Scope and Content
Street Farm,Ashtead, Epsom
My dear friend
I am glad you have read Rosmersholm, (1) Please remember that the author may not have intended to make anybody a hero or heroine. As I said to you when I saw you, I think he meant to show what the effect of the new thought is, and may be expected to be, on people who are not strong enough to stand it. For my own part, I long for the time when men will turn away from these most barren discussions on God, immortality, and their own souls, and busy themselves a little more with science,
or with the world of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Sir Walter Scott, or with their own gardens.
As for Rebecca West (2), she is very interesting to me, because she is so unsatisfactory, such a curiously composed creature, scheming the death of the wife for love of the husband, undoubtedly sympathizing with all his freedom schemes, refusing to marry him and bitten therefore with remorse, and finally determining to die with him.
Of such most unsatisfactory composition are we all mixed, and the creature with one motive, like a pin stuck through him longitudinally, does not exist.
I do beg you to read Lavengro (3). Read it in the large type three-volume edition, and recollect that I will lend it to you in a moment, as I have offered to do, if times are bad, and you don’t want to buy it. I do wish you to buy it, though, and to keep it as a companion. I particularly wish you to tell me what your husband thinks of it.
We have been in trouble here lately. Mrs White has been very unwell again, and has been in bed for about a week. This is the third attack of utter prostration she has had this winter, and the worst. The cruel disease, I am afraid, and so Willie thinks, is beginning to affect the muscles of the lungs. Her patience and self forgetfulness for others, even when she can hardly speak, are extraordinary. Added to this, Jeanie and her children and nurse came here just before the snow-storm and were laid up, or at least one of the children, were with bad colds which, in Leonard.s case looked like laryngitis, and instead of going home in two or three days, have remained here ever since. In the midst of these
calamities we had to change servants, and my dearest little Molly, being somewhat over done, was on the brink of fainting away one evening and became hysterical. However the snow is melting, the children are better, and the end of all things has not yet come.
With best love to your husband & children from us all
Ever affectionately
W. Hale White
(1) Henrik Ibsen 1886.
(2) Not the author but a character in the play described as an emancipated female. in a review in the times, 24th Feb. 1891. However this was the source of the pen name used by Dame Cicily Isabel Andrews [née Fairfield], [pseud. Rebecca West] (1892–1983), writer, critic, and journalist
(3) Lavengro : the scholar-the gypsy-the priest by George Borrow British Library gives 1900 as first dated but some n.d.