Ba is articulating here the frustration of generations of women who hate, not their bodies and their own selves, but the constrictions of gender roles. There are pleasures and there are pinch points, and we should be careful about reducing such resistances to aspects of ‘femineity’ to the single-pointed essentialism of gender dysphoria: that ‘real’ women couldn’t possibly feel like this is the claim made by centuries of misogynists.
Ba is growing up in an era when even the daughters of the wealthy must rely on paternal goodwill – and culture – to patch together an education beyond the feminine accomplishments she’s bored by: ‘I hate needlework & drawing because I never feel occupied whilst I work or draw—’. Her father keeps a country gentleman’s library: a cosmopolitan affair, as British education at the start of the nineteenth century is, well stocked with the classics, key Enlightenment belles-lettres, and some of the Romantics. With her mother’s guidance, by her early teens she has read the American revolutionary thinker Thomas Paine, Locke’s fellow British empiricist David Hume, the great French secularist Voltaire, a translation from the German of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, arguably the most influential Bildungsroman in European history, and that Genevan-born Romantic with a more political take on the nature of the self, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She’s such ‘A great admirer at thirteen’ of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that two years later her mother is worrying ‘Mrs Wolstonecrafts system’ will turn her into ‘an old maid’ with ‘singleness of will &c.’
Yet it’s Mamma herself who gave Ba permission to read Wollstonecraft at this formative age. The surrendered wife imagined by future biographers is nothing like this real-life woman, viewed by her contemporaries as ‘Mary and her little coterie of independent females’. Ambitious for her children’s development, it’s she who keeps them at their lessons when Papa is away on business, and who commissions and collects much of Ba’s juvenile creativity, including a fragmentary ‘Essay on Woman’, written at sixteen in response to Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’:
Are vases only prised because they break?
Then why must woman to be loved be weak?
But it’s not just ‘femineity’ that’s engaging Ba’s emerging political awareness. Turn back once more to 1817, and we find the eleven-year-old drafting a furious letter to Lord Somers, owner of nearby Eastnor Castle, who to neighbourhood chagrin is about to be made Lord Lieutenant of Herefordshire, and will shortly gain an Earldom. He’s among House of Lords supporters of the government’s suspension of habeas corpus – the right to be tried in one’s own presence, and therefore fairly – on the grounds that there are too many political subversives around. Moreover, his pamphlet A Defence of the Constitution of Great Britain, published this same year, argues that the right to vote should be curtailed; parliament doesn’t need to sit every year. Ba’s fiery letter denouncing his attacks on ‘liberty’ can’t have done neighbourly relations much good, if it was ever actually sent, but she doesn’t seem to notice the paradox inherent in arguing for legal and democratic rights as the daughter and granddaughter of slave ‘owners’. She’s not alone in this. Her slaver father and Uncle Sam are both at the same time politically progressive Whigs.
Is youthful idealism in particular always separated by a few degrees from daily life? Ever since her very first poem, ‘On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man’, protested press-ganging, liberty has been a recurring theme for Ba. The high point of her early seriousness is The Battle of Marathon, a 1,500-line retelling, in the heroic couplets she’s coming to favour, of a key moment in the Greco-Persian wars. Her Preface frames this story not as adventure but as a moral parable about ‘one little city rising undaunted, and daring her innumerable enemies, in defence of her freedom’; and it’s surely better to hold such ethical ideals than not. How then do we judge a young person who develops a social conscience before she knows all the facts, or has the economic and social agency to act?
It’s unclear how well-informed Ba is about the sources of her family’s wealth as she enters her teens. But The Battle of Marathon has cost her too much effort and emotion to be a game. Started in the summer she was eleven, it takes her over two years to complete. Her father, the dedicatee, has it printed in a private edition of fifty copies for her fourteenth birthday. Though this is vanity publishing, it is her first book, and some of its strongest passages show a precociously adult, assured ear, as when Ba brings Athena to Athens to give false council:
Doubt clouds the Goddess’ breast—she calls her car,
And lightly sweeps the liquid fields of air.
When sable night midst silent nature springs,
And o’er Athena shakes her drowsy wings,
The Paphian Goddess from Olympus flies,
And leaves the starry senate of the skies.
Still, even the most austerely intellectual young girl enjoys high days and holidays. The plays Ba puts on with her siblings are undeniably literary achievements – that first French tragedy is succeeded by Socrates, of the Laurel of Athens when she’s eleven, and The Tragedy of Laodice when she’s thirteen – but organising the straggle of little siblings to perform must be chaotic fun too. There are trips to join Grandmama and Treppy at the smart new spa town of Cheltenham, just twenty-five miles away. And when Ba was nine, she managed to invite herself along on her parents’ expedition to France simply by dint of jumping into the carriage with them.
Yet this turned out to be the most intellectually formative of treats. Travelling by way of Calais, Boulogne, Abbeville and Amiens, the family followed a trail
