Beatrice Nest's unrequited admiration for Ash

Beatrice Nest’s unrequited admiration for Randolph Henry Ash grows from a distinctive claim about what poetry can make possible: a conversation between a man and a woman whose intelligence and feeling meet as equals. Ash’s poems give her an imagined intimacy she cannot find in her immediate surroundings; her subsequent work on Ellen Ash’s journal turns that longing toward a more complicated recognition of the life behind the poet and the limits of what scholarship can disclose.

The poems and the desire for conversation

As a student of Professor Bengtsson at Prince Albert College, Beatrice studied Old Norse subjects, philology, Anglo-Saxon, runes, and medieval Latin. At his recommendation she read Ash’s Ragnarök and Ask to Embla. She took a First and fell in love with Ash, an attachment presented not as an encounter with the living poet but as a response formed through reading. The poems offered her a model of intimacy in which thought and passion could coexist.

Beatrice made that response explicit in her Finals paper. She distinguished poets who address a distant lady with praise or blame from poets whose love poems represent genuine conversation between men and women. John Donne could meet that standard, though his writing could also disparage women; Meredith might have done so under happier circumstances. Ash, she argued, was pre-eminent because the Ask to Embla poems traced intimacy, opposition, and failures of communication while making the woman addressed feel like a real thinking and feeling presence. Her choice of “conversation” over the more obvious “dialogue” was the one word in the paper she felt proud of.

The attachment therefore rests on a literary ideal as much as on admiration for an author. Beatrice sensed in Ash’s poems a union of cultivated exchange and powerful feeling, a form of reciprocity she believed people wanted but could not see in her small social world. Around her were her serious Methodist parents, Professor Bengtsson’s university tea club, and fellow students anxious about invitations to dances and card games. Ash’s poetry seemed to tell her that a different kind of relation was imaginable; she did not expect to hear such things from anyone else.

From imagined intimacy to archival work

Beatrice wanted to write her doctoral dissertation on Ask to Embla, but Professor Bengtsson considered the subject uncertain and difficult to establish as a contribution to knowledge. He steered her instead toward editing Ellen Ash’s journal, which had been kept with the Ash papers deposited in the British Museum. The proposed project offered a manageable scholarly task related to Ash, and Beatrice accepted it, settling among boxes containing letters, laundry lists, receipt books, the daily journal, and shorter writings of a more private character.

She had hoped the papers might bring her closer to the author of the poems, to the fine mind and passionate nature she had encountered through his verse. Instead, the journal recorded Ash reading Dante’s sonnets aloud to his wife and Ellen praising his goodness and forbearance. Ash read to Ellen daily when they were in the same house. Beatrice tried to imagine the effect of those readings, but Ellen’s broadly enthusiastic responses did not provide the vivid, intimate access to Ash she had expected.

A changed understanding of Ellen Ash

At first Beatrice judged Ellen’s journal as rambling and dull. Extended attention to it altered that judgment. She became involved in Ellen’s days of illness and confinement, in the details of domestic life, and in concerns that might initially have seemed far from the poetry she had set out to study. Her growing investment made her defensive when James Blackadder suggested that Ellen was not a suitable partner for a man as curious about life as Ash.

The change matters because Beatrice’s original desire to reach Ash through his writing had made Ellen seem like a barrier or an inadequate guide. Reading the journal instead brought Beatrice to recognize the privacy it guarded. Ellen’s expansiveness did not mean that her private life was fully exposed; what she recorded, and what remained indirect or unstated, carried its own significance. Beatrice’s admiration thus develops into a more attentive relation to the person whose journal she edits, even though the evidence does not show her finding the reciprocal intimacy she had sought in Ash’s poems.

Significance and limits of the attachment

The narrative places Beatrice’s youthful ideal beside the institutional limits of her scholarly world. Bengtsson discouraged a dissertation on Ash’s poetry and directed her toward an edition, while making publication a condition of professional advancement. Beatrice wrote a short book about the daily lives of the wives of famous men and received an assistant lectureship. Her career consequently developed through the study of women’s domestic records, not through the dissertation on the poems that had first inspired her.

Her attachment also exposes a tension between poetic intimacy and biographical access. Ash’s verse persuaded Beatrice that a woman could be addressed as an intellectually present partner, yet the archive did not simply open Ash’s inner life to her. It brought her instead into contact with Ellen’s voice and its guarded silences. The admiration remains unrequited in the sense that the available account records no relationship between Beatrice and Ash; its consequential movement is inward and scholarly, from longing for the poet toward a more complicated understanding of the people and privacy preserved in his papers.