Thereafter Father taught both of us together, and if anything he paid more attention to my progress than to Edward’s, because I could follow his mind, which Edward could not. The next year Edward went off to school, scraping through his exam. Father continued to teach me. By the time Edward went to Oxford it was almost as if Father and I were colleagues, both scholars together, spending all day poring over a text and discussing it. Father said I had the wits of a man, and it was a shame I could not go to Oxford too, as I would get more benefit from it. I said that I did not want to leave him, but that perhaps Edward could bring us some more books. Father had a great desire to re-read Plato, which he did not own and had not read since he was himself at Oxford.
The year after, 1859, my father died, quite suddenly, of a chill that went to his lungs. Edward was in his second year at Oxford. Our lives changed overnight. The rectory, of course, had to be given up. Meg, who was twenty-three, had been betrothed for some time to the son of the local squire. It now seemed best to everyone that they be married immediately and set up housekeeping. My mother, almost as a matter of course, went to live with her. The day after the wedding I was sent off to my godmother, my father’s sister, Aunt Fanny, in London. Aunt Fanny had made an advantageous marriage and was now Lady Dakin. She could better afford to support me than Meg’s new husband.
Edward frowned at all this, but was powerless. My father’s estate, such as it was, went to him. It was barely enough for him to live on and remain at Oxford. He promised me that when once he had graduated and found a living that would support us both, he would take me into his house as his housekeeper. He painted a rosy picture of the two of us living happily in some country rectory, him out hunting and me in the study writing his sermons. It seemed the best future I could aspire to.
Aunt Fanny was very kind and gave me a London season with her youngest daughter, my cousin Anne. It was not the kind of entertainment that was to my taste, causing me to continually twist about on myself with shyness, thrust out among so many strangers. I was not a success with the young men to whom I was presented.
Aunt Fanny and Anne constantly urged me to make the best of myself and to wear lilac and grey after three months, but I insisted on wearing mourning black for my father for a whole year. Indeed, I missed him bitterly every day. Also I missed my books. I had been allowed to bring only certain books of Father’s, and I felt parched for anything new. At the end of the London season, with neither of us married and being no doubt desperate as to what to do with two girls, Aunt Fanny carried us off on a tour to Italy. We had a guide and a carriage and we stayed in pensiones or in the houses of friends. It was all very grand, and at least it afforded me new things to see and think about. Sometimes I could even tell the others the stories of the places we were visiting, which always left them a little taken aback and caused the guide to despise me.
Then in Florence I fell in love, as so many have before me, not with any personage but with the art of the Renaissance. In the Pitti Palace I saw a fresco that showed the destruction of the ancient world—Pegasus being set upon by harpies!—and the refugee Muses coming to Florence and being welcomed by Lorenzo de Medici. I was so overcome I had to borrow a handkerchief from Anne to mop my eyes. Aunt Fanny shook her head. Young ladies were supposed to admire art, but not so extravagantly.
Indeed, poor Aunt Fanny had no idea what to do with me. In the Uffizi, she found the Botticelli Madonnas “papist.” I realized as soon as I saw them how bleak was the notion of God without any softening female spirit. I believed in God, of course, and in salvation through Christ. I had always been a devout churchgoer. I prayed nightly. I believed in Providence and tried to see its hand even through the difficulties of my life—which I reminded myself were not so very much to suffer in comparison with the lives so many led. I might have been utterly destitute and forced to beg, or to prostitute myself. I knew I was lucky. Yet I felt myself trammelled. Since Father died I had never had the conversation of an equal, never indeed had any conversation that was not at best quotidian. I wanted to talk to somebody about the female nurturing element in God, about the lives of the angels visible in the background of Botticelli’s Madonnas, and even more about the Primavera. Anne, when I asked her what she thought, said she found the Primavera disturbing. We stood in front of the Birth of Venus as the guide mouthed nonsense. We moved on to another room and to Raphael, who had painted men I felt I could have talked to. I was so lonely I could have talked to their painted selves, had I been unobserved. I missed my father so much.
In the San Lorenzo market the next day, while Aunt Fanny and Anne were cooing over some leather gloves, I stealthily moved to the next stall, which was piled high with books. Some were in Italian, but many were in Greek and Latin, among them several worn volumes of Plato. Even the sight of his name on the faded leather seemed to bring my father closer. The prices seemed reasonable; perhaps there was little demand for books in Greek. I counted my little store of cash, gift of my generous aunt who imagined I wanted to buy trifles. Instead I bought as many books as I could carry and the money would reach to. Of course I could not carry them inconspicuously, so my cousin and my aunt saw the pile as soon as I caught up with them. I saw dismay in Aunt Fanny’s eyes, but she did her best to smile. “How like your father you are, dear Ethel,” she said. “My own dear brother John. He would also spend all he had on books whenever he got the chance. But you must not let men think you are a bluestocking. There is nothing that they so dislike!”
The next day we left for Rome. I had decided to make my books last and read only one book a week, but instead I gorged myself on them. In Rome I saw the Colosseum and the ruins of palaces on the Palatine Hill. I read Plato.
Like everyone who reads Plato, I longed to stop Socrates and put in my own arguments. Even without being able to do that, reading Plato felt like being part of the conversation for which I had been so starved. I read the Symposium and the Protagoras, and then I began the Republic. The Republic is about Plato’s ideas of justice—not in terms of criminal law, but rather how to maximize happiness by living a life that is just both internally and externally. He talks about both a city and a soul, comparing the two, setting out his idea of both human nature and how people should live, with the soul a microcosm of the city. His ideal city, as with the ideal soul, balanced the three parts of human nature: reason, passion, and appetites. By arranging the city justly, it would also maximize justice within the souls of the inhabitants.
Plato’s ideas about all these things were fascinating and thought-provoking, and I read on, longing to talk about them with somebody else who cared. Then, in Book Five, I found the passage where he talks about the education of women, indeed about the equality of women. I read it over and over again. I could hardly believe it. Plato would have allowed me into the conversation from which my sex excluded me. He would have let me be a guardian, limited only by my own ability to achieve excellence.
I went over to the window and looked down on the busy Roman street. A workman was going past, carrying a ladder. He whistled at a young woman on a doorstep who called something back to him in Italian. I was a woman, a young lady, and this constrained me in everything. My choices were so unbearably narrow. If I wanted a life of the mind I could work at nothing but as a governess, or a teacher in a girls’ school, teaching not the classics but the proper accomplishments of a young lady—sketching, watercolors, French and Italian, playing the piano. Possibly I could write books; I was hazily aware that some women did support themselves in that way. But I had no taste for fiction, and writing philosophy would hardly be acceptable. I could marry, if I could find a man like my father—but Father himself had not chosen a woman like me, but one like my mother. Aunt Fanny was not wrong when she said that men dislike bluestockings. I could perhaps keep house for Edward as he had suggested, and write his sermons, but what would then become of me if he were to marry?