Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters from the End of the Affair

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From Emma Hart (1765–1815, later Lady Hamilton) to Charles Greville (1749–1809), with whom she had been involved for five years. This letter was written after Greville, the second son of the Earl of Warwick, wrote Hart, his mistress, to say he felt she should turn her attentions to his uncle William Hamilton, who had been courting her. Greville and Hamilton had cooked up a scheme to help Hamilton secure Hart’s affections: Greville would neglect her, and Hamilton would swoop in to take his place and would settle Greville’s many debts in return. But Hart was obsessively devoted to Greville, and badly hurt after he betrayed her. According to Colin Simpson’s biography Emma, The Life of Lady Hamilton (Bodley Head, 1983), the letter below “begins with Emma’s writing that she misses the lips that had sealed the envelope, and then suddenly she explodes . . . she had by now read the letter right through, for tucked into the final paragraph is Greville’s suggestion that the sooner she climbs into Sir William’s bed the better it will be for all concerned.” Hart married Hamilton in 1791. She is better known as the mistress of Admiral Horatio Nelson and mother of his daughter Horatia.

Naples

1st of August 1786.

I have received your letter, my dearest Greville, at last, and you dont know how happy I am at hearing from you, however I may like some parts of your letter, but I wont complain, it is enough I have paper that Greville wrote on, he as foldet up, he wet the wafer—happy wafer, how I envy thee to take the place of Emmas lips, that she would give worlds had she them, to kiss those lips, but if I go on in this whay I shall be incapable of writing. I onely wish that a wafer was my onely rival, but I submit to what God & Greville pleases. I allways knew, I have ever had a forebodeing, since I first begun to love you, that I was not destined to be happy, for there is not a King or prince on hearth [earth] that could make me happy without you; so onely consider when I offer to live with you on the hundred [pounds] a year Sir Wm. will give, what can you desire, and this from a girl that a King etc, etc, etc, is sighing for. As to what you write to me to oblidge Sir. Wm. I will not answer you for Oh if you knew what pain I feil in reading those lines whare you advise me to W . . . nothing can express my rage, I am all madness, Greville, to advise me, you that used to envy my smiles, now with cooll indifferance to advise me to go to bed to him, Sr. Wm. Oh, thats worst of all, but I will not, no I will not rage for if I was with you, I would murder you & myself boath. I will leave of[f] & try to get more strength for I am now very ill with a cold.

I wont look back to what I wrote. I onely say I have had 2 letters in 6 months nor nothing shall ever do for me but going home to you. If that is not to be, I will except [accept] of nothing, I will go to London, their [there] go in to every exess of vice, tell [till] I dye a miserable broken hearted wretch & leave my fate as a warning to young whomin [women] never to be two [too] good, for, now you have made me love you, made me good, you have abbandoned me & some violent end shall finish our connexion if it is to finish, but, Oh Greville, you cannot, you must not give me up, you have not the heart to do it, you love me I am sure & I am willing to do everything in my power that you shall require of me & what will you have more and I onely say this the last time, I will either beg or pray, do as you like.

I am sorry Lord Brook is dead and I am sinecerly [sic] sorry for Sr James & Lady Peachey, but the W——k family wont mind it much. We have been 7 weeks in doupt [doubt] wether he was dead or not for Sr. Wm. had a letter from Lord Warwick & he said Lord B. was better, so I suppose he must have had a relapse. Poor little boy, how I envy him his happiness. We have a deal of rain hear [here] & violent winds, the oldest people hear never remember such a sumer, but it is luckey for us. The Queen is very poorly with a cold caught in the Villa Reale & mine is pretty much like it. We dont dine at Passylipo today on the account of my cold. We are closely besieged by the K. in a round a bout maner, he comes every Sunday to P——po but we keep the good will of the other party mentioned abbove & never gives him any encouragement. Prince Draydrixton’s our constant freind, he allways enquiries after you, he desires his compliments to you; he speaks English, he says I am a dymond of the first watter & the finest creature on the hearth [earth], he attends me to the Bath, to the walk etc. etc. etc. I have such a head ake [headache] today with my cold I dont know what to do. I shall write next post by Sr. Wm, onely I cant lett a week go without telling you how happy I am at hearing from you. Pray write as often as you can & come as soon as you can & if you come we shall all go home to England in 2 years & go throug[h] Spain & you will like that. Pray write to me & dont write in the stile of a freind but a lover, but I wont hear a word of freind, it shall be all love & no freindship. Sr. Wm. is our freind, but we are lovers. I am glad you have sent me a Blue Hat & gloves; my hat is universaly admired through Naples. God bless you, my dear Greville prays your ever truly and affectionate

