Friday 23 October 2020

Esther Brain – a personality on display

It’s natural that, having received her red-and-gilt Birthday and Confessions Book for her 21st birthday, Ada Brain immediately turned to her family to make entries in it. It’s also not hard to imagine the amusement on offer from matching them to the precepts offered for their own birthday. Ada was enjoined to "be not weary in well-doing," to "wait to be guided," and that "blood is thicker than water."


Thus prompted, she turned to her sister Esther to be the first (after Ada herself) to make some disclosures. Maybe Ada also considered that she could reassure Alice by way of the fourth precept: "Esther," she might have said, "You can confide in me. Have I ever deceived you?"

 

And Esther, a spirited member of a spirited sisterhood, might have retorted, "Happy is he that has a hobby..." but might also, stretching Addison’s point, have conceded that her place in the book was an opportunity both to be honest and to do some good by not taking the game too seriously.


Esther, born on 6 May 1878, was sixteen when she wrote her answers, in a round schoolgirl’s hand with a few spelling mistakes and lots of slang.  Her ideal man has "Whips of go" and the ideal woman, "Tons of cheek." She loves music, natural history and dancing, and in her young life her greatest misery is toothache. As a good Methodist, she deplores "Boosing" and her choice of gum-chewing as a tolerable peculiarity ranks alongside her sister Alice’s choice (kissing). Esther’s satirical attitude to nearly everything is epitomized by her choice of "Princess  Ida" as the opera she most admires – this Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration is entirely concerned with the war between the sexes and the eponymous princess starts the show as the sort of over-earnest, top-lofty woman who would never stoop to "cheek."


The reference to "Tea-bags" for Esther’s favourite fictional hero is mystifying. Tea-bags, received history has it, are an American invention, and a twentieth-century one at that [1]. Rose-anne as a heroine of a nineteenth-century novel has also so far eluded me. Esther’s playfulness, however, is evident in her choice of Charles (Karl) Voss as her favourite composer. He was a successful German virtuoso pianist and music educator, whose works enjoyed some mid-century popularity, in particular, one supposes, because he had no qualms about converting them into media that would enable them to be played mechanically. It’s more than possible that Esther, whose preferred (and amusingly vulgar) instrument was the Jew’s harp, opted for Voss because his music was readily available by way of a pianola roll.

Esther’s confession shows her to be a clear-minded and candid girl on the brink of womanhood. She seems to want some sort of balance between the sexes, and some maturity too: neither men nor women should get married until they are ready for it [2]. But falling in love at first sight is possible "where there is tin." [3] She’s comical as well as cynical about falling in love – "Rather," she says – "only seven times," which seems unduly enthusiastic unless you admit the irony she displays throughout a catechism whose responses could easily subside into the merely conventional.

Young Esther Brain seems, in short, to have been a lot of fun.  Is it fanciful to suggest that her lighthearted answers came from the fire of green wood?

Fancy aside, we are privileged to have some evidence of her sidelong views of life by way of her older sister’s cherished record. Second sister Alice Brain’s contribution offers another, somewhat more serious, slant, a subject for later consideration. Taken together, however, all three "confessions" provide a glimpse of the interior lives of the elder Brain girls when they were blithe, and bonny, and possessed of a light touch, even for portentous questions.

References
[1] https://redrosetea.com/pages/tea-history carries a typical description of the US’s contribution to tea-drinking culture
[2] She is open about the basics of hormonal changes: facial hair growth for men, menstruation for women
[3] i.e. money

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