Reviews of Books

A Copybook Romance

Reviewed by Karen Lystra, California State University, Fullerton

The "throbbing heart" (p. ix) of this book, as Ramsay MacMullen describes it, is the sixty-seven letters copied into a blank notebook, presumably by Carrington Beach, the spurned fiancé of Sarah Woolsey. The first letter in the notebook collection, dated September 20, 1828, is Sarah's report to her twenty-nine-year-old suitor on the results of a conversation with her parents. Sarah told her father, William W. Woolsey, a prominent member of the New York merchant class, how much she liked Carrington and asked if he "might at least have a trial" (p. 20). Her avowal of romantic feelings was met by "a decided negative" (p. 21).	1
The last letter in the copybook, dated April 18, 1832, is Carrington's denunciation of Sarah's father for his disdainful treatment, public insults, and complete insensitivity to the suffering he had caused by his unyielding disdain. "One word of real kindness on your part," Carrington wrote in an ending worthy of a novelist, "would have effected your object and spared your daughter and myself years of unhappiness. You would not speak it, because I had dared to be independent" (p. 125).	2
Nineteenth-century romantic courtship was inherently dramatic, consisting of private rituals in which emotional scenes that enacted doubt, frustration, and fear, followed by demonstrations of reassurance and praise, were staged on a regular basis. So the drama of the Beach-Woolsey courtship was not unusual. Instead, it stands out for its unique character as a story with an almost perfect narrative arch. Act one: father rejects relationship of daughter to suitor; act two: suitor metaphorically spits in the eye of father. Seldom does life offer the satisfactions of art, and in this case, art had a hand in shaping life.	3
The original letters in this failed courtship do not survive, which presents some problems of historical interpretation. When the curtain rises, Carrington and twenty-three-year-old Sarah are at least one year into their relationship; as MacMullen notes, the "beginning [of the correspondence comes] out of the blue" (p. 20). In all likelihood, earlier letters in the courtship had been excised. When letters are copied and the originals destroyed, there is a deliberate hand at work. Clearly Carrington has the last word because he (or the copyist) arranged it that way. Doubtless, other acts of suppression occurred along the way. Sarah's letters contain hardly a reference to sex, not even an indirect circumlocution or veiled hint, over the course of a four-year courtship. However constrained their interaction, this dearth in nineteenth-century romantic letters is highly suspect.	. . .