Emma Hart

P.S. Pray write for nothing will make me so angry & it is not to your interest to disoblidge me, for you dont know the power I have hear [here], onely I never will be his mistress. If you affront me, I will make him marry me. God bless you for ever.

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From French/Swiss novelist (Corinne, see p. 287), Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) to the printer and writer Chevalier François de Pange, with whom she was in love, after he wrote that he was too ill to see her. De Staël—then married for nine years to the Swedish ambassador Baron de Staël-Holstein—had known de Pange since 1786, and in 1795, in her late twenties, her friendly affection turned to passion. But de Pange, in love with another woman—his younger cousin Madame de Serilly—resisted her attempts to turn the friendship into a romance. Following the publication of de Staël’s political pamphlet Reflections on Domestic Peace in August 1795, de Staël was accused of protecting émigré aristocrats, among other things, and was forced into exile, leaving for Switzerland that October. The following January, de Pange married Serilly, who had been widowed when her husband was guillotined during the Great Terror. De Pange died of tuberculosis soon after his marriage.
Midnight, 11 September 1795

I am so upset by your letter that I don’t know how to express or how to contain a feeling which is capable of producing on you an effect so contrary to the desires of my soul. What expressions you are using! ‘Breaking off a friendship—avoiding a commitment—not knowing when you will be able to come—believing me happy where I am.’ Ah, Monsieur de Pange, has love taught you nothing except its injustice, its forgetfulness, its inconstancy? . . . You have no right to torture me. Remember what you said to me about friendship. What life there is left me depends on that friendship; for the past four months I owe everything to it and, what is worse, I need everything still. I have no intention of intruding on your independence . . . But if to need you means to disturb you, then you have a right to be afraid of me . . . You know as well as I do what is missing from my happiness here, but you cannot know as well as I know that you are perfection itself in the eyes of those who know you, that you are, to me, something even more desirable than perfection, and that I should find in your friendship all the happiness there is for me in this world, if only you removed that sword that hangs over my head.

I beg you on my knees to come here or to meet me in Paris or at Passy for just one hour . . . I refuse to give up what I have won; this friendship is to me a necessity—I do not care if it is not one for you. Give me what you can spare, and it will fill my life. . . .

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The following letter was sent from British novelist Rebecca West (1892–1983), author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) to the then-married author H. G. Wells (1866–1946), when West was only twenty-one years old. The two met after West published a scathing review of Wells’s Marriage in 1912, and became lovers in early 1913. At the time this letter was written, Wells had broken off the relationship, then only a few months old. The couple got back together soon afterward, had a son, Anthony, in 1914, and continued their volatile relationship until West, fed up with what she characterized as Wells’s “increasingly demanding behavior”, left him in 1923 and moved with Anthony to America. The original letter was unsigned and incomplete and probably a draft, according to Bonnie Kime Scott, editor of The Selected Letters of Rebecca West (Yale University Press, 2000). This letter was edited by Kime Scott and appeared in the above book; as she formatted the letter, words that appear in were words crossed out by West and words in curly brackets were words West inserted above the line.

[circa March 1913]
Dear H. G.,

During the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death. At any rate I shall be quite a different person. I refuse to be cheated out of my deathbed scene.

I don’t understand why you wanted me three months ago and don’t want me now. I wish I knew why that were so. It’s something I can’t understand, something I despise. And the worst of it is that if I despise you I rage because you stand between me and peace. Of course you’re quite right. I haven’t anything to give you. You have only a passion for excitement and for comfort. You don’t want any more excitement and I do not give people comfort. I never nurse them except when they’re very ill. I carry this to excess. On reflection I can imagine that the occasion on which my mother found me most helpful to live with was when I helped her out of a burning house.

