From sisterly love to confidantes during time of romantic woe, Lizzie Rogers illuminates the power of female friendship in the Regency era…
One of the most endearing parts of seeing the Regency on screen in period dramas like Bridgerton is not the romance, but the affectionate portrayal of female friendship.
Not only did these friendships provide humour and counsel during the simultaneously arduous and thrilling process of finding a husband – or living without one – but they could also support a vision of life that did not solely emphasise being a wife and mother, offering encouragement to each other in interests that ranged from writing, to travel, to artistry and more.
Romantic entanglements
If anything, close female friends were the only confidantes an elite young woman could have during the process of finding a husband. As a teenager, Princess Charlotte of Wales, daughter of the Prince Regent and Caroline of Brunswick, met a daughter of the future Viscount Keith, Margaret Mercer Elphinstone.
Mercer, as Charlotte called her, was eight years her senior, and would become the isolated heir to the throne’s closest friend and confidante, exchanging countless letters across the Princess’s lifetime. Charlotte’s life was a lonely one, caught between her warring parents, and her friendship with Mercer provided solace through difficult times.
Princess Charlotte spent much of her childhood and adolescence being ferried between the two households of her parents, who had hated each other since they first met. Even on Charlotte’s eighteenth birthday, she was forced to have two separate celebratory dinners at Carlton House and Blackheath, her father and mother’s homes respectively. Writing to and being with Mercer provided levity in the young Princess’s anxiety-inducing circumstances.
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This only deepened as Charlotte began to fall in love with various men who crossed her path. The Princess had an interesting love life, which was shaped not only by her own romantic sensibilities – she openly identified with Austen’s Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility – but also the competing ambitions of her parents, and the political factions around her.
After falling for a roguish Lieutenant Hesse as well as her own cousin George FitzClarence, Charlotte would begin to be courted by Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld after their first meeting in June 1814.
The trouble was, she was already meant to marry Prince William of Orange, and any passion she might have had for Leopold was dampened by his writing to Charlotte’s father to assure the Prince Regent that there was no romantic entanglement there, enraging Charlotte. To keep on the good side of the Princess, Leopold maintained contact with Mercer. After the incident with the letter to the Prince Regent, Mercer, like any good best friend, wrote to Leopold to let him know how much he had offended her dear Charlotte.
Mercer was privy to all of Charlotte’s fluctuating romantic feelings, a confidante throughout, and moreover, used her own abilities to write to Leopold without raising suspicion to mediate between the two. Leopold, tortured by his feelings for Charlotte, would appeal to Mercer, who, once she knew that Charlotte truly had feelings for Leopold, would encourage him on her best friend’s behalf.
The counsel of sisters
Rather than seeing each other as competition, letters between female friends tell of support and counsel, as well as commiseration and comedy. Jane Austen wrote to her closest friend, her sister Cassandra, of gossip and flirtations, with the earliest of her surviving letters joking about Jane’s flirtatious behaviour with Tom Lefroy at a ball in 1796.
As the only two women in a family of eight children, with the circumstances of their lives pushing them closer together as they aged – both remained unmarried and experienced instability in their living situations – Jane and Cassandra kept the close relationship throughout their lives that their father, Reverend George Austen, predicted at Jane’s birth: “We have now another girl, a present plaything for Cassy and a future companion.”
Not only did Cassandra repeatedly encourage Jane’s writing ambitions but, as teenagers, they put their burgeoning talents as writer and watercolourist to work. In 1791, they penned a history book together.
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Of course, this was no ordinary history book. Probably based upon the classic text for English historical education of the time, Oliver Goldsmith’s 1771 four volume The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II, the book was a complete parody, running from Henry IV to Charles I.
Jane wrote the amusing histories and attributed the book to “a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian”, and Cassandra added the charming and irreverent illustrations that communicated how the sisters felt about each monarch by how attractive their representations were.
These types of close friendships were not only supportive to professional ambition, but also grounding in difficult situations.
Providing professional solace
Again, personal writings reveal these situations to us. Queen Charlotte was highly focussed on the education of her children and took great care in appointing teachers that reflected some of the most important minds of the time. One such appointment was the noted intellectual Mary Hamilton as sub-governess to the royal children.
Hamilton had beauty as well as brains, and soon had to fight off the advances of several men at court whilst also trying to protect her position and respectability. These men included a young Prince of Wales, the future Regent and George IV, who pursued her with an uncomfortable persistence.
Amongst these uneasy circumstances, Hamilton befriended one of the Maids of Honour to the Queen, Charlotte Margaret Gunning, who arrived at court in 1779, three years before Hamilton left and then became a celebrated part of the Bluestocking circle.
Both women had experienced extensive educations as children, particularly in classical languages, and found relief in each other as they navigated what could often be quite dull activities at court as they tended to the royal family. Gunning’s letters to Hamilton name her “My very dear friend”, lamenting that she is always desperate for news of her, as “To hear of your Health and happiness always gives me unspeakable happiness”.
Hamilton shared her own worries and instances of harassment from the men at court with Gunning in her letters, writing to her in 1779 of a man entering her royal apartment and the fear she had in the incident. For women who had to navigate situations in which they were the target of bad behaviour, and had to guard their own reputations with an unfair vigilance, the ability to divulge inner thoughts and feelings in confidence must have been a small but incredibly important mercy.
Supporting each other’s ambitions
The validation female friendship could provide not only in thoughts and feelings but in ambitions and professional desires, was crucial in supporting many of the important female thinkers, writers and artists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like Cassandra Austen encouraging her sister Jane’s novel writing, novelist Frances Burney was taken under the wing of some of the most important female intellectuals of the time.
In 1778, a young Burney anonymously published her first novel Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. The novel would bring her to the attention of Hester Thrale, an important writer and patron in her own right, who invited Burney to her home at Streatham. This cemented Burney’s entrance into the world of the Bluestockings and important thinkers, with her spending large portions of time staying with Thrale.
Their friendship was such that when the so-called Queen of the Bluestockings, Elizabeth Montagu, would write to Thrale, Burney would always be remembered in the letters as she was with Thrale, as well as being called “truly lovely Frances Burney”. To have the respect, admiration and ultimately patronage of the older woman would have been an invaluable support to a young female writer, and Burney relished it.
However, this did not stop the two women from having altercations. After Thrale lost her first husband in 1781, she began to fall in love with Gabriel Piozzi, her children’s music teacher.
Burney, though an admirer of Piozzi as a musician, implored her not to marry him, begging her not to consider “so great an ascendance of passion over Reason”, as society would shun them: she added that her letter was “not written in enmity to Piozzi of whom I think ever highly, but who to me is nothing, while you are almost every thing.” Thrale would ignore this and go on to marry Piozzi in 1784, for which Burney, along with many of Thrale’s friends, would reject her.
Thrale, now Hester Piozzi, and her husband, would leave England for the continent to travel, resulting in her 1789 book Observations and Reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany.
Burney would write to her father in 1789 asking if he had read the book, and tell him of her and Queen Charlotte reading it – for, by this time, Burney had accepted a role as Keeper of the Robes at court. It seemed that Burney still supported the genius of her friend, even if she felt she had to reject her socially; they would later reconcile and Burney would be heartbroken at Thrale Piozzi’s death in 1821.
The finest balm of friendship
Rather than a source of stress, for many women in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain, their female friends provided levity from the pressures of everyday life. It is no wonder that Jane Austen wrote in her penultimate novel Northanger Abbey that “Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
If anything, friendship was the finest balm for many of the situations life brought Regency women.