Archive of Our Own

MISS TREVALYN'S SCHOOL FOR YOUNG LADIES
DECEMBER 11th, 1846

Dearest Aunt Augusta,

I am writing to inform you that Kitty and I will not be home in two days time as originally planned. We have been snowed in here for several days all ready and as the weather shows no immediate signs of relenting, there seems little hope that we will be able to leave as scheduled. Rest assured that Kitty and I are doing our best to keep each other entertained and that we are no worse than growing a bit stir crazy, otherwise we are perfectly well. I am sure you would tell me that the quiet time spent indoors is good for my nerves and would hope that it would force me to be calm and occupy myself in some ladylike fashion, so consider the message duly received.

Your loving niece,
Susan

SUSAN VOIGHT'S JOURNAL
(WRITTEN IN CIPHER)

12 DEC 1846

I wonder at what point it would no longer be considered morally objectionable by society at large to throw one of these hideous pieces of furniture through the window to afford my escape? I fear that short of imminent deadly danger to my physical person, that is entirely the sort of willfull abuse of my "unnaturally active temperament" that continues to cause Miss Trevalyn to rail at me. I fear I shall cause an increase in the count of the poor woman's grey hairs, but given that the alternative seems to be pretending to be some tragic sort of milquetoast excuse for an intellectual invalid, I have no choice. Even Kitty, who is undeniably far nearer the ideal gentile young lady than I, is too much of a handful for our tutors when she is by times taken with her usual flights of fancy.

Of course the flights of fancy have just expanded ten-fold the past few days, since we've been stuck inside with no chance to even take a walk in the garden, little post, no visitors, and rather little actual work in most of our classes since the teachers who live further than mere feet away cannot manage to trudge through the snow drifts to get here to teach, and if they did they would never be able to get back to their homes in the afternoon. After tea today I was curled up perfectly peacefully in the window seat of the second story sitting room, intent on getting through some of the Hegel I had surreptitiously borrowed from James' shelf in an effort to prove his goading wrong when we see each other over the holidays. He had claimed that my spiderish tendencies, in his words, would never allow me to truly understand freedom and the nature of experience. Obviously I rose to the challenge and am determined to have read the one volume I was able to lift so many times over by the time I am forced to sit across from him at Christmas dinner that I will be able to tie his brain into dialectical knots even the greatest philosophical mariner could not undo. The metaphor is a bit awkward, but the point remains valid. In any event, there I was, tangled in a particularly thorny passage on the nature of the universal versus the particular, when Kitty comes bounding in declaring that she has the perfect way for me to beat James at his own game. Clearly, she says, if I can find a way to transcend my finitude, in the terminology of Hegel, then I would have bested James at his own philosophical and idealogical game. I greeted this with as blank a stare as could be imagined until she told me in no uncertain terms that all we need do was free our minds to transcend our normally limited plane of perception and then we could see the ultimate truth and, most importantly, have the upper hand in any further philosophical arguments with James.

I wish now I could remember how Kitty had acquired the bottle of whiskey from the cook's pantry, or any details about how I spent this afternoon other than in a hazy, muddled fashion, but I suppose that is my penance for having been driven by utter boredom and sensory deprivation to agreeing to one of Kitty's schemes. Needless to say the whiskey did not unlock any expanded sense of being or grant us the key to the infinite, despite Kitty's continued protestations that if we had merely had a bit more we could have truly come to something fascinating. Alas it did nothing but serve as an evening's distraction and now I have a beastly headache and am in bed listening to Kitty's snoring from across the room, which unfortunately is doing little for my all ready somewhat murderous mood. I have always thought of myself as a fairly patient, quiet person, but being housebound these past few days has proven enough to put me into a dreadfully bloody minded mood. I snapped rather harshly at Kitty this evening, which I know means I am in a particularly foul mood as she is nearly the only person in the world that can be assured to be able to goad me into a better humour. I had made an offhand comment about how I could hardly wait to see James' reaction to learning I had been devouring his Hegel and the silly creature latched onto it like a retriever after a fowl and would not let the subject of my concern for James' opinion drop until I was on the verge of shouting at her in a way I do not believe I ever have before.

I wish I understood what it is that has Kitty convinced my interest in James is anything other than a somewhat perverse scientific curiosity. He is nothing less than brilliant and he seems determined to drive himself to a life of utterly pointless vacillation and hedonism and it is maddening! If he were merely a man of above average handsomeness and good means, the charmingly vapid ballroom prattle he engages in with ridiculous frequency would be precisely what I would expect and more, but the fact is that he is utterly and entirely brilliant! I fancy myself to be in possession of a rather sharp and inquisitive type of intellect, but even I have difficulty following the twists and turns of the philosophy and rhetoric that run through his mind with such apparent ease, and yet he seems so frustratingly, ridiculously inclined to ignore that. There are moments when it is as if he is caught off guard and his more conscious mind relinquishes control for a moment while he puzzles something out and that is the man I fancy is actually worthy of his position and of the ridiculous swooning from every one of the unwed young women he comes across at the myriad social functions he seems always to be attending. And now I've managed to digress on an entirely unrelated tangent and make my headache worse than it was. I think this must be a sign it is time to force myself to sleep. Certainly tomorrow things will be a little clearer, or at least less fogged by the remnants of Kitty's ill-advised plan.

MELROSE HALL
14th DECEMBER 1846

Dear Miss Voight,

I have returned home from university, only to find that one of my volumes of Hegel has gone missing. You would not happen to have any idea what it might have come to, would you?

Yours ever, etc.,
James Cobham

MISS TREVALYN'S SCHOOL FOR YOUNG LADIES
15 DEC 1846

Dear James,

Your Hegel is safe. We will negotiate for its return when I myself return home for the holiday.

Happy Christmas.

Yours,
Susan