Louisa Stuart Costello
1799-1870
© Tamara Holloway, 2002
Louisa Stuart Costello, one
of the most accomplished and popular writers of her day, was born in Ireland
in 1799. She was primarily known as a travel writer, but she was also a novelist,
painter, biographer, and poet. After the death of her father, Colonel James
Francis, in 1814 Costello moved to Paris where she supported her mother and
younger brother Dudley by painting miniatures and working as a governess.
The Dictionary of National Biography writes
the following about Costello's early career: "Although not sixteen she
was a proficient artist, and was able to add considerably to her mother's
pension by painting miniatures that she maintained her younger brother at
Sandhurst College, and assisted him not only while he served in the army,
but subsequently till his death." She published her first volume of poetry,
Maid of Cypress Isle, in 1815, but her
first publication to gain attention was Songs
of a Stranger in 1825. She wrote picturesque descriptions of France and
histories of French and English celebrities, which were as popular as her
poems and novels.
Although she was popular as
a poet and novelist, Costello's reputation was primarily based on her travel
narratives, which display her knowledge of history, art, and literature, and
which coincided with the new English middle-class vogue for foreign travel.
Admirers of her work included Sir Walter Scott, King Louis-Philippe, and Thomas
Moore, to whom she dedicated her Specimens
of the Early Poetry of France (1835). Both Louisa and Dudley Costello
were friendly with Charles Dickens, and both published in Bentley's Miscellany and Household
Words, which Dickens edited.
Near the end of her literary
career, Costello published Memoirs of
Eminent Englishwomen (1844), which is illustrated with her own engravings
from portraits in the Duke of Devonshire's collection. During their lifetimes,
both Louisa and Dudley Costello did much to call attention to the occupation
of copying illuminated manuscripts; Costello worked at this occupation herself
in Paris and in London. Like his sister, Dudley Costello was a popular travel
writer. His publications include A Tour
through the Valley of the Meuse, with the Legends of the Walloon Country and
the Ardennes (1845) and Piedmont
and Italy, from the Alps to the Tiber, illustrated with a series of views
taken from the spot (1859-61). In addition, Dudley Costello planned a
narrative of his travels in Spain, which he did not complete due to failing
health.
Near the end of her life, Costello
became friendly with a prominent family who awarded her a liberal pension.
Described by the Dictionary of Literary
Biography as possessing a "pale pretty face and engaging conversation,"
Costello never married. Her mother died at Munich in 1846 and her brother
died in 1865. Costello was given a Civil List pension of seventy-five pounds
per year in 1852, and she retired to Boulogne where she died of cancer of
the mouth on April 24, 1870. She is buried in the cemetery of St. Martin,
Boulogne.
Songs
of a Stranger
Louisa Stuart Costello dedicated
her Songs of a Stranger to William
Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), a clergyman was figures in literary history less
for what he wrote than for his effect on other writers. Costello writes that
she dedicates the poems as "a tribute of gratitude and sincere esteem."
From her poem “Lines written in November, at Bremhill, Wilts, the Residence
of the Rev. W. L. Bowles,” it is clear that the two enjoyed a close friendship.
