Close
Cart (0)
Login
Staff Login
Register
FR
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
Go to Login page
Episode 4: Lady Hester Pulter / Alice Eardley
Episode 4: Lady Hester Pulter / Alice Eardley
Actions
Episode 4: Lady Hester Pulter / Alice Eardley
In this episode, we interview Alice Eardley about Lady Hester Pulter, a seventeenth century woman writer who tackled both the personal and the political in her writing. A staunch royalist in the time of the English Civil War, Pulter did not hesitate to make her support for the King and the old order and her distaste for Cromwell and the parliamentarians known in her poetry. Also unusually for the time, when women’s writing was often chaste and religious, Pulter wrote sympathetically about female experiences including rape, the postpartum period, and child loss.
Eardley was one of the first scholars to work on Pulter’s writing in the early 2000s after Pulter’s manuscript was uncovered in the 1990s. Pulter’s manuscript, which was not published lifetime and likely only seen by family members, includes the first emblem poems written by an Englishwoman and one of the first prose romances written by an Englishwoman, the Unfortunate Florinda. Eardley tells us about working with the manuscript as a physical object, and why she prefers to see her work in the light of “uncovering” Pulter’s manuscript, which avoids the colonialist and sexist rhetoric of “discovering” it.
This is Orlando, a podcast about the history of women's writing from medieval times to the present.
-:-
-:-
Transcription
Karen Bourrier (00:05): I'm Karen Bourrier. Kathryn Holland (00:15): And I'm Kathryn Holland. This is Orlando, a podcast about the history of women's writing from medieval times to the present. In this episode, we interview Alice Eardley about Lady Hester Pulter, a 17th century woman writer who tackled both the personal and political in her writing. A staunch Royalist in the time of the English civil war, Pulter did not hesitate to make her support for the king and the old order, and her distaste for Cromwell and the parliamentarians known in her poetry. Also unusually for the time, when women's writing was often chaste and religious, Pulter wrote sympathetically about experiences including rape, the post-partum period, and child loss. Karen Bourrier (00:53): Eardley was one of the first scholars to work on Pulter's writing in the early 2000's after Pulter's manuscript was uncovered in the 1990s. Pulter's manuscript, which was not published in her lifetime, and likely only seen by family members, includes the first emblem poems written by an English woman, and one of the first prose romances written by an English woman: "The Unfortunate Florinda". Eardley Tells us about working with the manuscript as a physical object and why she prefers to see her work in the light of "uncovering" Pulter's manuscript, which avoids the colonialist and sexist rhetoric of "discovering" it. Kathryn Holland (01:28): This is Orlando, a podcast about the history of women's writing from medieval times to the present. Karen Bourrier (02:03): Hi Alice! It's so great to see your face and to talk to you, welcome to the podcast! We've all known each other for a long time and it's delightful to have you here. So we just wanted to start off by asking a little bit about Hester Pulter. Who was she? When did she live? What was her background like? What did she write? Alice Eardley (02:20): Oh, she's a bit of a mystery. So a big chunk of my research was just trying to dig out the basic facts of her life. So she was born around 1605, which isn't exactly clear, but we think that's when she was born, she died in 1678. So her lifespan goes across the seventeenth century. She came from quite an aristocratic background. So her father was James Ley, who was the first Earl of Marlborough. So in the British aristocratic system, you've got the King and Queen at the top, then you've got Dukes and Duchesses, and then you've got Earls and Countesses underneath. Karen Bourrier (02:59): So much higher than a Baron, right? I have a little PowerPoint when I teach Jane Austen about like who's at the top, yeah. Alice Eardley (03:05): And James Ley was one of James the First's Privy councillors. So he was in direct contact with the King in the early 17th-century. She went on to marry a gentleman. So she sort of came down the social hierarchy, but at the beginning when she was born, she was really aristocratic. Erm, she did most of her writing -- so the writing that we know about, we've only got one manuscript, that's all that we know about that has survived. And it was written mainly during the middle of the 17th-century, so the civil war period. Karen Bourrier (03:40): Oh yeah! Can you give us a little refresher on what the English civil war was? Because they think in a North American context, we think of the American civil war first. Alice Eardley (03:49): To put this very, very simply it was a conflict between the King, who at that point was Charles the First, and Parliament. So you've got a battle that at its heart It was a religious conflict. So you've got Charles the First who was what we would describe as Laudian, and so quite high church, um -- Karen Bourrier (04:11): I