I always knew that you would hurt me to death some day, but I hoped to choose the time and place. You’ve always been unconsciously hostile to me and I have tried to conciliate you by hacking away at my love for you, cutting it down to the little thing that was the most you wanted. I am always at a loss when I meet hostility, because I can love and I can do practically nothing else. I was the wrong sort of person for you to have to do with. You want a world of people falling over each other like puppies, people to quarrel and play with, people who rage and ache instead of people who burn. You can’t conceive a person resenting the humiliation of an emotional failure so much that they twice tried to kill themselves: that seems silly to you. I can’t conceive of a person who runs about lighting bonfires and yet nourishes a dislike of flame: that seems silly to me.

You’ve literally ruined me. I’m burned down to my foundations. I may build myself again or I may not. You say obsessions are curable. They are. But people like me swing themselves from one passion to another, and if they miss smash down somewhere where there aren’t any passions at all but only bare boards and sawdust. You have done for me utterly. You know it. That’s why you are trying to persuade yourself that I am a coarse, sprawling, boneless creature, and so it doesn’t matter. When you said, “You’ve been talking unwisely, Rebecca,” you said it with a certain brightness: you felt that you had really caught me at it. I don’t think you’re right about this. But I know you will derive immense satisfaction from thinking of me as an unbalanced young female who flopped about in your drawing-room in an unnecessary heart-attack.

That is a subtle flattery. But I hate you when you try to cheapen the things I did honestly and cleanly. You did it once before when you wrote to me of “your—much more precious than you imagine it to be—self.” That suggests that I projected a weekend at the Brighton Metropole with Horatio Bottomley. Whereas I had written to say that I loved you. You did it again on Friday when you said that what I wanted was some decent fun and that my mind had been, not exactly corrupted, but excited, by people who talked in an ugly way about things that are really beautiful. That was a vile thing to say. You once found my willingness to love you a beautiful and courageous thing. I still think it was. Your spinsterishness makes you feel that a woman desperately and hopelessly in love with a man is an indecent. . . .

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From Violet Veitch Coward (1863–1954), the mother of playwright (Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever) Noël Coward (1899–1973), to her husband Arthur, a piano salesman. The two were married in 1890 after a courtship that took place at church services and amateur theatrical productions, and the following year, she bore their first son, Russell, who died of spinal meningitis in 1898, at age six and a half. Noël, her second child, was born a year later, and his brother Eric, in 1905. According to Philip Hoare’s work, Noël Coward: A Biography (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), Violet wrote this letter in 1930 after becoming overwhelmed with anger at Arthur’s unwillingness to work, his flirtations with local women, and his alcoholism. (As Hoare notes, Coward’s 1932 musical, Words and Music, features the character of a mother who sings, “Then I married your father/Gay and handsome and frank/But it shattered me rather/When I found he drank.”) Although Violet demanded that the two reside in separate rooms, they remained together until Arthur’s death seven years later, in 1937.
[1930]
Dear Arthur,

This letter will probably come as a shock to you. I have made friends so often and it has taken me a long time to kill my affection for you, but you have at last succeeded in doing so. . . . As long as I can remember, not once have you ever stood up for me or the boys when we have been in any little trouble, you have always taken the opposite side and been against us. I remember so many times when you have failed me: and this has been the last straw. How dare you behave as you have been doing lately. I have never been so miserable in my life since I came from Ceylon, and who are you to dare to make my life so unhappy. What have you ever done for me or for either of your fine boys to help them on in life. You have never done anything to help anybody, and everything has been done for you. And yet you are so far from being ashamed of yourself that you plump yourself down on us, full of conceit, selfishness and self appreciation and spoil our lives for us. No one with any pretensions to being a gentleman could ever bully a woman as you bully my sister. It is shameful in front of those children too. She has as great a right to be here as you have. Noël chose to give her a home before he gave you one, and why are you not earning your living? You are strong and healthy and will not doubt live to be 100, a burden on Noël, not to speak of putting your wife on him too. Now I have come to a decision. I am going to add still more to poor Noël’s burden and ask him to provide you with another home. If he agrees I will find you a cottage somewhere, with a little...