofeducation, at one point noting that Adam Smith and James Beattie concurredon the vital question ‘‘whether a public school or the privacy of domesticeducation be preferable’’, and highlighting the moral degradations inherent inthe former.52

The year in which Elizabeth started her last volume of extracts (1806)provided a new focus for her pedagogical reading. Hugh had married KatherineBaillie of Dunain the year before and on 2 December, the new ‘‘Mrs. Rose washappily delivered of a fine healthy female child, to our inexpressible joy’’.Elizabeth’s first grandchild, Isabella, was joined over the years by threesisters*Margaret, Katharine and Elizabeth*and by two brothers, thoughIsabella was always their grandmother’s favourite; family tradition relates thatElizabeth never missed seeing her eldest grandchild to bed, except when shewas incapacitated by illness. It can hardly be accidental that Isabella’s arrivalcoincided so neatly with Elizabeth’s new-found interest in women writers;rather it seems that her domestic situation once more determined the natureand scope of Elizabeth Rose’s reading in the last 10 years of her life. Indeed,one of her last diary entries, before ‘‘the severity of my ailment [ . . .] obligesme here to give up a useful custom, which I recommend to the young andable’’, recorded what must have been a regular part of the family routine:‘‘Heard Isabella read’’.53

With its focus largely on female exempla, then, the last notebook wasprobably compiled with the moral guidance of her granddaughters in mind,intended to inculcate in them the conservative virtues that Elizabeth herselffavoured. Perhaps, too, Elizabeth hoped to teach her granddaughters how toread novels; there was certainly increasing debate in the first decades of the

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nineteenth century about the act of reading, with commentators andpractitioners alike concerned ‘‘with those who read the wrong books, in thewrong ways and the wrong places’’.54 By extracting what she considered theright passages from the right books, Elizabeth may have been helping hergranddaughters develop appropriate reading habits, hoping to prevent themfrom submitting to the perceived moral dangers of reading. In this way,Elizabeth Rose’s notebooks can themselves be considered as a form of literarycomposition, intended to be passed down to her granddaughters as acompilation of safely virtuous and devotional readings, precensured by theirdevoted grandmother for their edification and proper moral development*hence, the direct appeal to the reader in the extract transcribed from Letitia:‘‘observe her heedfully, you will be [well] taught’’.

Though the well-being (moral and spiritual as much as material) of her ownfamily was evidently uppermost in Elizabeth’s life of reading, her books ofextracts may also have had a wider currency. This was certainly another featureof extracting in its international context. Mme D’Epinay’s Conversations d’Emilie(1774), which contained her compelling endorsement of extracting, was writtenfor her granddaughter Emilie de Belzunce, but became a highly influentialpedagogical work in late eighteenth-century France, winning the Prix Montyonin January 1783.55 Mme de la Ferte-Imbrault started to make extracts in hermiddle age, once again with the educational requirements of a young protegeefirmly in mind (this time the niece of a close friend), but her books of extractssoon earned a far wider reputation, circulating in manuscript throughout elitecircles in Paris and Versailles.56 Elizabeth, too, was part of a much wider networkof women readers, with her admiration for the Duchess of Gordon’s librarynoted in a letter to Euphemia Russell of Earlsmill. None of Elizabeth’s lettersseem to survive, but the nature of her epistolary relationships is revealed in aletter to Euphemia’s sister quoted by the Rose family’s biographer. In it, shedefends one of her favourite writers:

I am vexed to see, my dear Betty, that you have conceived so bad anopinion of Lord Kames [ . . .] I never heard one speak more to my mindon any of the most important truths; and I think the book I am at presentreading cannot fail to please the nicest taste.57

She was remembered by the family biographer as

[ . . .] the choice companion, the leader of all cheerful amusements, thehumourous story-teller, the clever mimic, the very soul of society [ . . .]Her extensive reading gave her a certain pre-eminence, which she neversacrificed in society by any pedantry or blue-stocking affectations.58

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In her relationship with the two Brodie sisters of nearby Lethen, books seem tohave played a particularly important role. On 3 December 1782, for instance,she notes having the ‘‘Miss Brodies to dinner [ . . .] spent the eveng in literaryconversation’’; on 13 May 1784, she ‘‘passed the day agreeably in reading,walking, music & conversation with the Brodies. Friday passed similar to theformer’’; on 30 April 1785, she writes that ‘‘Jeannie and I read and walkedwith the ladies of Lethen’’.59 On such occasions, Elizabeth probably shared herreading strategies with female friends like the Brodie sisters of Lethen and mayeven have lent them her extracts in an earnest attempt to further theireducation. This course of action would certainly have been encouraged byHenry Mackenzie’s view of the Brodies, expressed to Elizabeth soon after theymoved from Edinburgh to Nairnshire:

