In her book on Joseph Severn, Against Oblivion, Sheila Birkenhead writes that Ann Mary Severn Newton told her sister Claudia:
[. . .] that she would start awake in the night, not refreshed by sleep, but with a sensation that she had been drawing, drawing all the night. Her brain would not rest, and she worked all the harder to keep the miserable thought from her that she might never have a child. (Birkenhead, 1944: 223).
In her overview of Mary’s married years, Birkenhead jumps from Mary looking pale after her voyage to Rhodes in 1863 to shortly before her death in 1865. In my account of Mary for Life-Writing in the History of Archaeology (2023), I illustrate how this story of childlessness, as well as the stress of her marriage, was repeated in both Sally Festing’s biography of Gertrude Jekyll and Deborah Cherry's Painting Women. In the notes for a piece called ‘A Forgotten Artist’, by her niece Claudia Elizabeth Gale, Mary’s letter about the ‘sensation of painting and working all the time’ was apparently referenced as being written when she was staying at the Liddells in Oxford. Yet, in the notes that I have read (I have not yet tracked down the published version), the letter is referenced as being written to her husband Charles Thomas Newton – not her sister Claudia:
It is evident, from a letter written to her husband from Oxford, where she was staying at the Deanery at Christchurch to paint a portrait of Mrs. Liddell, that the strain of her life was beginning to tell upon her. She speaks of being unable to sleep, and says that if she does sleep it is no rest, as she has a sensation of painting and working all the time. (Gale, 1912/13?)
There is no reference in the notes for Gale’s article to childlessness, though, given that the article was probably published in the 1910s or 1920s, it may be considered too indelicate to refer to.
Given Birkenhead repeatedly refers to infertility as causing Mary distress there probably are traces somewhere. Severn’s much more recent biographer Sue Brown writes that ‘there is a hint in a letter from her mother in 1862 that Mary may have had a miscarriage: “I should be nearer to you all and you particularly at present” (Elizabeth Severn to Mary Newton, 25 March 1862, Charlton MS). I have not read that letter or any others with such hints . . .yet. In two letters before her marriage, Mary refers to retiring to bed with a blue pill – possibly a mercury pill usually used for syphilis or as a strong pain killer in childbirth or even for period pain. This may indicate fertility problems, or it may not. As someone who suffered from horrendous pain caused by endometriosis for decades, which affected my own fertility, it is tempting to make a retrospective diagnosis but there is not enough evidence.
The illustrations that I have seen of her married life point to a different source of anxiety. Her own
sketches show her cast down by housekeeping and unable to make the accounts balance. (She has my sympathy: cross checking what I think has been spent against what has been spent is my least favourite task at work.) Overseeing management of a house, which for a middle-class woman meant managing servants and a household budget as well as organising dinners took a toll. It was a contrast to her life before where – according to her letters – Mary often went without lunch due to her commissions or toasted bread on an open fire with her father. When the family all lived together, from 1857 to 1861 for example, she and her mother shared the housekeeping. A sketch she made forewarned her future husband of the dangers of marrying an artist.
The only long-term health problems, that I have read, refer to anxiety and ‘excitement’ making her ill – a nervous anxiety that led to pains in her right arm and hand, listlessness and feeling utterly cast down. She refers to this anxiety in letters between 1855 and 1857, when she is supporting her parents and younger siblings with commissions and anxious about making enough ‘tin’. On Easter Sunday 1855(?), she writes to her mother that she has been able to do very little work and ‘I dare say I was relying too much upon myself’. In another letter from 10 January 1856, Mary writes:
[. . .] when I am anxious & have no 'coms', I feel as if I was in some kind of unsettled state and did not know what to do next & I fritter away my precious time between one thing & another.
In Eton a year later, Mary repeatedly reassures her mother and older brother Walter that she is not exciting herself, though she clearly had a moment of anxiety when painting the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother at Windsor, as she writes to Walter:
But now I really am quite well; it must have only been my great anxiety which rather upset me, but still I was better and less anxious than I often am at home.
This commission in October 1857 is what led to her big break of painting the younger royal children. Burnout and nervous exhaustion are not new and were recognised as a symptom of 'modern' life in the nineteenth century. A recent study has argued that there was sympathy for nervous breakdowns and that people were sent off to rest. Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, quotes Matthew Arnold as writing in his poem Scholar Gipsy in 1853 about “repeated shocks, again, again” were seen to deplete physical and mental health, “exhaust the energy of strongest souls and numb the elastic powers.”
I have written about how I over identified with Mary’s supposed childlessness and needed to stop researching her due to a sense of having a parallel existence with her as I went through years of failed fertility treatment. And so, transcribing these letters when I had been diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression almost made me feel haunted again. I was in no state to reflect on this as I dealt with the physical consequences of taking anti-depressants for the first time and sleeping roughly 12-15 hours a day to deal with my burnout. Lifelessly transcribing letters for an hour or two at a time was all I was capable of. Deadened by drugs, at least I no longer had the desire to simply disappear, feeling that I only made people and things around me worse. When I was at my most anxious and before I was diagnosed, I filmed an Only Connect Special – a very difficult quiz show – and my team The Antiquarians won. Yet, I felt chronically stupid.
Unlike all these years ago, a fear of self-identifying with my subject will not make me stop my work on Ann Mary Severn Newton. Apart from anything else, so many people then and now have anxiety and depression. Just as I found when I was open about my infertility and then infant bereavement, so many had been through similar trauma. Instead, I use this self-knowledge to help me reflect, step back, and empathise with a woman from the past in a very different situation but who also had anxiety. A month after Mary is most worried, she reflects:
Really at times I felt so knocked down by all the little worries, that I just sat in a chair doing nothing & felt as if nothing in the world could make me laugh or smile. . . . Today I was so bothered and felt so down, that I thought I must go away & have a change; so I made Papa go to the British Museum & I made some sketches from the Elgin Marbles.
And I understand that need for escape. I stretch back in my mind to feel the sun on me in Athens last spring, or remember the touch of my children’s fingers, or putting my cold hands on their warm bellies as they wriggle with laughter. Those are the sketches in my head that make me feel alive again.
References
Birkenhead, Sheila, Against Oblivion. The Life of Joseph Severn (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944).
Bonea, Amelia, et al. Anxious Times : Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
Challis, Debbie, ‘The ghosts of Mary Ann Severn Newton: Grief, an imagined life and (auto)biography’, Clare Lewis & Gabriel Moshenska (eds.), Life-writing in the History of Archaeology. Critical perspectives (London: UCL Press, 2023).
Cherry, Deborah, Painting Women: Victorian women artists (London: Routledge, 1993).
Festing, Sally, Gertrude Jekyll (London: Penguin, 1991).
Gale, Claudia E. (unpublished notes), A Forgotten Artist (1912/13?)