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Rosalie Stier Calvert as a Woman of Letters: A Bibliographic Essay on
Women and Reading in the United States, England, and France, 1794-1820
By Jill F. Reilly
Rosalie Stier Calvert (1778-1821), the mistress of Riversdale Plantation,
was an avid reader throughout her adolescence and adulthood. Although
Rosalie learned English at her convent school before arriving in the Philadelphia
in 1794, she improved her fluency by reading British novels with her mother.
As a young mother, Rosalie continued to spend a portion of each day reading.
She purchased books from Philadelphia, New York, and London, and her family
sent her books published in Paris. She maintained her intellectual ties
to French and British culture while acquiring American reading tastes
and habits. A study of her reading provides insight into the reading habits
and interests of privileged, educated women of the United States, England,
and France between 1794 and 1820.
The recreation of Rosalie's library collection at Riversdale was derived
from three sources. Her collected letters provide titles that Rosalie
read and hint at genres and authors she might have enjoyed. Scholarship
on the history of reading with a focus on women's reading illuminates
the cultural discourse surrounding reading women; the private significance
of reading for individual women; and the book titles, authors, and poets
popular with women of the period. Finally, the online bibliographic utility
WorldCat, which includes records on the holdings of most major research
libraries in the United States and Western Europe, facilitated the selection
of appropriate editions that might have been in the Riversdale library.
I
Margaret Law Callcott's edition of the correspondence of Rosalie Stier
Calvert, Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie
Stier Calvert, 1795-1821 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1991), provides an interpretive framework. In addition to a variety
of topics, Callcott highlights Rosalie's passion for reading and literature.
Throughout her life, Rosalie read for pleasure and made time for reading
as part of her daily routine. She viewed reading as "a relaxation
after [her] domestic cares" (196).
Her letters revealed Rosalie's interest in French and German drama, especially
the works of Gessner in translation (185) and Racine, Corneille, Delille,
and Molière in the original French (308). Her love of poetry, biography,
and travel literature (196) surfaced in her letters. Also mentioned are
her favorite authors and poets, including Sir Walter Scott (283), Lord
Byron (283, 299), and Thomas Moore (131, 158-159).
Rosalie read and reread the work of Irish poet Thomas Moore with "renewed
pleasure each time" (158). Her favorite poems included "Love
and Reason" from Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq, "Dismal
Swamps" from Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, and "Ode
XVI" from Odes of Anacreon (185). At a social gathering in
Washington, D.C., Rosalie met Moore. "Mr. Moore is a young man who
is as agreeable in his manner and conversation as he is talented as a
poet, and that is saying a great deal!" Rosalie explained to her
brother (158).
In addition to drama and poetry, Rosalie enjoyed reading novels. Madame
de Staël's Corinne was a particular favorite, a copy of which
she received as a gift from her sister and subsequently encouraged her
brother to read (196, 303-5). Her active imagination and familiarity with
Gothic romance may have engendered her fears of living in a Belgian castle
as her brother did. "After you have read all the romances about apparitions
and trap doors, don't you shudder passing by those towers and winding
staircases in the dark?" she asked (210).
There must have been schoolbooks and juvenile literature in the Riversdale
collection, as Rosalie was intermittently responsible for educating her
children at home. Subjects such as French, English grammar and composition,
history, geography, and religion would have been included in Rosalie's
curriculum.
These hints and probabilities provide a tantalizing glimpse into Rosalie's reading habits and imaginative world. As her letters suggest, discussions of literature were conversational topics among relatives and friends (196). Acquaintances often borrowed books from one another because printed volumes were so costly. Subscription libraries such as the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Library Company of Baltimore were another popular option for voracious readers in American cities of the colonial and early republic periods. "You know how books travel in this country (much to the detriment of their covers), but it is an excellent idea," Rosalie explained (196). The existence of lending libraries and the common practice of borrowing among friends make it difficult to determine what books Rosalie Calvert might actually have owned. There is no way of distinguishing between which volumes she borrowed and which she purchased. The bibliographies created for this project offer a picture of what a woman of Rosalie's social position and intellectual interests might have read.
II
To piece together this picture of what educated, American, British,
and French women read during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, I relied upon the work of academic historians and literary
scholars who study the history of reading. While the history of the book
focuses on publishing history and technological developments, the history
of reading is a relatively new and developing field of research, which
places reader response in historical context. Marginalia in published
books, diaries, and letters like those Rosalie wrote to her family provide
evidence and primary sources for scholars who seek to explore the cultural
and personal significance of reading in a certain time and place. A great
deal of scholarship on the history of reading has focused on women's experiences.
In A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1996), Kevin J. Hayes explores the private writings of prominent
Colonial American women, such as Abigail Adams, to reconstruct their intellectual
lives. Structured like an extended bibliographic essay, this book offers
a broad selection of titles that were available to colonial American women
readers. Hayes provides an analysis of various women's reactions to their
reading, especially Richardson's Clarissa, and the significance
of reading in their daily lives. He also explains the cultural context
in which men proscribed what women should and should not read.
Hayes's examination of American men's anxiety about women's reading complements
Elisabeth B. Nichols's " 'Blunted Hearts': Female Readers and Printed
authority in the Early Republic" (in Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas,
eds., Reading Acts: U.S. Readers' Interactions with Literature, 1800-1950
[Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002] pp. 1-28). Nichols contrasts
men's conception of reading as a work activity for women with women's
designation of reading as a leisure pastime. The social aspects of reading
were important to women, Nichols argues, and reading aloud in groups was
popular. Schoolgirls and adult women alike corresponded with one another
about their novel reading. Patricia Howell Michaelson describes the social
dimensions of reading aloud for women readers of Austen in Speaking
Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford,
Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2002).