They need hardly go thither to find solitude, as they live uncommonlyrecluse in Town. I fancy there is a natural shyness runs thro’ the Family;yet I am told the eldest Girl is far from wanting Parts, & has considerablyimprov’d them by reading.60

V

Some time in the last 10 years of her life, Elizabeth Rose transcribed a passageshe entitled ‘‘Mrs Morgan’s Address to Her Son’’ onto the back cover of herlast book of extracts:

It is time that the mother of Morgan should receive some recompense forher tender cares for those hours of unceasing anxiety in which her life hasbeen I will not say wasted but to which it has been devoted � disappointnot my hopes, let me see you happy my son, let me embrace yourchildren & die contented.61

Whether or not this was the last extract she made from her reading (thestrategic placement suggests not), this passage demonstrates that ElizabethRose’s life of reading was dedicated in large part to her family. Though shevery rarely commented on the relative merits of the books she read, herpriorities as a reader are revealed in the choices she made as an extractor. ForElizabeth, reading was a virtuous occupation that was intended to effecther own moral improvement*to prepare her for the world of action intowhich she had suddenly been thrust in 1782; to make her an attentive reader, adutiful landholder, a virtuous mother, a responsible educator, a sympatheticfriend and a devoted grandmother.

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Most importantly for our purposes, Elizabeth’s life of reading appears tocontradict the assumption, frequently expressed at the time and often repeatedin modern scholarship, that women preferred to read books by other women.In the surviving books of extracts, Elizabeth showed no particular preferencefor women writers until their works became relevant to her broader project.Just as impeccable male authorities like Robertson, Smith and Kamescontributed to an encyclopaedia of extracts she compiled to effect her owneducation as a reader and to ensure the appropriate moral education of heronly son, female novelists like Frances Burney, Harriet Lee and Rachel Hunterwere enlisted to provide moral guidance for the next generation of Rosewomen*most likely with the anticipation that Elizabeth herself would not bearound to supervise their education personally. Her choice of extracts was notonly intended to help her granddaughters learn to read virtuously, but alsoprovided them with a ready collection of approved conduct models reflectingthe virtues that she held most dear. At the same time, Elizabeth’s finalcollection of literary extracts introduced this new generation of female readersto the international network of women writers that was becoming such animportant feature of the literary marketplace*even in the rural isolation ofthe Highlands of Scotland.

Notes

1 Henry Mackenzie to Elizabeth Rose, 26 Jan. 1771, in Horst W. Drescher,ed., Henry Mackenzie: Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock on Literature, Events andPeople, 1768�1815 (Munster: Aschendorff, 1967) 70�72. The play wasprobably Jean Marishall’s Sir Harry Gaylove (Edinburgh, 1772), which in theevent suffered a rather tumultuous pre-publication history, fully narrated inthe author’s preface. ‘‘Harry’’ Woodward was one of the leading comic actorsof the age. See Richard Allen Cave, ‘‘Woodward, Henry (1714�1777),’’ inOx ford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 26 Oct.2010 Bhttp://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29944�.

2 Drescher 77, 14�15, 57, 167�69, 206.3 Mary Robinson, Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental

Subordination (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799); BritishLibrary copy, classmark C.142.b.13. A digital edition of this copy, withMrs Rose’s annotations, is available at Bhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/robinson/mrintro.htm�. On marginalia, see Anthony Grafton,‘‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Bude and HisBooks,’’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91.2 (1997): 139�57;H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale UP,2001); and David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the ScottishEnlightenment, 1740�1830 (New York: Routledge, 2008) esp. ch. 6.

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4 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750�1835: A DangerousRecreation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 97, quoting J.M.S. Tompkins,The Popular Novel in England, 1770�1800 (1932; London: Methuen, 1962)141, quoting Montagu Pennington, ed., Memoirs of the Life of Mrs ElizabethCarter (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1807).

5 Cosmo Innes, ed., A Genealogical Deduction of the Family of Rose of Kilravockwith illustrative documents from the family papers, and notes (Edinburgh: SpaldingClub, 1848).

