With a person finely proportioned, she had a lovely face of great sweetness set off with a head of fair hair, shining and naturally curled, with a complexion which nothing could equal, in which the lilies and the roses contended for the mastery. Her eyes were bright ... indeed, I could never tell the colour they were of, but to the best of my belief they were what Solomon calls "Dove's eyes," and she is almost the only woman I ever saw whose lips were scarlet and her bloom beyond comparison.
Mr. Ballard dedicated the second part of the Memoirs of Learned Ladies to her as "the truest judge, and the brightest pattern of all the accomplishments which adorn her sex." Burke called her "the highest bred woman of the world and the woman of fashion of all ages."
These citations but faintly indicate the impression made by Mrs. Delany on her contemporaries. It is not, however, an impression sustained by any existing work of hers. The seventy-two pictures she painted were copies of old masters with occasional portraits of relatives and friends, and they were highly prized at the time, but no one of them was of sufficient excellence to secure permanent recognition. Her wide and diversified reading is evidenced by her letters which are full of references to the histories, novels, plays, criticism, and devotional works occupying her eager attention. She carried books on every journey. She read or was read to every spare moment. But none of this miscellaneous devotion to books resulted in anything like learning or even in a critically discriminating taste.
Her two real achievements were letter-writing and hand-work. Over a thousand of her letters have been published. They are lively and entertaining and are valuable for the study of mid-eighteenth-century social life. Especially vivid are her accounts of festivities. The rooms and their furnishings, the gowns and jewels of the ladies, the refreshments served, the guests and their idiosyncrasies, are effectively sketched in. There is humorous appreciation, but no touch of malice, and almost no gossip. The refinement and sweetness of tone in the letters never becomes vapid or mawkish. There is always a counter-balancing gayety and buoyancy of mood. Mrs. Delany must have made letter-writing nearly as much a matter of business as did Miss Seward, but the heavy "epistolary solicitudes" of the Swan of Lichfield are at the other end of the scale from Mrs. Delany's bright naturalness. Mrs. Delany's letters are but a clear medium revealing "the fine lady, the good woman, and the good Christian" of Dr. Delany's picture of "Maria."
The most surprising element of Mrs. Delany's life is her hand-work. In October, 1750, she wrote: "I am going to make a very comfortable closet, to have a dresser, and all manner of working tools, to keep all my stores for painting, carving, and gilding, etc., for my own room is now so clean and pretty that I cannot suffer it to be strewed with litter, only books and work, and the closet belonging to it to be given up to prints, drawings, and my collections of fossils and minerals."
With almost any tool she had instinctive dexterity, and she had taste and originality. She apparently enjoyed every kind of hand-work that came to her notice. She never wasted a minute. The knotting-shuttle and the embroidery needle were constant attendants on her tea-table hours, and she accomplished almost unbelievable amounts in designing and working fancy gowns, coverings for chairs and sofas, bed-curtains, etc. She made a carpet and other elaborate pieces in double cross-stitch; she did "shell lustres" and chenille work; she designed and executed a chapel ceiling in cards and shells. Most remarkable of all is her herbal begun when she was seventy-two and completed when she was eighty-five. The flowers were made of colored papers and were so accurate as hardly to be distinguished from the flowers themselves. This paper mosaic was left to the Duchess of Portland with a selection of twenty of the flowers to Queen Charlotte. The herbal is now in the British Museum.
A review of the achievements of Mrs. Delany—her painting, her hand-work, her letter-writing, her multifarious reading—shows that these are but incidental to her personal charm. Her beauty, and the loveliness of her nature, made a fine commendatory background for whatever she did. A friend's portrait, a design for a gown, a bit of turning in ivory, a letter—every trifle gained in value when illumined by the "dove's eyes" of so high-bred and elegant a lady. Her character was marked by uprightness, dignity, and good judgment. She was delicate in her feelings, gentle, courteous, and most sincerely kind. All of her qualities made her a desirable member of any family or social group. It is as a fine lady of the best type that she is remembered, not as a learned woman.
Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806)
Elizabeth Carter lived nearly half a century after the close of the period now under consideration, and her fame as a learned lady belongs chiefly in the second half of the century, but the work on which that fame was based belongs before 1760. Our knowledge of her life comes mainly from two sources, her Memoirs published in 1807 by her nephew and executor, Montagu Pennington, and a series of letters between Miss Carter and Miss Talbot written in the years 1741-1770 and published in 1809. There are also many allusions to Miss Carter in contemporary writings.[374]