One of literary history’s most enduring mysteries, Esther Johnson was Jonathan Swift’s friend, secretary, confidante, and muse. She was the Stella of his poems—and possibly his wife. From scant facts and the few writings credited to Esther Johnson, Trudy J. Morgan-Cole creates a brilliantly realized, Brontë-esque portrait of a remarkable woman and her lifelong relationship with one of the giants of Western literature.
Unlike most women of the early eighteenth century, Esther led a life governed by choice. She had been born into the servant class, but unexpected fortune led her into an uneasy, sometimes treacherous independence. She could choose how to live and with whom to socialize—and whether and whom to marry. One of the few constants in her life was Jonathan Swift, whom she’d met when she was only eight years old. Morgan-Cole mines deeply that relationship to explore the nature and boundaries of love—platonic, romantic, and sexual.
Beautifully written and meticulously researched, The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson offers a fascinating and emotionally rich portrait of an unforgettable woman.
Moor Park, Surrey, England
December 28, 1694
I sett my pen to paper to write this Journal, which I intend to keep for the Improvement of my Mind. It is my intention to continue the Education which my good Tutor began in me, and yet I do fear that without his discerning Tutelage and his kindly Hand to guide Mee, I shall become shallow, and vain, and frivolous, which faults in Woman he ever condemned, and strove to train my Mind in such a way that I might grow to be studious, grave, and sober, not as other young women are, and such Virtues I do heartily wish to cultivate in myself. But alas! without his gentle guidance who so long has been my Help, how shall I have any hope of success? This Journal is the record of my struggle, and I keep it, to show no other ey’s but his, should he return here to us, which I think not likely, but if he do, he shall see how I have endeavoured to please him and to follow his Instruction, while he is himself absent.
I see I have begunne this my Journal in most haphazard fashion, so that Mr Swift would chide me for it were he here. I should properly introduce myself as Esther Johnson, thirteen years of Age, living at Moor Park in Surrey. Moor Park is the home of Sir William Temple, a very great Man; my mother is his housekeeper. So you see I am no great lady, with little enough to boast of, save for the kindness of my Benefactors.
We are in the midst of the twelve merry days of Christmas, yet this day’s merriment has been something clouded by the news Lord and Lady Onslow brought when they came tonight, that the Queen is ill. These tidings sore distress’d Lady Temple, who is the Queen’s great Friend. I ought to saie that Lady Temple is Sir William’s wife, our mistress here, though in truth it seems more Lady Giffard who is mistress. She is Sir William’s sister, a very grand lady, and very learned. I should aspire to be like her in Learning, though not in Temper, I think. Lady Temple is far Sweeter, but she is often gone, being in London with Queen Mary. Only now the Queen is ill, and Lady Temple, I think, is not in good Health herselfe, and is worried for her friend the Queen.
But tonight we were merry indeed, in spite of the sad news. After a dinner of goose and chicken and meat pasties and roast pork finished with jellies, almonds and raisins, came mummers from the village and everyone, family, servants and all, met in the Great Hall to watch them play. And there was dancing, and Sir William and Lady Temple did lead the dance, and she look’d well, and all danced and sang and had good Cheer.
I had meant to write more about what happened today, before the dinner and the mummers, I mean. About Mrs Dingley in the brew house, and Jamie and the cottage, but I am tired; my eyes ache. I will write more tomorrow, but not so long or so Tedious.
Esther Johnson
Dublin, Ireland
1723
Esther is reading through her journal. The old bound book, the first of several on the table before her, was a gift that year, her thirteenth Christmas. A gift from whom? Sir William, no doubt—who else could have, would have, given her an empty book? But its pages do not reach back as far as she wants to go tonight, back to her childhood, to the beginning of her life at Moor Park.
She opens the book on the desk, viewing the creased paper in the light of two tall wax candles, a surer and steadier glow than the sputtering rush lights she had used when she wrote those early entries. She remembers candle making at Moor Park: beeswax candles for the Great Hall, tallow for the kitchen, the workrooms, and the family bedrooms, and finally dipping rushes into the mutton fat to make the cheap candles considered good enough to light children and servants to bed—good enough for her, little Hetty, both servant and child.
Lady and mistress herself now, though not of a grand house like Moor Park, she sometime indulges in wax candles when she writes at night. She justifies the expense with the excuse of her eyes, though in fact she should not be writing after dark at all. Perhaps she should not even be writing. The headaches and blurred vision grow worse and worse. But that thought—a life without the written word—is too bleak to dwell on.