think high church too! I didn't figure this out until later in grad school, it's like kind of conservative, more towards Catholic, right? Alice Eardley (04:18): Both sides were very conservative and that's, yeah -- gets difficult to sort of map it onto more modern politics, but you've got the Royalists who were on the side of Charles the First and the established church, which people started to think looked a bit too Catholic. So if you think about the reformation in the previous century, when Catholicism had been banished from the country officially, and then you've got Charles the first he's married to a Catholic woman, his church looks a bit too Catholic, so it's lots of ceremonies, lots of big grand churches. And then on the other side, you've got parliament, and I think where it gets a bit complicated for modern people as we think of parliament as representing the ordinary person, but actually parliament at this point is still quite aristocratic as well, and you've got, very broadly, parliament was on a more reformed religious -- it was a more reformed religious end of the scale, so. Karen Bourrier (05:24): Okay, and so how does this come out in her writing? So we don't know a lot about her as a woman, historically, like you've kind of dredged up these different facts as best you can, how does it come out in her writing, that she's on the Royalist side and supporting Charles the First? Alice Eardley (05:41): She's surprisingly outspoken about her political views in a way that is quite unusual. So we have other women writers from the periods who were quite Royalist and they write very nice sort of friendly, polite poetry. Karen Bourrier (05:59): So who are these other women? Alice Eardley (06:00): The main one I'm thinking of is someone like Katherine Philips who's just writing these very nice friendship poems. She's using lots of Royalist motifs, like celebration and Mayday, and friendship. So very nice themes. Hester Pulter is much more direct and she hated Cromwell, and she says that very, very clearly. Karen Bourrier (06:25): Yeah. What do you think made her able to be so direct and forthright in her poetry? Is it that she wasn't... So she was circulating only in manuscript, right? She was never published in her lifetime. Like, did that privacy give her, or in your opinion, what enabled this? Kathryn Holland (06:42): Just to piggyback on that, who were her readers? Who was her audience? Did she have an intended audience? Alice Eardley (06:48): If she was circulating it at all, I think it was within a very narrow family circle, so probably her children, but we have to be really careful because it doesn't mean that she's writing really private, you know, just for herself, she's writing as though an audience will read it, but it's not an actual audience at that point in time. Karen Bourrier (07:10): That makes total sense. And I just wonder if that is what enabled her forthrightness. And can you tell us some more, this manuscript was, she's really different in that this manuscript was hidden for like 300 years too. Can you tell us about the story of the discovery? Kathryn Holland (07:24): What does it smell like? Karen Bourrier (07:26): Is it like leather-bound and gilt? This is what I imagined. Kathryn Holland (07:28): That's what I imagined too. Alice Eardley (07:30): It is! It is! It's bound in calf-skin. So it's got this lovely brown, velvety cover that's embossed with gold. Karen Bourrier (07:40): Wow. Alice Eardley (07:41): I mean, one of the reasons we know it hasn't gone very far in its existence is because it's still in really good condition. So it's in almost perfect -- it's a bound book and it's about the size of a regular book that we would read today, maybe slightly bigger and it's got all this gold tooling and the handwriting inside is really ornate and very beautiful. So somebody -- Karen Bourrier (08:06): Some kind of fair copy that somebody did, right? Alice Eardley (08:09): Yes, it's not her rough notes. Somebody has put a lot of time and effort into making really a beautiful object. Karen Bourrier (08:16): So you weren't the one that discovered it, but tell us about how it was discovered and you're the best one to -- sorry, go on. Kathryn Holland (08:24): I also want to know about kind of the trajectory of Alice's experience with Pulter and with the manuscript itself. Karen Bourrier (08:31): Yeah! Kathryn Holland (08:31): Like about your personal engagement as a thinker and a writer. Alice Eardley (08:37): We have to be careful when we're talking about "discovery" -- I've been told off by archivists. So it's been in the Leeds Brotherton library since the 1970s, but it sort of became public knowledge when it was identified by Mark Robson, an academic who came across it while he was working in the archives and realized -- Karen Bourrier (09:02): And was he just poking around, looking for something else, and found this? Alice Eardley (09:05): Yeah, I mean, I think an important part of this is that he found it in the 1990s when the Perdita project had just started up at Warwick University and what they were doing was going around archives and cataloging manuscripts by women. They wanted to create a full picture. So I think that helped