6 Innes 507.7 Drescher 213.8 For a more thorough introduction to Elizabeth Rose’s reading experiences,

see Mark Towsey, ‘‘‘An Infant Son to Truth Engage’: Virtue, Responsibilityand Self-Improvement in the Reading of Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, 1747�1815,’’ Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society 2 (2007): 69�92. Forcomparable contemporary readers, see John Brewer, ‘‘Reconstructing theReader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading,’’ ThePractice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, HelenSmall, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 226�45, andNaomi Tadmor, ‘‘‘In the even my wife read to me’: Women, Reading andHousehold Life in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Raven et al. 162�74.

9 ‘‘Extracts from David Hume,’’ GD1/726/10, National Archives of Scotland(NAS), Edinburgh; ‘‘MS copies of sections of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling,’’NAS, GD1/726/11.

10 NAS, GD1/726/7, GD1/726/12.11 ‘‘Extracts made by Elizabeth Rose from her reading, 1775, 1790, 1806�8,’’

NAS, GD1/726/6, GD1/726/8�9.12 On 26 December 1803, for example, Elizabeth recorded in her diary that

she ‘‘copied some extracts and returned Miss McK’s books’’. See ‘‘Journal ofElizabeth Rose of Kilravock, 1803�1807,’’ NAS, GD1/726/2.

13 Drescher 109.14 Innes 502�03.15 NAS, GD1/726/1�2. NAS, GD1/726/3 is also described as the ‘‘Journal of

Elizabeth Rose’’, but since it was begun in the 1820s, it is most likely theteenage diary of her granddaughter Elizabeth.

16 Qtd. in Drescher 239�40.17 Mary Catherine Moran, ‘‘From Rudeness to Refinement: Gender, Genre

and Scottish Enlightenment Discourse,’’ diss., John Hopkins U, 1999, 77.18 ‘‘Catalogue of the Kilravock Library, 1783,’’ NAS, GD125, box 1.19 Drescher 137, 168.20 Drescher 85, 228.21 ‘‘Library Receipt Book,’’ Brodie Castle Lib, Brodie Castle, Nairn (National

Trust for Scotland).22 See the Library History Database at Bhttp://www.r-alston.co.uk/

contents/libraryhistory.htm�.

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23 Innes 496.24 ‘‘List of Books in Lady Breadalbane’s dressing room at Taymouth Castle,

16th January, 1814,’’ NAS, GD112/22/35.25 Mark Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in

Provincial Scotland, 1750�1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2010) ch. 3.26 See R. Darnton, ‘‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading,’’ Australian

Journal of French Studies 23.1 (1986): 7�12.27 NAS, GD1/726/9, 15; taken from Fanny Burney, Cecilia, or memoirs of an

heiress, 5 vols. (London: T. Payne and T. Cadell, 1782) 1: 173�74.28 NAS, GD1/726/6, 2; taken from Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont, The

new Clarissa: a true history, vol. 1 (London: J. Nourse, 1768) 84.29 NAS, GD1/726/9, 85�90; taken from Elizabeth Sibthorpe Pinchard, The

Blind Child, or anecdotes of the Wyndham family (London: E. Newbery, 1791)165�75.

30 Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell UP,2009) 151�55 (151). I am most grateful to Professor Goodman for sharingwith me her material on the practice of extracting before her book waspublished. For Rollin and the tradition of extracting in eighteenth-centuryFrance, see Nicole Pellegrin, ‘‘Lire avec des plumes ou l’art*feminin?*del’extrait a la fin du XVIIIe siecle,’’ Lectrices d’Ancien Regime, ed. IsabelleBrouard-Arends (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003) 113�30(119�20) and Jean Bloch, ‘‘Discourses of Female Education in the Writingsof Eighteenth-Century French Women,’’ Women, Gender and Enlightenment,ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) 243�58.On the commonplace method more particularly, the literature has untilrecently been more convincing for early periods than for the late eighteenthcentury; see Ann Blair, ‘‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: TheCommonplace Book,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 53.4 (1992) 541�51;Peter Beal, ‘‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century CommonplaceBook,’’ New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton:Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies with Renaissance English TextSoc., 1993) 131�47; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuringof Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) 25; Earle Havens,Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquityto the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Beinecke Lib., Yale U, 2001); LuciaDacome, ‘‘Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of theSelf in Eighteenth-Century Britain,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4(2004): 603�25; and Allan, Making British Culture esp. ch. 7.

31 Elizabeth was certainly familiar with his works in translation, withMackenzie assuring her that ‘‘from a sincere Goodness of Intention, & anunwearied Application to his Subject, [Rollin] is highly useful in all hiswritings’’ (Drescher 70).

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32 James Beattie, Essays. On Poetry and Music (Edinburgh: William Creech,1776) e.g. 519; Lord Kames, Loose Hints upon Education, Chiefly concerning theCulture of the Heart (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1781) esp. 128�29.