On the table before her is the untidy evidence of thirty years’ scribbling: journal entries, letters, poems going back to that distant childhood world of Moor Park. How little she had written down in the journal at first—how cautious she had been! She had been thinking, perhaps, of Jonathan Swift returning someday, of showing him her journal, the life record of an educated young woman. She would have written down nothing she would not have wanted him to see.
She is not so careful anymore. She does not imagine showing her journal to anyone, least of all Jonathan Swift, while she lives. And when she dies? What matter, then, if anyone reads it? But no, perhaps she will burn it. If she were a famous man, it might be read, copied, published. But she is a woman, and no one need ever know what she thought.
On the desk beside her journals, set apart a little from them, is a letter in another hand, a letter she received only a few hours ago. One from a woman who never learned caution, who never rationed her words for fear of the eyes that might read them. That letter sent her on this mad midnight hunt through her own past, looking for some key, something to explain how things had turned out as they had.
She feels nothing but contempt for the letter’s author, a woman utterly at the mercy of her own violent passions. Esther is a reasonable woman. She believes that reason has governed her life, all her loves, all her choices. But if that is so, why is she awake in the hours between midnight and dawn, driven to a distracted search through her own written past, all because of a few words on a page?
Perhaps, she thinks, she was not always this person, this calm and reasoned woman. She is peering back, trying to remember herself. The thought that she cannot recall who she is fills her with terror. Whom has she allowed herself to become, to be molded into?
She leafs ahead through the journal pages until a line leaps out: I satt this Night besyde the body of Lady Temple, who pass’d to her Rest about Sunsett, and in that Room where her Corpse lay I did a deede I knowe I ought nott to have Done, yett I cannot find it in myself to Regret. How strange that picking up a bundle of old Papers should open the Doore to another World, another Life …
Here, for the first time, the young writer had let her caution slip, had allowed a hint of her tangled emotions onto the page. That night, perhaps for the first time, she had written without the imagined eyes of Jonathan Swift staring over her shoulder. Indeed, the night Lady Temple died she had hardly thought of him at all.
Moor Park
1694–1695
Queen Mary died the same night the mummers came to Moor Park, though days passed before the Temple household learned the news. Lady Temple took to her bed at once, her already fragile constitution crushed by her friend’s death. Esther, poised on the edge of her fourteenth birthday, was from Christmas onward a member of a household that seemed to wait with held breath by its lady’s bedside. Lady Temple had never been the true mistress of Moor Park—that had ever been Lady Giffard’s role, while Lady Temple, so often away at Court, had been loved by all the household—perhaps loved the more because she kept her distance. Esther took her turn along with her mother, Bridget, and Mrs. Dingley and Jane Swift to bring tea and broth and various ill-tasting drenches to the invalid. Her room was darkened: she lay, a small figure in a large bed, dwarfed by the draperies around and above her. Esther knew from the Sir Peter Lely portrait of her in the Long Gallery that Lady Temple had been beautiful when she was young, but years ago she had survived the smallpox and her skin now was pockmarked as well as wrinkled. She lay with her iron-grey hair combed out and spread all across the pillow, a startling sight to Esther who had never seen the mistress without her hair carefully powdered and piled behind a stiff frontage. When Esther tiptoed to her bedside, Lady Temple’s eyelids fluttered, then lifted to reveal dark eyes, huge in her gaunt face.
“She’ll not live out the month, the physician assures me of that,” Lady Giffard was saying to Mrs. Dingley when Esther went back down to the housekeeper’s room. “I feel as if I am caring for two invalids, not one, for Papa is prostrate with grief.” Lady Giffard always called her brother Papa. “He loves her to distraction—always has. Ah, Hetty, did she drink the tea? Good, very good. The doctor says it will ease her pain and help her to sleep. Now, run to the kitchen with this list and give it to your mother or Mrs. Mose—it is for tomorrow’s dinner, though I hardly think there will be dinner in the hall. Papa will want to continue taking his meals in his rooms, no doubt, and I will have mine brought to Lady Temple’s chamber.”
It was like that for a month—the house busy with the doctors coming and going, special meals and draughts and physicks being prepared, special food to be sent in, and even, at the beginning of February, a trip by Esther and her mother to the clothier’s in Farnham to purchase several bolts of black stuff.
“Isn’t it dreadful?” Esther asked her mother as they rode back from Farnham past rolling fields that were already showing green again, under bare branches that soon would unfurl into bud. “How would Lady Temple feel if she knew we were buying cloth for mourning clothes?”
Bridget Johnson, her hands on the reins and her eyes on the road, clicked her tongue. “Lady Temple knows nothing of it, nor ever will. It’s Lady Giffard who rules the roost, and she’s nothing if not practical.”