because he, you know, he was aware that this was an area of interest. Karen Bourrier (09:28): Yeah, no, and totally take your point that we shouldn't paint ourselves as the heroes coming in to defend her and rescue it. And it's a little colonialist, isn't it? But it's easy because it's so romantic, too right? It's very tempting. Alice Eardley (09:40): Yeah. You know, I grew up reading novels about manuscripts being discovered by academics and it did feel like that. Karen Bourrier (09:49): So it felt like that. So you're the first, but someone else, it re-emerges while someone else is doing archival research, is that the kind of...? Alice Eardley (09:57): I think the word I used to use was "uncovered". It was sort of there, but it's been brought, it's been made more public. Karen Bourrier (10:06): So it's been uncovered, it's been made more public and you come in to work on it, and what was that like? Because this was a few years after it was uncovered. Alice Eardley (10:14): Yeah. It was really exciting. So it was the main focus of my PhD. So I wasn't the first person to do that. So Sarah Ross had done a bit of work in her PhD on Pulter, but I was the first person to do a full study of the manuscripts and that was, that was the focus of my work. Just to give you one example, the first week of my PhD, I managed to find some diary entries to her by one of her relatives. And that increased what we knew about her life by about a hundred percent. There's so little that when you started to dig out these small bits of information, they really increased what we knew about her. But there was everything to do. There was the biography, there was looking at the poetry and the prose and thinking about her influences, and in some cases what she was saying, you know, some of them of them took a bit of unpicking. We also had the physical manuscripst and again, Sarah did quite a lot of work on this, but there's the -- Karen Bourrier (11:15): And they said Leeds, right? Yeah. Alice Eardley (11:16): But we also have some loose sheets in her handwriting, so we've got rough drafts by her. And we've also, there were other hands in the manuscripts, so we think she's correct- she's made corrections. We think a couple of other people have looked at it and made notes. So there was all of that. Karen Bourrier (11:36): It's such literary detective work, it's hard not to get excited and to see yourself as the romantic hero. Kathryn Holland (11:44): What I find striking about it is the collaborative nature of the work and collaborative, I guess, asynchronous collaboration, to use a term that we've been throwing around quite a lot in the last few months. Karen Bourrier (11:54): Can you tell us about what excites you most about her writing? So she does poetry and prose, and she seems like she was quite forward-thinking from what I've read about your work, like what, what excites you about her writing? Alice Eardley (12:08): The thing that always strikes me the most and the thing that was most exciting when I started reading it was how outspoken she is about what it means to be a woman in the period. So again, we tend, you know, you tend to these manuscripts as a feminist critic, or I did, and you want to hear the woman's voice. And in some ways, 17th-century women, I'm going to use the word disappointing, cause if you if you come at it from a modern perspective, you want evidence of, you know, chafing at some of the restrictions. And we don't always get that. You know, you get a lot of nice religious, pious women's writing, and some of that is the conventions that they were working within. But Pulter is very, very clear that she is unhappy and a lot of it is because she's a woman and she talks about being -- Karen Bourrier (13:01): But is it because she's a woman, sorry, I interrupted you. But like, I picture her -- I've heard about her from you over the years, so I picture her in a castle locked up with 15 children. Alice Eardley (13:16): Yes. Kathryn Holland (13:16): <Laugh>. Karen Bourrier (13:16): <Laugh> and that's basically... Alice Eardley (13:16): Yeah, and she's not happy about it. Karen Bourrier (13:20): So tell us more how that comes out in her poetry, right? So this is an era of unrestricted birth for a lot of women. You know, there's no birth control that people are using regularly at this point, is that...? Alice Eardley (13:33): Yeah. So she talks about being locked up in a country grange, which we know is Broadfiled Manor in Hertfordshire, we don't know why she was locked up. She writes a poem, well, we don't know if "locked up" is the right word, I don't know if she was forcibly restrained. We don't know why she's there, and there's I was looking at- Karen Bourrier (13:54): Could it be the political situation? Or, her husband seemed like a nice enough guy, so I hope it wasn't him! I hope this isn't a Jane Eyre situation. Alice Eardley (14:03): Well, yeah, we've got a poem where she lists all the reasons that she isn't locked -- isn't confined. But then doesn't go on to say why, I mean, it could be her house. She had 15 children and there's a couple of poems that were written just after childbirth, where she's really suffering the, you know, I think there's one poem after