Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen by Rory Muir;

Author:Rory Muir;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300277562
Publisher: Yale University Press

Susanna Dalbiac was unusual: most officers’ wives stayed home and endured months, often years of separation and anxiety, while the men themselves often felt lonely and homesick. In March 1800, two-and-a-half years after being wounded at Tenerife, Thomas Fremantle felt sufficiently recovered to apply to the Admiralty for a new command. Almost six months passed before a letter arrived announcing that he had been given the command of the Ganges, a ship-of-the-line. Betsey wrote in her diary, ‘I feel quite miserable at his going from me but still cannot help being flattered that he has so good a ship. It threw us in great confusion & misery.’ A few years later, when the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens led to another parting, Betsey’s sister was staying with them and noted that ‘Capt. Fremantle was much affected during dinner and cried so that he was obliged to leave the room. We were all very dull at the thought of his going away.’ After farewelling her husband at Spithead, Elizabeth Bass wrote to him that she felt as if ‘I had lost every friend I had in the World’, while Matthew Flinders told his wife Ann that without her he felt like ‘one half of a pair of scissors without its fellow’. Anna Walker, the wife of an army officer, wrote in her diary after he had sailed on the Copenhagen Expedition in 1807 that ‘in parting with him, I endured perhaps the most painful Moment of My Life. He was much affected, but endeavoured to keep up, & to persuade me his Absence would not be long – & that he saw Nothing to be done – but alas! Danger on every Side glared in My Face – I felt too strongly that all of my Happiness was at Stake – and the risque I run of losing all!’17

Captain Fremantle was an able, ambitious and responsible officer, but his letters home are often filled with his longing to be with his wife and children again: ‘my mind hangs constantly towards you and your children, and I am at times so low I cannot hold up my head . . .’; ‘my low spirits are excessive and I do nothing but take snuff and read Shakespeare, when I am off the deck, – thank you my dearest woman for your attention in sending me newspapers . . . you can’t think how much I enjoy these periodical papers, and daily ones . . .’ and:

I just receive[d] your letter of the 4th, which you have the modesty to say contains nothing, I on the contrary think it contains everything as I am assured of the health and happiness of all I hold dear in the world, indeed I think it most interesting, and you can have no idea how an arrival revives and comforts my spirits which are not so good as they used to be . . . my only consolation is in the recollection that au dernier resort, I

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