In 1789 Bowles published Fourteen Sonnets,
which, along with Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets five years earlier, did much to revive that important
poetic form and also influence the longer Romantic poems of meditative description
of a natural scene. In 1806 Bowles brought out and edition of Pope that derogated
Pope's merits, starting a literary controversy in which Byron eloquently supported
the virtues of the neoclassical poet. In the first chapter of his Biographia
Literaria, Coleridge testifies to the extraordinary impact on his poetic
sensibility and practice of Bowles' Sonnets
of 1789; his enthusiasm was shared by Wordsworth and Southey. Like "Frost
at Midnight" and "Tintern Abbey," Bowles' sonnets present a
determinate speaker in a particular place; his description of the natural
scene evokes a process of memory, meditation, and feeling, expressed in ordinary
language and correlative with details of the scene. In her book Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic
Tradition, 1740-1860, Ann Bermingham describes the popularity of landscapes
in English literature of the period, to which Bowles, Costello, and other
Romantic poets respond and contribute:
Precisely
in the period of accelerated enclosure (roughly 1750-1815), there fell the
dramatic aesthetic and cultural discovery of the countryside on the part of
the middle class. Throughout the period, nature, and the natural, as embodied
par excellence by the countryside, became important aesthetic and cultural
values. (10)
Bowles' influence is evident
in the poetry of Costello as well. Although Songs
of a Stranger does not include sonnets, she evokes memory, meditation,
and feeling through intricately wrought scenes. The poems "The Hunter
of Uruguay to his Love," "The Destroying Spirit," "Night,
on the Sea-shore," "His Indian Love to Diogo Alvarez," "Medjnoon
in his Solitude," "November Fifth," "Memory," "The
Indian Cupid," "The Traveller in Africa," "The Adieu,"
"Written at B—," "Sung by the Wife of a Japanese," "Lament
of an Ashantee Warrior," "Complaint of Amanieu," "The
Return of the Indians," "The Wanderers in the Polar Sea," "Chaucer's
Tale of the Falcon," "Lines written in November, at Bremhill,"
and "Colabah" all feature an impassioned speaker in a specific location.
It is interesting to note that the majority of these poems, and many of Costello’s
“Songs” as well, feature a male speaker. The tone of these poems is highly
evocative of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," and it is clear the great
influence that Bowles and the early Romantics had over Costello's poetry,
including the male subjectivity with which she writes. In life, Costello was
a governess, author and poet, but in her poetry, she transforms her voice
into that of a sea captain, warrior, saint, explorer, and king.
However, unlike Bowles and
other early Romantics, Costello often describes non-English landscapes in
her poetry. Out of eighty-two poems, thirty-five are set in non-European locations
including South America, the Arctic, Japan, Russia, and America. The influence
of travel literature, to which Costello extensively contributed, is evident
in her poems. Even though her books of poetry were widely read and admired,
Costello's most popular works were books and journal articles describing her
adventures in England and throughout the continent, especially France and
Italy. While there were many women travel writers in the nineteenth century,
Kelly Best writes in her essay "A Forgotten Woman" that "Costello
set herself apart from them by refusing to undermine her work as a major contribution
to the growing body of travel writing written by men, and offered her work
as a major contribution to the growing body of travel literature on Europe"
(1). As Elizabeth Bohls discusses in her Women
Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818, women like Costello
changed the perception of the traveler:
The
travel writer, like the aesthetic subject, was normatively male in an age
when the home was literally and symbolically woman's place. The imaginary
topographies of Western travel, its stagings of self and other, were systematically
gendered and powerfully institutionalized. Women did not fit the traveler's
image as heroic explorer, scientist, or authoritative cultural interpreter….Women
writing the language of landscape aesthetics work through their exclusion
from the political, social, and cultural privileges of the gentleman. As their
travels put distance between them and the gentleman's home turf, they seem
emboldened to experiment with aesthetics' symbolic encoding of a social world
viewed from the top down. (17-18)
Costello published her first
travel narrative, A summer amongst the
Bocages and the Vines, in 1840. The two-volume narrative begins with Costello's
steamboat trip to Normandy, and establishes her own particular style of travel
writing. In the work, as in her later ones, Costello is very concerned with
the history and literature of the land, as well as its appearance. In addition,
she includes many ballads and poems written by local residents. Costello's
subsequent successful travel narratives were A Pilgrimage to Auvergne from Picardy to Le Velay (1842) and Bearn and the Pyrenees (1843), and are
similar in tone and theme to the first. In 1845 Costello published her fourth
travel narrative, The Falls, Lakes,
and Mountains of North Wales. It is far shorter than her first narratives,
and is concerned almost exclusively with the landscape and countryside, and
includes lithographs, engravings, and maps.
Costello's
prose travel narratives deal with her travels throughout Europe, but it is
clear in her footnotes that she relied heavily on the exploration narratives
of men such as Columbus, Campbell, and Captain Lyon for some of her poems.
As well, Costello mentions several histories from which she drew information
such as Southey's History of Brazil, Sonnini's
Egypt, and Belzoni's Egypt.