the birth of her 15th child when she describes not being able to lift her head from the bed. So some of it might've been physical health, we've also got all of the political situations. So you think, you know, she's this very outspoken spoken Royalist living in a very Parliamentarian area. So I mean, whether she decided to restrain herself or whether her husband was keeping her contained, because she was a danger to everybody, he seems to have been quite moderate and quite scholarly. And he disappears from public record in 1652, which is really interesting because if he'd been -- but it's probably to keep him himself and his family safe because he was on the wrong side of the politics. There's also, we've got a couple of what I think are play poems. Karen Bourrier (15:17): Yeah. Tell us more about this. This is so, I mean, there's way too much residence -- uh, resonance, pardon me, I can't speak -- with the political situation today. Like, you know, politics is crazy today and we're in the middle of a plague. So you have evidence, sorry, not to be too -- <laugh>. Alice Eardley (15:34): I did think about her a lot during lockdown. I have to say. Karen Bourrier (15:38): So what do you think was going on? What was the plague she was experiencing in the 17th century? Alice Eardley (15:44): The one that I think we've got poems about was the one from 1665, which I think was smallpox, but we've got a couple of poems about this illness that is afflicting people. And I think a couple of her children might have died in that. Karen Bourrier (16:01): So she could have been in isolation because of that. I'm picking up a lot more references in historical novels that I read to people, staying away, yeah. Alice Eardley (16:11): To go to the countryside, to get out of London and avoid the contamination in London. But to go back to the question I started with, because one of things that I wanted to say about her in terms of her feminism was the romance is really interesting from that perspective. Karen Bourrier (16:29): Okay. Can you tell us what her romantic, this is the Florinda? Kathryn Holland (16:31): The Unfortunate Florinda? Karen Bourrier (16:32): The Unfortunate Florinda, what a great title! Alice Eardley (16:37): And I mean this is really interesting 'cause she takes all of the things that we would expect from romance-- Karen Bourrier (16:45): What is a romance in the 17th-century? Give us a refresher. Alice Eardley (16:49): So romance in the 17th-century is a massive scrawling narrative of about a thousand pages. It looks, it follows the lives and adventures or mainly the love lives of a group of noble friends. So you'll get a little story about a couple that come together and then get separated. And then you'll get another little story about another couple and then you get characters sort of dip in and out and they meet, they all know each other and they travel around and they meet each other. Karen Bourrier (17:20): Yeah. So what does Pulter do with this genre of the romance that's exciting to you? Alice Eardley (17:27): So she's interesting because she specifically -- she's the first person I know of in Britain who'd written a version of Madeleine de Scudéry's romances. So the 1650s romances are a particular kind, and she seems to be the first person to have been using that model. And they're based on historical, um, narratives. So Pulter takes an existing narrative and it's about the Islamic invasion of Spain in the 8th-century, and she takes one of their foundation myths. So it's about a character called Florinda who gets raped by the king of Spain, and that is her central narrative. And then we have these -- Karen Bourrier (18:12): How does she treat the rape? Alice Eardley (18:12): So this is -- Karen Bourrier (18:13): We have to ask on a feminist podcast about -- yeah. Alice Eardley (18:17): So rape isn't unusual in romances, but usually it's sort of glossed over and it's -- Karen Bourrier (18:22): You know, I think it's still not unusual, I watched Outlander! <Laugh>. Alice Eardley (18:28): You know it's happened, but she's unusual because it's really graphic. So you get a really detailed description of what actually happens to this character. To have that made that explicit in the mid 17th-century and treated quite sympathetically as well, so you get -- it's the female characters perspective that we get. She isn't, you know, an unchaste temptress that gets what she deserves. She's -- the sympathy is with her. Um, and -- Karen Bourrier (19:03): So she's writing really sympathetically about childbirth, about postpartum, about rape, and this is just really unusual for the 17th century. Alice Eardley (19:12): And then there's another bit in the romance where she takes an existing pamphlet from the 1650s that is really mysognist and she argues directly with it, so she has one of her male villains speaking the words of this pamphlet, and she has her female heroine arguing against it, line by line. Karen Bourrier (19:34): That's amazing. It must have been so exciting to work on this compared to what you're saying is the more proper -- Alice Eardley (19:41): The more chaste... Karen Bourrier (19:43): Chaste, yes! Alice Eardley (19:45): -- polite and reserved