And then, when Death came, it was almost unnoticed. Esther did not know what she had been expecting—a great bell to toll? a darkness to fall across the house?—but when Mrs. Dingley came into the housekeeper’s room during supper and said, “Lady Temple died at five o’clock,” she felt curiously let down and was at once ashamed of that feeling. She could not help thinking that this death, so long expected, was in some ways like the long-ago death of her father—the loss of someone who had never really been there.
“Sit down, Dingley, you look wretched,” said Esther’s mother, pulling back a chair at the table. Mr. and Mrs. Mose and Thomas Swift were eating with them; Jane Swift was at the cottage eating with her sister-in-law, Lucy, who was in the last days of her confinement. Dingley sank gratefully into the chair.
“This last three days, I doubt I’ve slept above an hour together,” she said, downing the glass of small beer Mr. Mose poured for her. “Lady Giffard and I have taken it in turns to sit up with her, and there’s always something wants doing. And Sir William—poor man—he came down today, and sat there for hours, just holding her hand and staring at her. But he left at four, and she lived another hour past that. Lady Giffard was with her at the last. Her ladyship’s gone now to lie down for an hour—I told her she must, but there’s so much to be done …”
“And well I know it,” said Esther’s mother, pushing back her chair. “I must send Nell down to the village for the seamstresses, and we’ll to work tonight on the mourning clothes, for I’m sure her ladyship will want everyone in mourning by tomorrow.”
“Has she been laid out yet? Has the carpenter got her coffin finished?” asked Mr. Mose, rising from the table. “Come, Parson, we men must see what arrangements are being made about the funeral. Will Sir William be able to talk to us at all, do you think?”
And he and Thomas Swift were gone too, and Mrs. Mose stood up and started to clear the table, saying, “Mrs. Dingley, do you know anything at all of the funeral dinner? When it’s to be, or what Lady Giffard will want, or how many? I’ll send down to the farm tonight for some hogs and order them to slaughter a cow, just to be sure …”
Esther, too, was clearing away the supper dishes as the others went about their work. Only Rebecca Dingley was left sitting, looking as if she had no strength to stand. Her dull brown wispy hair was all escaping in loose strands from the pins under her cap, and her usually pleasant round face wore a vacant expression. Her eyelids drooped. Esther felt a sudden rush of tenderness for poor Dingley.
“Becca, you must take your own advice. You need a rest as much as Lady Giffard does, I’m sure. Why don’t you go lie down?”
Dingley’s eyes opened. “As if I could! Don’t you know, Hetty, someone’s got to sit up with the corpse? Sir William is in there with her now—he wanted to be left alone with the body—but he’ll need to go rest in a few moments and someone will have to sit up the night with her. Lady Giffard is worn out and everyone else is so busy—I don’t see who it can be if not me.”
“I will do it,” said Esther quickly, before she could form too clear a picture in her head of dead Lady Temple in her dark room. “I haven’t anything special to do; I’ll sit by her.”
“What? A child like you? It’s not to be thought of.”
“I’m not a child, Becca, I’m fourteen years old. It won’t fright me to sit beside poor Lady Temple’s body. Get you to bed.”
Dingley took very little persuading. So it was Esther, not she, who went up an hour later to Lady Temple’s bedchamber and tapped lightly on the door. Sir William’s voice sounded as though he were at the bottom of a well rather than behind an oak door. “Come in.”
The room was no longer as dark as it had been. Someone—Dingley, perhaps?—had lit wax candles all around, in the sconces on the walls, on the table beside the bed, and on the dressing table across the room. Lady Temple, in the middle of the bed, looked just as she had looked for days, though the candles gave her ashen face a lovely glow and made her look, Esther thought, a bit like a picture of some very old lady saint. Lady Giffard and Dingley must have already done the laying-out, for the great eyes were closed, the grey hair combed, and the thin hands folded above the coverlet. Sir William sat beside her; his waistcoat was unbuttoned, his white hair askew: He had been sitting with his head in his hands, and at his feet was a bundle of papers tied with ribbon.
“I’ve come, sir, to sit by the … by her ladyship, sir, so you … I don’t mean to disturb. If you wish to be alone with her, I’ll wait—”
“No, no—come in. I cannot stay …” He looked about, as if he were not sure he remembered where he was. “Sit down, Mrs. Johnson, thank you, I’m most grateful.” He gestured to a chair on the other side of the bed. Esther sat down, uneasy. He did not recognize her—thought she was her mother, whom she scarcely resembled. Was he so disordered in his grief that he was going to stop knowing who people were, like madmen and very old people? He rose slowly and bent to pick up the papers that had lain at his feet, then reached out for her unsteadily, grasped her shoulder. He might have been only steadying himself, but there was an intimacy in the gesture quite unlike the many times he had patted her hair and embraced her as a little girl. He was about to say something. His eyes fixed on hers, blurred, focused—she found herself afraid of what he might say—and then something changed in his face, and he said, “I am sorry—Miss Hetty, it’s you, is it not?” He paused a moment; she could hear his breath. Then he said, “This is a sober duty for one so young.”
