Reflections on Fashionable Friends

The love between Mary Berry and Anne Damer, the woman Berry called “my dear Soul,” lasted for nearly thirty years and was central to both their lives. That relationship and Berry’s play Fashionable Friends (originally staged 1801, published 1802), written for herself and Damer to perform, provided the inspiration for the workshop sponsored by the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, “Female Friendship, Collaboration and Creativity” (11 May 2023). I remember the conversation with Laura Engel, during my fellowship at the library in October 2019, in which the idea for that workshop first sparked, over breakfast in the Timothy Root House (adjacent to the Walpole Library). It was a privilege and a complicated joy to be part of the workshop when it finally took place in May 2023.An undated pencil drawing (held in the Walpole Library), once thought to be by Richard Cosway, shows the two women sitting together in a library. Books and reading, particularly classical Greek and Latin literature, were an important part of their relationship. As Damer’s notebooks make clear, theirs is a love that takes the ancients as its ground, an intimacy formed and sustained through a shared passion for classical reading and study. Damer claims the high ground of classical male friendship for herself and Berry, quoting extensively from De amicitia, Cicero’s great work on friendship, at the start of her first notebook, before going on to fill four notebooks with extracts from Berry’s letters to her. She creates a narrative of their relationship from 1789 to 1797 made up of Berry’s letters to her and quotations from the classical authors they loved. The entries mostly stop in 1797 (there is just one after that), when Walpole’s death and his legacies to Damer and the Berrys made the two women neighbors at Strawberry Hill, reducing the need for correspondence.Most of Damer’s correspondence was destroyed by her or at her request after her death. Nevertheless, a record of the love between her and Berry survives in her notebooks (held today by the Walpole Library) and in those letters from Damer that Berry said she could not bring herself to destroy as evidence of having been the object of such devoted affection. Two copies of a bust that Damer sculpted of Berry survive, one at the National Portrait Gallery in London and one in a private collection; neither is on display. The wax head that Damer made as a self-portrait at Berry’s request is lost, like so much else.My final object for the workshop, alongside the drawing and Damer’s notebooks, was the document I came across in the Walpole Library’s catalog in 2019, halfway through my fellowship. I had no idea it existed, and as far as I know I am the only person to have written about it apart from one man in the nineteenth century—Richard Monckton Milnes, Baron Houghton—whose comments suggest he did not understand it. It is Mary Berry’s notebook, with her monogram on the cover. The first item in it is dated August 1840 and entitled “A Dream.”The “Dream” presents a conversation between Berry and a figure who closely resembles Damer in which Berry expresses her complete happiness in being loved both by her friend and by an unnamed husband figure who is not present. She says that she has sometimes fancied recently that she “might be going to give Him a Child,” that she does not want this for herself, but that a child of hers might be “an interest to you in your latter life, and a support to Him in old Age”: “If so, it shall be welcome, provided that I may then be allowed to depart—I can in all confidence leave my Child under His, & your protection, & shall die convinced that I have exhausted every thing that can make life desirable.” Here, the dreamer wakes up to find that she is an old woman who has never possessed “either Husband, or Child, & having long survived that Friend, who my waking, as well as sleeping thoughts always recall to me, as the comfort & support of nearly thirty years of my sadly insignificant existence.”“A Dream” feels like the definition of intangible artistic legacies, recording a dream of impossible connection (leaning on and conversing with “that Friend,” who is long dead) and of an imagined but disembodied possible future. There is no sense of where this fantasy child might come from or how it is connected to the shadowy husband figure. Berry’s dream offers an extraordinary creative fantasy of queer love and of reimagining family.In Berry’s notebook, this entry is crossed through, and the word “Transcribed” is written in pencil at the top of the first page. At the workshop, Alexis Wolf pointed out that 1840 was a time when Mary Berry was thinking about her literary legacy and what she wanted to include in it. “A Dream” is something she chose to preserve, as Damer chose to preserve her narrative of their relationship in her notebooks. This sort of exchange is one of the gifts of the Lewis Walpole Library workshops, a piece of information that makes you see what you are doing in a new way.Reflecting after the event, I have been thinking about the Lewis Walpole Library itself as a space for female friendship, collaboration, and creativity. On the last day of my fellowship in 2019, the Root House was full of women talking excitedly about Anne Damer and Mary Berry: Laura Engel and Amelia Rauser, the actors Sadie Crow and Amy Dick, the art historian Cristina Martinez, the composer Nathalie Dupuis-Désormeaux, and Cindy Roman, who brought us all together. That afternoon, Nathalie took me out of the reading room to play me her piano tableau “Sitting Together in the Library,” inspired by Damer and Berry. In 2023, I sat in the same room to watch Laura’s wonderful production of Fashionable Friends, danced with the masqueraders, and took part in the postshow discussion. It was the perfect end to a glorious day: a reminder of how joyful our work can be, of how much more there is to life and work than surviving the last three years, and that sometimes you get to have it, in beautiful surroundings and excellent company

Art · Art history · Conversation · Friendship · Honor · Literature · Passion · Reading (process) · Sociology · Communication · French Literature and Criticism · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Psychology