voice that we find in a lot of women's writing. She's very out there and that's why I'm using the word feminist, because we probably shouldn't in 17th-century, but I feel it's appropriate in a lot of ways. Karen Bourrier (20:01): I'm sorry. My baby monitor is going off. Alice Eardley (20:03): <Laughs>. Kathryn Holland (20:10): Thinking about Pulter's writing, we've been talking about the manuscript, but we know that Alice Eardley edited the volume: "Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda". Um, I happen to know, I just looked it up and it's available, it's in the MacEwan library system, but it is out someone has it now. Nonetheless, it is available for readers to explore, and so one question that I have for you, Alice, is where would you suggest readers to begin with Pulter if they picked up that volume? Karen Bourrier (20:43): I was going ask the same thing, or is there one poem that you would put on a syllabus? Kathryn Holland (20:47): Yeah, that's a great question! Karen Bourrier (20:47): One that's pretty successful or one thing you think that people should read? Alice Eardley (20:54): Ooh, that's a -- Karen Bourrier (20:56): Probably not The Unfortunate Florinda, right? Cause if there's anything we know, like getting people to read that thousand million page thing is not. Alice Eardley (21:04): Well actually -- Karen Bourrier (21:06): Or are you going to say yes, we should do that? Alice Eardley (21:07): If you want to read an example of one of those romances read that one because it isn't a thousand pages. It's a nice, it's a nice contained mini-version, that has all of the motifs, but in a short story format almost, you know, in modern terms. What would I start with? I'm tempted to say start at the beginning because well, a lot of thought has clearly gone into, it's like the order of the album, a lot of thought has gone into the order of these poems and how they're organized. Alice Eardley (21:43): I think if you want to dip in, there's, I was looking at it this morning, poem 11 is about the death of one of her daughters. And it's a really good example of how she brings together these what I think of as women's themes, you know, the death of a child, but also it's a really sophisticated use of poetical convention. It's a blazon, so it's a love poem, which looks at the different, her daughters, her daughter, Jane, who died when she was 20. And it looks at the different physical parts of her body. Karen Bourrier (22:18): So a blazon is usually a male voice writing to a female and cataloguing the beauties of his lover, right? And so this is quite exciting because it's a mother writing about her child. Alice Eardley (22:29): Again, a little bit controversial. So Elizabeth Clark's written really nicely about how mourning mothers were specifically told not to dwell on the physical aspects of their child, because it would just feed the grief, so she's going against that. Karen Bourrier (22:46): How many of her children died? Didn't they all predecease her? Alice Eardley (22:50): Two of them outlived her. Karen Bourrier (22:51): That's really sad. Alice Eardley (22:51): Quite a few lived into adulthood. So she wasn't just losing them as babies, she was losing them as grown adults. So yeah, that, poem 11 would be a good place to start. Kathryn Holland (23:04): Wonderful. Karen Bourrier (23:04): We -- we will start there. Thank you so much, Alice. It was such a pleasure to talk to you about this and to learn about Hester Pulter with you. Kathryn Holland (23:13): Thank you, Alice. Alice Eardley (23:14): I've enjoyed it. Karen Bourrier (23:15): Okay. Speak soon. Bye. Alice Eardley (23:18): Bye! Karen Bourrier (23:28): Orlando is a podcast that aims to extend the conversation surrounding writing by women, its history, and its conditions of possibility. This series is edited and produced by Jessica J Khuu, with the help of Christie Hurrell, and co-hosted by Karen Bourrier and Kathryn Holland. Additional resources and information on our amazing guests and contributors will be listed in the description below. Please take care and we'll see you next time.
Linked assets
Orlando: A Podcast on Women's Writing
Orlando: A Podcast on Women’s Writing
Add to Lightbox
Download
Get link
Ask a Question
Podcast
Orlando: A Podcast on Women's Writing
Creator
Bourrier
,
Karen
, Holland, Kathryn
Roles
Bourrier
,
Karen
(show host),
Holland
,
Kathryn
(show host),
Hurrell
, Christie (producer), Khuu, Jessica J. (producer), Khuu, Jessica J. (audio engineer)
Genre
audio recording
,
podcasts
How can you use this object?
Permitted uses are outlined in License and Usage Rights. Usage Restrictions can only be waived by the copyright holder. Add to cart to request more access.
Usage Rights
Education
,
Instruction
,
Private study
,
Remix and adapt
,
Research
Usage Restrictions
Commercial
Copyright Status
In copyright
License
CC BY-NC 4.0
Attribution
" Episode 4: Lady Hester Pulter / Alice Eardley", 2021, ( CU110655695) by Bourrier, Karen,Holland, Kathryn. Courtesy of Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary.
https://doi.org/10.11575/dc/fyve-nf75
Browse by Captions
Unique identifier:
CU110655695
Legacy Identifier:
1.4_Orlando_Eardley
Type:
Audio
Duration:
24m21s