In " 'The Cultivated Mind': Reading and Identity in a Nineteenth-Century
Reader" (in Reading Acts pp. 29-52), Allison M. Scott explores
the patchwork national identity constructed by a well-read Scottish immigrant
woman. The importance of one Scottish expatriate's reading of the works
of Scottish authors corresponds with Rosalie Calvert's continuing interest
in French literature.
The history of reading has received much attention from historians of
France and Western Europe. The edition of scholarly essays edited by Dominique
De Courcelles and Carmen Val Julián, Des femmes et des livres:
France et Espagne, XIVe - XVIIe siècle (Paris: École
nationale des chartes, 1999), focuses on the libraries of noble women,
which included many religious texts, classical works in Latin, history,
and poetry. Many of the contributors distinguish between merely owning
a book and actually reading it. Angelica Rieger and Jean-François
Tonard's similar collection, La Lecture au féminin: La Lectrice
dans la littérature française du Moyen Age au XX e siècle
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), devotes significant
attention to the cultural meanings attached to a woman who reads, a woman
who has access to knowledge and perhaps power. Contributors also explore
the importance of imagination and national identity.
In Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women,
Peasants (New York: Palgrave, 2001), Martyn Lyons creatively applies
evidence to support her arguments about the subversive power of reading.
Most histories of reading favor the wealthy and educated members of a
society. Lyons, however, explores what reading might have meant to segments
of society whose access to reading materials was limited or restricted.
Her chapters on women explore the antagonism between men's public pronouncements
about what women should read, namely Catholic devotionals, and women's
private decisions about what they wished to read, usually popular novels
and memoirs. Many French women read sentimental novels contrary to the
advice of clergy members and male family members, participating in a subversive
activity. Lyons argues that, when reading, women created spaces of personal
autonomy for themselves and their ideas.
Moyra Haslett's Byron's Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) contends that, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
England, reading "appeared to some to offer a dangerous subjectivity
to groups whose use of such potential individualism threatened subversion
- the working class and women. And the interaction between women and the
narrative imaginative text was increasingly viewed as not only gendered
but sexualized" (193-194). Specifically, the work sheds light on
the cultural significance of the efforts to control women's reading by
focusing on the controversy surrounding Lord Byron's Don Juan.
Byron's earlier work had been popular among ladies and considered appropriate
reading for women. However, critics encouraged husbands and fathers to
keep this sexually explicit work hidden from the impressionable ladies
in their households.
Although some critics also felt that sentimental novels and Gothic romances
provoked the emotions of ladies, these two extremely popular genres received
less censure and were not considered unfit reading for respectable women.
Rosalie Calvert especially enjoyed Gothic romances. Two works of literary
criticism proved helpful in my efforts to pinpoint which titles Rosalie
might have read. Susan Wolstenholme focuses on the most prominent romance
writers in her study, Writing Women as Readers: Gothic (Re)Visions
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). Bette B. Roberts's
The Gothic Romance: Its Appeal to Women Writers and Readers in Late
Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Arno Press, 1980) explores reader
response.
Roberts devotes her attention to the seven most popular Gothic romances
written between 1785 and 1797, the peak period for the Gothic trend. Gothic
novels offered a psychic escape for women who suffered oppression and
emotional pain, she argues. Women readers identified with the imprisonment,
persecution, and oppression that victimized heroines experienced in Gothic
novels like The Recess and The Mysteries of Udolpho. Gothic
novelists contrasted the suspenseful, terrifying confinement of ruined
medieval castles and the dramatic, emotional freedom of natural landscapes.
During Rosalie's lifetime, tension infused discussions of women's reading. Men often believed women should read only for educational and spiritual development, but many women chose to indulge in the imaginative escapes of narrative fiction. Rosalie Stier Calvert was a privileged woman whose father and husband allowed her a remarkable amount of personal autonomy. Free to make her own reading selections, Rosalie satisfied her intellect with histories, biographies, and works of great literature and suited her fancy popular novels.
III
From the secondary sources on the history of reading and the history
of women, I compiled a list of books that were popular and commonly available
during the period Rosalie was actively reading and acquiring volumes for
her library. Another list included the types of books mentioned in Rosalie's
letters, i.e., a children's book about Waterloo and travel books, whose
titles could not be determined. Armed with these two lists, I began searching
the online bibliographic catalog utility, WorldCat.
I first conducted searches of the books popular when Rosalie was actively
reading, 1780 to 1820, and I selected editions Rosalie was most likely
to have read or owned. Factors included year of publication (with preference
for earlier editions), place of publication (favoring London, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Paris, and New York), and number of extant copies (an indication
of a large printing). In some cases, I noted whether the University of
Maryland Libraries owned a book or microfilm copy of that particular edition.
Using the list of book types, I searched keywords and subjects to pinpoint
popular titles in those genres. The same factors used to select among
editions of popular works guided the selection of specific typical books.
Based on the number of editions and extant copies, I was able to determine
which were the most common schoolbooks, for example. A poem about the
Battle of Waterloo written for a juvenile audience was published in 1816,
the same year Rosalie's sister sent such a poem to the Calvert boys. There
is less certainty that these titles formed part of the Riversdale library.
This imaginative reconstruction of Rosalie's contribution to the Riversdale library incorporated primary research, close review of the secondary scholarship, and bibliographic exercises to construct a picture of Rosalie's reading experience. Although Rosalie was an exceptional American woman, she was a representative woman of her class and education who participated in the culture of the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
