1872

1872 is associated with the publication of Randolph Henry Ash’s “Ask to Embla” and, in Beatrice Nest’s journal, with her reading and assessment of Christabel LaMotte’s The Fairy Melusina. The date therefore connects the record of Ash’s poetry to a contemporary reader’s changing response to LaMotte’s work, while the novel’s account of winter storytelling in Brittany places both literary authorship and reading within a wider culture of tales passed between people.

Publication and literary chronology

Mortimer Cropper’s account of Ash’s travels identifies “Ask to Embla” as a sequence of mysterious love lyrics published in 1872. Cropper considers the poems in relation to Ash’s Icelandic travels and notes that they had certainly been written earlier, perhaps during Ash’s courtship of Ellen Best. The publication date is thus not the date of composition: the poems belong to an earlier period of Ash’s life, while 1872 marks their appearance in print.

Beatrice Nest reads LaMotte

In November 1872, Beatrice Nest’s journal records that she began reading The Fairy Melusina, which she had bought at Hatchard’s. Her first entry distinguishes the work’s lengthy, rather pedantic preamble from its account of Raimondin’s encounter with the shining lady at the Fontaine de Soif. At this early stage, Beatrice praises LaMotte’s ability to create unease, but has not yet reached the judgment that the poem’s full design will prompt.

The later entry shows a marked change in her response. Having reached the end, Beatrice calls the poem original and recognizes that its imaginative force departs from qualities commonly expected of women writers. She rejects the conventions of timid purity and restrained sentiment as measures of LaMotte’s achievement, instead picturing the poem as an elaborate tapestry populated by strange creatures and animated by shifting elements. The movement from initial hesitation to sustained admiration makes 1872 a date not only of reading but of critical reassessment.

Beatrice’s account also focuses on the poem’s scene of the husband who spies on his supernatural wife. She contrasts an expectation that such a scene should remain in the realm of suggestion with LaMotte’s more explicit imaginative treatment. Her response presents the poem as a challenge to conventional expectations of female authorship and of what a woman’s poem should depict.

The year within Brittany’s storytelling season

The journal’s November entry on storytelling places this period within the Breton season that begins at Toussaint and continues through December. During the Black Months, people gather indoors with their work to hear tales; Sabine describes her father’s nightly winter storytelling and the scholarly care with which he recounts legends. His repeated story of Merlin and Vivien is never told in exactly the same way, making recurrence a feature of oral tradition rather than a fixed verbal performance.

Sabine also distinguishes Gode’s storytelling from written transcription. Although her father has tried to record Gode’s words faithfully, Sabine observes that the telling loses something on the page. She had initially hoped to use her journal to record what she heard, but recognized that the act of writing could interfere with listening; she therefore turns to private writing as a way to understand her own experience instead. Her reflection places the year’s literary reading beside a continuing question about what changes when a spoken story becomes text.

Reading, performance, and memory

Gode’s stories depend on a particular setting and audience: listeners gather in the great hall during the dark season, and the teller’s gestures and the listeners’ shared attention shape the experience. Sabine’s written version of one tale cannot reproduce Gode’s manner of telling. She notices that her own literary phrasing has entered the account, altering its effect, and resolves to write more directly about what she saw and thought.

That reflection becomes personally consequential when Sabine records Christabel sitting beside her father during a fireside tale. LaMotte knits as the story proceeds, then sets her work aside and accepts her father’s hand; after the tale, he kisses her hair, and she clings to him. Sabine sees the group as resembling a family. This scene links storytelling with LaMotte’s presence in the household, while the journal’s attention to gesture and relationship shows how a record of literary life can also preserve observations that formal literary criticism leaves aside.