Although most of the travel in Costello's poetry is imaginary, she includes
exacting details from the books she reads, giving the poems a more authentic
tone
The
title of the volume, Songs of a Stranger, points to Costello's understanding of the popularity
of song lyrics in poetry of the period. The Dictionary of National Biography describes her songs as "graceful
verses, so tunable that some of them set to music became popular." Of
the eighty-two poems in the volume, thirty are named "Song," and
many others are based on lyrical poetics. "Savoyard's Song," "When
all has faded into rest," "Swiftly o'er the green sea sailing,"
"Romance," and "Were all the vows I liv'd to cherish"
were published in Lyrical Specimens, and set to music by
J. Beale. Costello mentions in her notes to “Miranda’s Song” that it was to
be sung to a specific air. These lyrical poems show that Costello intended
her poems to be not only read, but sung as well.
Since
Costello worked as a governess as a young woman, it can be assumed that she
had some type of formal education, but the exact details of Costello's education
are unknown. However, the fact that she was educated is evident from the allusions
in her poetry. She refers directly to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tasso, Sir Walter
Scott, John Milton, and Mary Shelley. The influence of other Romantic poets
such as Thomas Gray and William Blake, and of the seventeenth-century carpe
diem poets, is evident of Songs of a Stranger. As well, many of Costello’s
poems are evocative of Wordsworth's early work, though they do not mention
him specifically. Costello's knowledge of language is also extraordinary:
in addition to English and French she was also familiar with Italian, Latin,
Middle English, and Persian. In fact, Costello sought to make English readers
familiar with foreign poets. Costello's admiration of Eastern poets is evident
both in Songs of A Stranger and
in her book The Rose Garden of Persia
(1845). The volume contains the poetry of Omar Khiam, whom Costello describes
as "the Voltaire of Persia" (66), as well as the poetry of other
Eastern poets that Costello chose to include in her volume "in hopes
that the English reader will be gratified to meet at once, without trouble,
with many of the treasures he has so long slighted" (ii). In addition
to Costello's references to canonical English poets, she also includes ancient
English history and sections from the Koran in her poetry. This type of wide-ranging
knowledge would be surprising in a man during this age; it is nearly unheard
of in a woman of the Romantic period. Costello's achievements, both professional
and intellectual, are truly admirable. Her volume of work forces us to revise
our previously held assumptions regarding poets of both sexes of the Romantic
period.
Works Consulted:
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape
and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860. 1986. 10.
Best,
Kelly. "A Forgotten Woman." 3 December 2001.
http://www2.bc.edu/~bestkb/costello.html.
Blain,
Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women
Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. London: B.T. Batsford, 1990. 240.
Bohls,
Elizabeth. Women Travel Writers and
the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818. 1995. 17-18.
Costello, Louisa Stuart. Athenauem Index, City University.
10 October 2001 .
http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/…orfiles/COSTELLO,
LouisaStuart.html.
Greer,
Germaine and Elaine Showalter, eds. Cambridge
Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge UP, 1999. 154.
Histories. U of Alberta. 3 December
2001 http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/travel/history.htm.
Leslie,
Sir Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds. Dictionary
of National Biography. London: Oxford UP, 1917. 1202.
National
Library of Canada. 10 October 2001.
http://www.amicus.nlc-bnc.ca/wbin/…Costello,+Louisa+Stuart,+1799-1870.html
Talking to Charles Dickens. Learnfree.co.uk. 3 December
2001.
http://www.talkingto.co.uk/ttcd/ht…cd_print.asp?quesID=807&AuthorID=5.html.
Todd,
Janet, ed. A Dictionary of British and
American Writers: 1660-1800. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1984.
Ward,
William S. Literary Reviews in British
Periodicals 1798-1820: A Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1972.
Acknowledgments:
The base text for this
edition was prepared from a microfiche of an original copy in the "Edition
Corvey" under a special agreement with Belser Wissenschaftlicher Dienst,
Wildberg, Germany, and Boyle, Co. Roscommon, Ireland. This text has been used
for the present edition with the kind permission of Belser Wissenschaftlicher
Dienst.