Her older brother died when she was a small girl. Never again was she able to bear the sound of a tolling bell. She went with her father to the graveyard, day after day. He threw himself on the grave, arms outstretched. At home, he held her in his arms and wept onto her sleeve, into her soft brown hair. “My daughter,” he said. His arms tightened. “If only you had been a boy.”
She tried to become a boy. She rode horseback, learned Latin. She remained a girl. She sewed. She led the Presbyterian Girls’ Club. The club baked and stitched to earn the money to put a deserving young man through seminary. When he graduated, they went as a group to see him preach his first sermon. They sat in the front. He stood up in the clothes they had made for him. “I have chosen my text for today,” he said from the pulpit. “First Timothy, chapter two, verse twelve: ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but be in silence.’”
Elizabeth rose. She walked down the long aisle of the church and out into the street. The sun was so fiery it blinded her for a moment. She stood at the top of the steps, waiting until she could see them. The door behind her opened. It opened again and again. The Presbyterian Girls’ Club had all come with her.
She had, they said, a pride like summer. She rode horseback, learned Latin and also Greek, which her father had never studied. One winter day she sat with all her ladies in the park, under an oak, under a canopy, stitching with her long, beautiful, white fingers. If the other ladies were cold, if they wished to be inside, they didn’t say so. They sat and sewed together, and one of them sang aloud and the snowflakes flew about the tent like moths. Perhaps Elizabeth was herself cold and wouldn’t admit it, or perhaps, even thin as she was, she was not cold and this would be an even greater feat. There was no way to know which was true.
Perhaps Elizabeth was merely teasing. Her fingers rose and dipped quickly over the cloth. From time to time, she joined her merry voice to the singer’s. She had a strong animal aura, a force. Her spirits were always lively. John Knox denounced her in church for her fiddling and flinging. She and her sister both, he said, were incurably addicted to joyosity.
Her half brother had never been lusty. When he died, some years after her father, long after his own mother, hail the color of fire fell in the city, thunder rolled low and continuous through the air. This was a terrible time. It was her time.
Her father opposed her marriage. It was not marriage itself he opposed; no, he had hoped for that. It was the man. A dangerous radical. An abolitionist. A man who would never earn money. A man who could then take her money. Hadn’t she sat in his court and seen this often enough with her very own eyes?
For a while she was persuaded. When she was strong enough, she rebelled. She insisted that the word obey be stricken from the ceremony. Nor would she change her name. “There is a great deal in a name,” she wrote her girlfriend. “It often signifies much and may involve a great principle. This custom is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all. I cannot acknowledge this principle as just; therefore I cannot bear the name of another.” She meant her first name by this. She meant Elizabeth.
Her family’s power and position went back to the days when Charles I sat on the English throne. Her father was astonishingly wealthy, spectacularly thrifty. He wasted no money on electricity, bathrooms, or telephones. He made small, short-lived exceptions for his youngest daughter. She bought a dress; she took a trip abroad. She was dreadfully spoiled, they said later.
But spinsters are generally thought to be entitled to compensatory trips abroad, and she had reached the age where marriage was unlikely. Once men had come to court her in the cramped parlor. They faltered under the grim gaze of her father. There is no clear evidence that she ever blamed him for this, although there is, of course, the unclear evidence.
She did not get on with her stepmother. “I do not call her mother,” she said. She herself was exactly the kind of woman her father esteemed — quiet, reserved, respectful. Lustless and listless. She got from him her wide beautiful eyes, her sky-colored eyes, her chestnut hair.
When Elizabeth was one year old, her father displayed her, quite naked, to the French ambassadors. They liked what they saw. Negotiations began to betroth her to the Duke of Angoulême, negotiations that foundered later for financial reasons.
She was planning to address the legislature. Her father read it in the paper. He called her into the library and sat with her before the fire. The blue and orange flames wrapped around the logs, whispering into smoke. “I beg you not to do this,” he said. “I beg you not to disgrace me in my old age. I’ll give you the house in Seneca Falls.”
She had been asking for the house for years. “No,” Elizabeth said.
“Then I’ll disinherit you entirely.”
“If you must.”
“Let me hear this speech.”
As he listened his eyes filled with tears. “Surely, you have had a comfortable and happy life,” he cried out. “Everything you could have wanted has been supplied. How can someone so tenderly brought up feel such things? Where did you learn such bitterness?”
“I learnt it here,” she told him. “Here, when I was a child, listening to the women who brought you their injustices.” Her own eyes, fixed on his unhappy face, spilled over. “Myself, I am happy,” she told him. “I have everything. You’ve always loved me. I know this.”
He waited a long time in silence. “You’ve made your points clear,” he said finally. “But I think I can find you even more cruel laws than those you’ve quoted.” Together they reworked the speech. On toward morning, they kissed each other and retired to their bedrooms. She delivered her words to the legislature. “You are your father’s daughter,” the senators told her afterward, gracious if unconvinced. “Today, your father would be proud.”
“Your work is a continual humiliation to me,” he said. “To me, who’s had the respect of my colleagues and my country all my life. You have seven children. Take care of them.” The next time she spoke publicly he made good on his threats and removed her from his will.
“Thank God for a girl,” her mother said when Elizabeth was born. She fell into an exhausted sleep. When she awoke she looked more closely. The baby’s arms and shoulders were thinly dusted with dark hair. She held her eyes tightly shut, and when her mother forced them open, she could find no irises. The doctor was not alarmed. The hair was hypertrichosis, he said. It would disappear. Her eyes were fine. Her father said that she was beautiful.
It took Elizabeth ten days to open her eyes on her own. At the moment she did, it was her mother who was gazing straight into them. They were already violet.
When she was three years old, they attended the silver jubilee for George V. She wore a Parisian dress of organdie. Her father tried to point out the royal ladies. “Look at the King’s horse!” Elizabeth said instead. The first movie she was ever taken to see was The Little Princess with Shirley Temple.
Her father had carried her in his arms. He dressed all in joyous yellow. He held her up for the courtiers to see. When he finally had a son, he rather lost interest. He wrote his will to clarify the order of succession. At this point, he felt no need to legitimize his daughters, although he did recognize their place in line for the throne. He left Elizabeth an annual income of three thousand pounds. And if she ever married without sanction, the will stated, she was to be removed from the line of succession, “as though the said Lady Elizabeth were then dead.”
She never married. Like Penelope, she maintained power by promising to marry first this and then that man; she turned her miserable sex to her advantage. She made an infamous number of these promises. No other woman in history has begun so many engagements and died a maid. “The Queen did fish for men’s souls and had so sweet a bait that no one could escape from her network,” they said at court. She had a strong animal aura.