"Ethel's Love-Life" and Other Writings

By Margaret J. M. Sweat

In a series of lengthy letters, the unsettled and unruly Ethel Sutherland writes to an initially unnamed and ungendered correspondent, and patiently discloses the troubled history of her past romantic attachments to both men and women. Not until the third letter does she reveal that her correspondent is Ernest, the man to whom she is engaged to be married. Wanting to make him understand how all of her past loves are included and sublimated in her love for him, she especially wants to explain how "women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men"; and although this love is curiously "freed from all the grosser elements of passion, as it exists between sexes," nevertheless it "retains its energy, its abandonment, its flush, its eagerness, its palpitation, and its rapture."

Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat (1823-1908), a native of Portland, Maine, and wife of a United States congressman, published Ethel's Love-Life in 1859. The book is sometimes credited as an early—even the first—"lesbian" American novel, but such a label, Christopher Looby observes in his Introduction, somewhat misrepresents what is distinctive and surprising about the book. Ethel's Love-Life confounds our received binary distinctions between the spiritual and the carnal and, indeed, between the sexual and the nonsexual—the boundaries between such categories being not nearly as well-policed at the time as they later became. It is here reprinted, along with Sweat's Verses (1890) and five of her published essays, on Charlotte Brontë, George Sand, the contemporary novel, and the friendships of women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297409

Book preview

ETHEL’S LOVE-LIFE

LETTER FIRST

DEAREST AND TRUEST OF FRIENDS,

You ask me to tell you something of my childhood and my home, with which, though knowing me so well, you are still unfamiliar. Though the retrospect of vanished years must cause me pain, though the past has in it an eternal regret, which sits like the skeleton at an Egyptian feast, in the midst of the present joy that fills my heart, though tears rise to my eyes as I recall my sufferings, and self-reproach utters its mournful words as I recount my errors and my ignorances,—still I will not shrink from the revelation of my whole self to you. You who know my heart with all its strength and all its weakness, all its intensity of feeling and all its impetuosity of action, should know also the history of my past influences, the external environments and inner springs which have combined to make me what I now am. I will look back steadily upon my old self, and faithfully repeat to you what the past reveals to me. Two years ago you had never seen me; we who are now all in all to each other, whose pulses beat in magnetic sympathy, had never met. Two years ago my inner self was changed, old things passed away, all things became new,—old deadness gave place to new vitality, old passions were extinguished, old loves and hatreds were outgrown and thrown aside in one fresh, vigorous, new-born impulse of my whole nature. Never since then have I disturbed their repose, but now, at the magic power of your word, I reanimate them to a galvanic existence. I will call up at your bidding, the forms of the past, which, though now but weird-like phantoms in the sunshine which surrounds me, and with its healthy glow shows them to be unsubstantial and harmless, were once the giants of my battle-field, and strode fiercely and relentlessly upon their mighty errands to my soul. Once more they shall assume their grand proportions, and play their parts before your eyes. I shall no longer fear them, for the enchanter is near me to lay them again at rest. You shall know all that I had suffered when I met you, the master of my heart—all that made me the poor and prostrate thing I was when your love and your strength raised me again to life. For this I must recall my childhood and its externalities; I must paint the portrait of the little child, that you may better comprehend the woman; and show you the bud in which so many embryo leaves lay folded and almost invisible, that you may recognise the flower when it blooms into the fulness of glowing, panting, luxuriant life. The environments of our first years color our whole future, and, whatever that future may be, we never wholly forget or leave off the tone which we then acquired. The restraint of some of our growing powers, and undue forcing of others, distort the mature, when that which first bent the child-plant is forgotten; the crushing of sweet and tender feelings in a young and impressible heart will render the most susceptible nature callous, or force it to keep silence when it would gladly speak. Too much restraint and too rigid discipline distress and injure the eager nature of the child, break the natural impulsiveness, and produce disastrous results in later life; while the absence of all direction and control, the lack of judicious suggestion and loving vigilant aid, allow the young impulses to run riot; the weeds grow as fast as the flowers, and a wilderness instead of a garden is the result. All the influences which act upon the child, possess an enormous accumulative power for good or evil in the time to come. The mould, still plastic, may receive distortion, which will be always visible in the finished