Unusual, unafraid and unconventional
Defiance:the Life and Choices of Lady Anne Barnard Author: Stephen Taylor Publisher: Faber and Faber Review: Mark Levin
THERE exists a rather romanticised image of Lady Anne Barnard during the four years she spent in the Cape: a brilliant hostess who kept her guests charmed and amused at the parties she threw at the Castle, while off-duty she had a penchant for bathing nude in the natural pool at her cottage below Table Mountain.
As long ago as 1928, it was written that she was less well-known than she deserves. Only now, with Stephen Taylor’s book, does Lady Anne receive a full-length biography and what a fascinating woman is revealed.
The daughter of a Scottish Earl, she was born in 1750, the eldest of 11 children. Having begun fatherhood at the ripe old age of 60, Anne’s father died when she was barely 17. With austerity beckoning, her newly widowed mother sent Anne and her beautiful sister, Margaret, off to Edinburgh to seek wealthy suitors. What follows reads like the real-life inspiration behind Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which Mrs Bennet contrives to marry off her daughters.
Margaret dutifully married a rich husband (who was later bankrupted), but Anne seemed destined for spinsterhood. She certainly attracted 20 serious suitors and at least 11 proposals. She rejected them all, but then one was homosexual and two had been mentally unstable. Society’s verdict was that Anne had a great many lovers and fancied none of them good enough.
Some of these men rose to great heights in society and politics, which was to be of enormous benefit to Anne. She frequently implored them to find positions of employment for her eight brothers and, later, her nephews. One man who was devoted to her, Richard Atkinson, invested money on her behalf, enabling a financial independence unusual for a woman of her era. When he died, leaving her a legacy, she rather unwisely bought a new coach, attracting the cruel jibe that her new coach was a splendid complement to Mr Atkinson’s hearse.
When Anne does eventually marry in 1793, it is to a man who is not only 12 years younger than she is, but also her social inferior. She was 42; he was 30, in debt and unemployed. Her husband was Andrew Barnard, “a sweet, ‘Lady Anne Barnard’s Pool’ in the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town. amiable man” who genuinely loved Anne. She immediately used her contacts to find Andrew a job. He was offered a posting to the Cape, which had recently become a British Colony. It was hardly a plum position, but the wife of the new Governor, Lord Macartney, chose not to accompany her husband to such a dismal, distant colony.
Anne was made of sterner stuff and acted as the Governor’s hostess, to great effect. It was but one of her many attributes. Within weeks of her arrival, she had climbed Table Mountain and begun painting scenes of the Cape.
Although Andrew was a tireless worker, not afraid to accept responsibility, he battled to overcome the class prejudice of his age. He emerges as a man who depended rather too easily on his wife: it was she who tried to help his two illegitimate children (from an earlier liaison) and, after his death, a sixyear-old illegitimate daughter, whose mother was a slave. Anne educated and provided for the little girl, but what she thought of Andrew’s betrayal is unknown.
Her compassion in embracing the child of her husband’s infidelity was possibly her most admirable act.
Anne died in 1825, 18 years after her husband. Her diaries, letters and journals are a valuable source of information on her era, while her ballad Auld Robin Grey, was greatly admired by Wordsworth.
Unconventional she may have been, but Anne was not afraid to really live. And, in this fine biography, we can at last appreciate just how much Lady Anne did throw into life.