Life in Passage

THE WYNNE DIARIES (551 pp.)--Edited by Anne Fremantle--Oxford ($2).

If some of Jane Austen's livelier heroines had kept diaries, the result might have read very much like this book. In 1789, ten-year-old Elizabeth Wynne and her nine-year-old sister Eugenia, children of wealthy English Catholics who lived mainly on the Continent, began to confide in their journals. Mercurial Eugenia was irregular about her entries, but strong-willed Betsy filled up 42 notebooks before she died in 1857. Writing in a dry, clear style which at its best recalls the talk in Pride and Prejudice, the two sisters left a lively and often delightful record of the manners of their day. As now published, The Wynne Diaries is a skillful condensation* which brings their story up to 1820, shortly after Betsy's husband died.

"The Villanous French." "We danced," was Betsy's first entry; Eugenia reported that "Mr. Buller gave me great pleasure, he kissed me tenderly," but then she modestly scratched it out. The Wynnes were near Strasbourg, dining with nobility, inspecting churches, being generally entertained. Betsy rhapsodized over "the loveliest and maddest of balls [including] mascarades, changing of sex, tumbling of women and men on to the floor."

The Wynnes soon left for Italy, where the girls spent their early teens. Betsy found The Vicar of Wakefield "very pretty, interesting, well wrote," and went to see Romeo and Juliet, "which is translated from Shakes Pear but it did not please me." Though devout, the Wynnes seem also to have been worldly. Betsy thought "the only Idea of being shut up in [a convent] would make me grow mad." Eugenia directed her fire at the nobility: "The countess Gera comes here with her great bakside ... She talks all the wile . . . like a Mackpie."

When the revolution broke out in France, Betsy and Eugenia boiled with conservative wrath. In the midst of girlish descriptions of dances enjoyed and plays seen, they composed diatribes against the Republicans and wept over the fate of Marie Antoinette. When Republican France kept winning battles in Europe, Betsy burst out: "I cannot conceive how the villanous french can always be victorious."

Naked Fashions. The "villanous french" threatened to overrun Italy, and in 1796 the Wynnes boarded a British naval vessel to be taken home. They were befriended by Captain Thomas Fremantle, a mild-tempered but talented man, and shortly thereafter Betsy's journal entries began to grow dreamy. The romance was certain and swift, one of those idyls that begin in youth and end in dealh. But, while Betsy thrilled over her "excellent man" and wondered whether "he thinks so often of his Betsy as I do of him," the captain contented himself with a laconic note in his diary: "Was married to Elizabeth Wynne . . . Dressed ship and fired 21 guns."

For a while, Betsy lived aboard ship with her husband. She calmly reported the capture of a Spanish prize "with 9000 dollars," and later, in the summer of 1797, was present at the attack on the Spanish-held Canary Islands, where Captain Fremantle was wounded and his commander, Lord Nelson, lost an arm. If her diary can be trusted, Betsy took it all with courage and calm.

Afterwards, the Fremantles settled to a quiet country life in England, and Betsy's diary became filled with the domestic trivialities of a life fully enjoyed. Betsy amassed a brood of children, worried over their manners and education, "danced 24 couples till past four o'clock in the morning," and, as a matron of 19, sniffed that "the fashion now is to be almost naked, even old women show all their necks and back." Her happiness was in her marriage: "Mr. Fremantle very loving to his wife who is uncommonly attentive to him."

Throughout her diary Betsy, in good 18th century style, called her husband by his surname. By contrast, Eugenia was a igth century romantic. The great love of her life, with an impecunious Scot, was troubled and tempestuous. "He could not bear to see me less rich than I ought to be," she wailed in her diary. "But if he has any feeling could he prefer to see me waste my life in wretchedness--?" Quarrels, tears, reconciliations followed. "How different is the Love of a Woman to that of a Man!" wrote Eugenia. Betsy looked on sympathetically, Fremantle less so. "I wish," he wrote Betsy about Eugenia's letters, "she could reason and communicate less in the stile of a Novelist." But finally the marriage took place, and everyone relaxed.

So the years went. As she grew older, Betsy became more observant, noting the good &. bad manners of the nobility, describing charitable dinners for the poof, fretting over the escapades of Eugenia and her four other sisters. One day in December 1.819 Fremantle fell dead, and the following day, for the first time in 30 years, Betsy made no entry in her diary.

* The complete diaries, in three volumes, were published between 1935 and 1940, sold the grand total of 154 copies in the .U.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.