The Seeds of Things by Goldberg Jonathan;

Author:Goldberg, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2009-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

The Falt of My Wrighting

These “sprawling” letters, to use the adjective that Anna Battigelli offers in the latest printed transcription of them, reveal a hand characterized by wayward letter forms, some of them looking more gouged out than written, uneven in the pressure of the hand, spindly descenders trailing off into wisps, vagrant spaces between words, inconsistencies in the size of letters, blots, squeezed-in words, text running around the margins of the page. Add to this the usual features of early modern handwriting—the absence of capitalization and punctuation, irregular spellings (extending, in this case, even to the name of the writer)—and it seems fair to describe the hand of the twenty-three-year-old Margreat Lucas (as she most frequently names herself) as bordering on the illegibility that Cavendish claimed for her “Baby-Books” in her Sociable Letters (140) and affirmed some ten years later in her autobiographical True Relation: “I cannot now write very plain, when I strive to write my best, indeed my ordinary handwriting is so bad as few can read it” (56).

Battigelli reads these courtship letters as an “abbreviated epistolary novel” (120), a reading that can be supported. The letters suggest the negotiation of a secret relationship between Lucas and Newcastle, carried out under the prying eyes of the exiled English court in France, through the interventions of various friends and counselors, and the rumors that they circulate. Yet this characterization perhaps too quickly normalizes and “modernizes” these strange letters and the social relations they depict. It would be equally possible to read them as letters about the material conditions of their writing. The first, for instance, closes with an injunction to Newcastle, “pray lay the falt of my wrighting to my pen” (121), while in another she says that “if you cannot reed this leter, blam me not, for it was so early I was half a slep” (124). But if these remarks point to an agency separate from the writer’s, whether it is her pen or her being only half awake that is responsible for the illegibility of the handwriting, Cavendish also excuses herself in another letter—“I am a lettell a shamed of my last letter,” she writes (126)—precisely because she has spoken too openly in it. It seems therefore that a certain illegibility also is assumed, even despite the writer’s aim. Moreover, in these accounts letters go astray, it seems as a matter of course (the fact that she entrusts them to her maid is no guarantee). She requests a letter from him but only so that it can be sent elsewhere (to the queen); a letter from someone else delivered to the queen has revealed their relationship to her.

Yet it is this very vagrancy, often stigmatized, that nonetheless corresponds to a desire—to an epistolary desire—that names the relationship with Newcastle and redescribes the desire of the writer as well. In Lucretian terms, we could say these letters are written under the sign of the swerve, the chance possibility of connection. Cavendish confesses in the course of

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