33 Pearson 43; Moira Ferguson, ‘‘The Discovery of Mary Wollstonecraft’s TheFemale Reader,’’ Signs 3.4 (1978): 945�57; Mary Wollstonecraft, The FemaleReader: Or, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse (London: J. Johnson, 1789).

34 Drescher 15.35 NAS, GD1/726/9, 85�90; taken from Pinchard 174�75.36 NAS, GD1/726/9, 159; taken from Lady Sydney Morgan, The Novice of

Saint Dominick, 4 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1806) 3: 142.37 NAS, GD1/726/9, 21�22; taken from Fanny Burney, Camilla: or, a picture of

youth, vol. 4 (London: T. Payne, T. Cadell Jun. & W. Davies, 1796) 23,401.

38 NAS, GD1/726/9, 19; taken from Burney, Cecilia 4: 325. Interestingly,Cosmo Innes implies that Elizabeth was overly given to hero-worship of herliterary acquaintances: ‘‘everything literary � every one connected withliterature � was ranked unreasonably high’’ (Innes 470).

39 Pearson 2.40 NAS, GD1/726/9, 144; taken from Harriet Lee, Canterbury Tales, vol. 2

(London, 1797�99) 435.41 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2004) 228.42 NAS, GD1/726/9, 18; taken from Burney, Cecilia 4: 175.43 NAS, GD1/726/9, 81; taken from Agnes Maria Bennett, Vicissitudes Abroad;

or, the Ghost of my father, 6 vols. (London, 1806) 1: ii�iii.44 NAS, GD1/726/9, 159; taken from Morgan 3: 142.45 Qtd. in Innes 492.46 NAS, GD1/726/9, 139; taken from Rachel Hunter, Letitia; or, the Castle

without a Spectre, vol. 3 (London, 1801) 176.47 Pearson 7�8, 19; Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Women’s Lives and the 18th-

Century English Novel (Tampa: U of South Florida P, 1991) 40.48 Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture,

1680�1760 (New York: Twayne, 1997) 139, 134, 54; Carol F. Karlsen andLaurie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754�1757(New Haven: Yale UP, 1984).

49 Towsey, ‘‘‘Infant Son,’’’ 82�83, 78�79.50 NAS, GD1/726/6.51 NAS, GD1/726/9. The 1790 volume (GD1/726/8) also featured a small

number of extracts taken from women writers, around 15 percent of thetotal.

52 Towsey, ‘‘‘Infant Son,’’’ 79.53 Innes 514�16.54 Pearson 15.

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55 Jean Bloch, ‘‘Louise-Florence-Petronille Tardieu d’Esclavelles de la Lived’Epinay,’’ Knott and Taylor 725.

56 Goodman, Becoming a Woman 153�54.57 Both letters are reproduced in Innes 494�95. A significant cache of surviving

letters between Elizabeth Rose and the Russell sisters of Earlsmill wasdiscovered in an uncatalogued box at the National Archives of Scotland asthis article went to press. The newly uncovered letters strongly confirm thespeculative argument made here, and will form the the basis of aforthcoming monograph provisionally entitled ‘‘A Scottish Rose: Family,Friendship and a Lady’s Life of Reading, 1747�1815’’.

58 Innes 469�70. The last observation calls to mind Pearson’s contention thatwomen readers needed the ‘‘agility of a tightrope-walker’’ to avoid thestigmas of pedantry and erudition (Pearson 15).

59 NAS, GD1/726/1; ‘‘Jeannie’’ was probably Henry Mackenzie’s sister. Shehad been friendly with the Brodies before their move from Edinburgh toNairnshire, and often visited her cousin at Kilravock.

60 Drescher 175. The Brodie sisters collected their own library. See BurgieLib. Catalogue, *08.26/D898/1820Arch, ms., 1820, Grolier Club Lib,New York.

61 NAS, GD1/726/9, inside back cover; the source has not yet been identified.

Mark Towsey is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of

Liverpool, UK, and is particularly associated with the university’s interdisciplin-

ary Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre. He received his PhD from the

University of St Andrews in 2007, and is the author of Reading the Scottish

Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1570�1820 (Brill,

2010). His research on book culture and reading experiences in the long

eighteenth century has also been published in Book History, Historical Research,

the Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, the Journal of Scottish

Historical Studies and the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Address: School of History, University of Liverpool, 9 Abercromby Square,

Liverpool L69 7WZ, UK. [email: M.R.M.Towsey@liverpool.ac.uk]

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