On Clermont’s shelves: “The Countess of Albany” by Vernon Lee (1884)
Today’s entry is the first non-fiction book I’ve decided to cover from Clermont's shelves—a biography of a European noblewoman (of sorts) from the 18th century, Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. I’d be shocked if this name rang a bell for even one reader. But, if history had run a different course, we all might have heard of her as Queen Louise, because she was once married to a man with a contesting claim to England’s throne. Things certainly didn’t shake out that way for Louise, and the story told in The Countess of Albany ends up being fascinating for an entirely different reason. What I found was a portrait of a woman who may seem to be living a life of luxury, but behind closed doors was confined to a life of tragedy by social and political circumstances entirely beyond her control.
Initially, I was drawn to this book from a vague familiarity with the author, Vernon Lee. Vernon Lee is a masculine penname for the woman Violet Paget. Lee is most remembered today as a writer of fantastic ghost stories, but I knew her as an art critic and historian. Working with her friend and lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Lee developed a radical approach to art criticism. Instead of focusing on the art objects themselves, Lee studied the bodily effects which art has on a viewer, whether that be a gasp, a dilation of the pupils, or a quickening of the pulse. Her writing prioritized the viewer’s subjective experience and psychology in a way which prefigured theories that weren’t developed until decades later. So, when I found this book in our collection, I expected something on aesthetics or art history and was initially, if I’m being honest, disappointed. But what I found was Lee applying her sensorial and psychological approach to art to a work of history, which led to a beautiful and one-of-a-kind text.
Lee studied the bodily effects which art has on a viewer, whether that be a gasp, a dilation of the pupils, or a quickening of the pulse.
The biography begins at the moment of Louise’s marriage, at age 20, to Charles Edward Stuart, 32 years her senior. Charles, known to history as “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” was the grandson of King James II, who was deposed and exiled from England in 1688. Anti-Catholic sentiment in 1745, a young Charles became a Scottish folk hero when he fought in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 to retake the throne for his family. However, when he came to marry Louise, it was decades down the line, and he was no longer the romantic hero the public remembered him to be. Charles was a tempestuous alcoholic of ill health, who refused to engage socially with anyone who did not acknowledge him as a legitimate king. The French government arranged his marriage to Louise solely out of political interest. They wished for him to have an heir, who in the future, if it suited France’s aims, could serve as a contestant to the British throne.
(As an aside, the Albany of the title isn’t in reference to Albany, NY, although in a roundabout way the two are interconnected. No matter how much Charles may have pushed for it, very few people would take the political risk of addressing Louise and Charles as King and Queen of England. Instead, in Italy they were received as the Count and Countess of Albany, since Charles’ ancestor James II, prior to being king, held the titles Duke of York and Albany. James II (prince at the time) was made the official proprietor of New York after the British conquered New Netherlands, and it follows that New York City, New York itself, and Albany were all renamed in honor of James’ titles!)
Louise was very likely not consulted on the matter of her own marriage and went into the marriage with the far-off hopes of one day becoming Queen. Upon meeting Charles in person, those hopes were soon to evaporate. Over the years of their marriage, as his alcoholism progressed, he became increasingly possessive and physically abusive, until Louise, for fear of her own safety, escaped to a nearby convent.
When this biography ended up in Clermont’s collection, I wonder if any of the Livingston women felt a resonance with their own lives, or with those of their ancestors. Many a Livingston woman has ended up, in the interest of political or economic expedience, in an unhappy marriage. The cruelty of Charles towards Louise recalls, most readily, Henry Beekman Livingston’s abusive treatment of his wife Nancy Shippen. Like Charles, Henry Beekman was known for fits of rage, and Nancy fled their home for her (and her daughter’s) safety multiple times. Even in the highest social classes, women of the past could not expect to enjoy personal security and freedom, and the capricious institution of political marriage meant that they exercised little agency in selecting the man with whom they would spend the remainder of their lives. A biography, especially one that’s over a century old, which treats the oppressive social condition of women with critical empathy, is a rarity and heartening to find.