“This is a sober time, sir,” she said, rather pleased with having found such a good answer so quickly.
He nodded and looked down at the papers in his hand. “I was reading these—her letters. She wrote them to me when she was young—before we married. You never knew her when she was … young, and so full of life, before we lost our babies, and … I wish you children could have known her as she was then.” He stood up, clutching the little bundle of papers, and started for the door, stopped to button his waistcoat, fumbled after the first two buttons, and started out again, nodding and groping ahead of him like a blind man.
He left the papers on the dressing table, Esther realized a moment later; probably he had laid them down when he tried to button his coat. They sat there in an untidy pile, and although she thought at first of gathering them up and running after Sir William, she did not. He wished Esther had known Lady Temple when she was younger. And there was Lady Temple, her younger self, in that pile of papers. It was a great temptation to go over and pick them up. But she would not, of course. Even if it were not a betrayal of trust, it would be too eerie to sit beside a dead woman, reading letters she had written in her youth—like trying to conjure her spirit, and Esther did not want to wake any uneasy shades.
She was already regretting the ease with which she had made her offer to Dingley. It was well enough, down in the housekeeper’s room among company, to talk of sitting by a dead woman all through the night. It was quite different to be here, with all the candles, and Sir William acting so strangely, and Lady Temple lying on the bed but no sound of shallow, raspy breathing to fill the room any longer. Esther was not so very pious, but piety was meant for moments like this: she picked up Lady Temple’s prayer book from the table and read some prayers aloud, and sat for a while with her fingers running over the pink roses embroidered on the cover of the book, trying hard to feel that God was there, come to take Lady Temple to heaven.
Strange that it should be so hard to imagine God at a time when it was so easy to imagine every other kind of shade and spirit. The walls of Lady Temple’s bedchamber were hung with vast tapestries, their colours vivid in daylight but barely visible now. Unlike the ones downstairs in the public rooms, these tapestries had not been bought but had all been stitched by Lady Temple and Lady Giffard themselves: they depicted hunting scenes that seemed cheerful and pastoral when viewed in daytime. Now it was too easy to imagine when a breeze stirred the tapestry that one of the shadow picture trees was moving in its own phantom breeze, to see a dark embroidered figure move out from the blackness between those trees, to hear the far-off trill of the hunting horns. As a child, first come to Moor Park, Esther had looked at the splendid paintings and sculptures and tapestries and dreamed they might come to life, talking and moving about on their own. The idea suddenly seemed possible again, but no longer pleasant. She was sure she heard the baying of the hounds.
She looked away, but figures were worked everywhere: in the wall hangings, the bed hangings, the carpets. A looking glass hung over the dressing table and reflected back another roomful of candles and shadows; Esther moved across the room to close it and was sorry she had. The doors covering the glass were covered in the raised work that had been popular when Lady Temple was a girl, so that the little figures lifted off their silk background and seemed almost alive. Esther stood unable to move, her fingers tracing the tiny heads and bodies: the embroidery told the tale of Jephthah’s daughter in Scriptures. There she was, her embroidered hair streaming behind her, racing with joy toward the father who had vowed to sacrifice her in the flames—
No more of this—this would make her run mad. How many hours could she stay here looking at everything but the corpse, imagining the very pictures on the walls were moving about? And the prayer book made things better, not worse … Ashes to ashes, dust to dust … In the midst of life, we are in death … She needed a diversion, and Sir William would never know if she read the letters. Perhaps, she tried unsuccessfully to convince herself, perhaps he had left them here with that very thought in mind. She knew he had had no thought in his mind at all—he was distracted and had forgotten; and he certainly would not want his housekeeper’s daughter prying into his old love letters. But the letters were here, and they were the only things in the room that did not seem haunted.
She turned away from the dressing table and then back to it, making the candles flicker with her passing, and she picked up the letters. Sir William and Lady Temple, she knew, had had a famous romance—they had courted for nearly seven years before both families had agreed to the match. The letters, tied around with faded ribbon, looked very old—as indeed they were. Forty years ago, Esther thought, and untied the bundle. She picked up the first one to read.
