Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon by Pam Hirsch

Author:Pam Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446413500
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER 12

Practising the Art of the Possible

For Barbara, from about the summer of 1863, the strain of juggling all aspects of her life seems to have become more intense. Ellen Allen, the head of Portman Hall School, was to get married and to give up her job. As there was no one else whom she trusted to be the chief mistress, this marriage brought an end to the much-loved project. Bessie, the one always to be relied on, was in Ireland visiting Agnes Procter, now Sister Mary Francis of the Irish Sisters of Mercy, and Barbara felt sure that she was going to ‘lose’ her friend to Rome. Writing to Bessie, she said:

I am much distressed at your present bias towards Catholicism. Oh dear you must not take the good in humanity from the good in that old structure. I cannot tell you how wrong your views seem to me to be, and what a bar to anything you ought to wish for, & which we both love to do. God forbid you should go over, & God forbid that the Catholic Church should ever take you in. It is no place for women & no religion is more sensual in its views of women …1

As well as these two ‘desertions’ Barbara herself had shrunk away from Marian a little following the Pater’s death. Marian’s stoical acceptance that death was the end of the individual personality threatened the fragility of Barbara’s faith. Writing to Bessie from Algiers on 27 December 1861 Barbara had said:

tho’ I instinctly am an immortal being and never feel weariness of the soul or any unit in my own consciousness of the possibility of any end of life, my faith is not so strong for meeting [Marian] again and I want it to be stronger. I told Marian that if I felt convinced as she professed to be of utter annihilation, I should not have the power to live for this little scrap of life. Do you see Marian? I have not written to her once.2

It was because Barbara so respected Marian’s intellect that she was afraid of entering into a theological discussion with her. Barbara’s faith was undogmatic and eccentric; nevertheless, she found her faith in immortality frequently floundering.

However, this interlude of misunderstanding was swept away when Romola was published in 1863. Initially, Barbara had felt no great desire to read an historical novel (a genre she did not much care for), but when she settled down to read it, she experienced it as a revelation of Marian’s view on the complexities of each individual’s search for a satisfying spiritual life. She wrote to her in July 1863: ‘My dear Marian, Romola interested me more than any of your books … I can’t tell you how your picture of Romola’s love for her father went to my heart – in fact I felt more emotions in living in Romola for a week than I have felt in a long time & I am not one who lives like a polyp.

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