In the next stage of her life, Louise began a romantic relationship with the Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri, a count who in a dramatic move had renounced his inheritance to pursue the arts. At first the two pursued their affair in secret. Although Louise had successfully petitioned for a decree of separation, divorce was a legal impossibility under papal rule, so it was still illegal for her to remarry until Charles’ death. However, when Charles died decades later, Louise and Vittorio still declined to marry, in part because Vittorio, a political radical, objected to marriage as an institution. Alfieri also objected to tyranny in all forms, and wrote a poem cycle praising the American Revolution, “L’America Libera.”
This was the first book for this series which I chose to read in full in preparation for writing an article . At first, this was because there was little to no secondary information written about the book, but I ended up finding myself captivated reading Lee’s writing style. Modern biography, in my opinion, often ends up sacrificing a lot of style in the pursuit of a neutral, objective tone which prioritizes merely conveying the information clearly. Vernon Lee, in contrast, does a lot to imagine the setting and the psychology of her subjects, which leads to much more beautiful and creative passages. Is this irresponsible from a historian’s perspective? It may well be. But at the end of the day, historical work is also the telling of a story, and the book’s narrative is better for these poetic moments of description.
To illustrate Lee’s style, I’ll quote her description of the turn from the 18th to 19th century, when the world post-French (and American) revolutions was in a shaky rebirth. In fact, Robert R. Livingston participated in the very same French time and culture Lee describes, so she ends up articulating a lot of what fascinates historians about Livingston’s diplomatic career.
“It was the moment of the great fermentation, when even trifling things and trifling people seemed to boil and seethe with importance; when cold-hearted people were suddenly full of tenderness and chivalry, selfish people full of generosity, prosaic people full of poetry, and mediocre people full of genius: the brief carnival-week of the old world, when men and women masqueraded in all manner of outlandish and antiquated thoughts and feelings, and enjoyed the excitement of dressing-up so much that they actually believed themselves for the moment to be what they pretended: it was the brief moment, grotesque and pathetic, when the doomed classes of society, who were fatally going to be exterminated for their long selfishness and indifference, enthusiastically caught up pick-axe and shovel and tore down the bricks of the edifice which was destined to fall and to crush them all beneath its ruins.
All these men and women, their deep in-born corruption momentarily transfigured by this enthusiasm for liberty, for equality, for sentiment, for austerity, which mingled oddly with their childish pleasure in all new things, in mesmerism, in America, in electricity, in Montgolfier balloons, with their habitual pleasure in all their big and small futile and wicked pleasures of worldliness;—all these men and women, these morituri delighted at the preparations, the scaffoldings, red clothes, black crape, torches and drums and bugles, for their own execution, all assembled at that hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne.”
Lee also is not afraid to insert her personal voice and experience into the narrative (another taboo for modern biographers). This choice brings alive the excitement and profundity of historical research. In these moments, you can sense Lee drawing on her experience as a writer of ghost stories to describe the way the past haunts the present, as when she describes discovering Louise’s love letters for the first time:
“I confess that an eerie feeling came over me as I unfolded these five closely-written, unsigned and undated little squares of yellow paper, things intended so exclusively for the mere moment of writing and reading, all that long-dead momentary passion of a long-dead man and woman quivering back into reality, filling, as an assembly of ghosts might fill a house, and drive out its living occupants, this present hour which so soon will itself have become, with all its passions and worries, a part of the past, of the indifferent, the passionless. One is frightened on suddenly being admitted to witness, unperceived, as by the opening of a long-locked door, or by some spell said over a crystal globe or a beryl-stone, such passion as this; one feels as if one would almost rather not.”
The Countess of Albany, in summary, is a true diamond-in-the-rough work of biography which I’m grateful to have discovered in Clermont’s collection. It vividly illustrates the life and times of a noblewoman who has certainly fallen out of the public memory, but who I petition should re-enter, as a fascinating woman of letters and as an eyewitness to the social oppression even the most aristocratic women underwent. As is the case for all the books I’ve covered thus far, the text is in the public domain and readily available to peruse online for anyone I’ve successfully intrigued.
The Countess of Albany – full text available online at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28268
Kenny, Dylan. “Between Me and My Real Self: On Vernon Lee,” The Paris Review (April 2018): https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/03/between-me-and-my-real-self-on-vernon-lee/
