Book review: The Pinecone by Jenny Uglow

By LESLEY MCOWELL
Published on 15/09/2012 03:40

Sarah Losh’s story is the story of a 19th-century independent woman with money, who couldn’t become an architect because women weren’t allowed to. She grew up in a radical Northern family, refused to marry, travelled and built an extraordinary church in the village of Wreay, just outside Carlisle.

The Pinecone by Jenny Uglow

Faber, 352pp, £20

Her story is the story of so many forgotten women – for who remembers Elizabeth Wilbraham, Jane Parminter, Elizabeth Simcoe or Anne Clifford? They were builders, all of them: self-taught architects,
designers of houses and churches.

We often refer with admiration to the auto-didacticism of the Victorian era, forgetting also that the reason so many taught themselves was because they had to, because they were excluded from official centres of learning as they were women or they followed the “wrong” religion. Sarah might have been the “wrong” gender but she was lucky in many other respects. Her father, John, and his brother James, grew up in Carlisle, sons of the wealthy Big Black Squire as he was known, a larger-than-life figure who indulged his sons’ love of travelling. After his death, both went to Cambridge, where James discovered radicalism and had the greatest influence over his niece, Sarah, all her life. In 1806, the Losh brothers made their fortune by manufacturing a new kind of alkali, British ashes. The Industrial Age, ironically, would help build a romantic Romanesque church, decorated with pinecones.

However, the Industrial Age was also a time of political upheaval – when Sarah was young, wars and revolution filled the air. James Losh might have been a friend of William Wordsworth and enjoyed his walks in the country, but “it was a dangerous time for radicals”.

Sarah was exposed to the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and grew up with “plenty of proof that one could be an independent woman and a scholar; you did not have to marry, lose your name and settle down to domestic life”. It’s possible that it was this time of political upheaval that made the defiance of society’s rules more possible for women like Sarah, if they chose – after all, it was during both world wars of the 20th century that single women found they had more freedom, and more autonomy, doing the jobs that men traditionally did, living away from home.

The lack of romance in Sarah’s life and the absence of a diary both limit our understanding of her emotional life. What we do have is evidence of a very bright, indulged little girl who grew up fascinated by processions and rituals, symbols and myths, to become an intellectual young woman, a kind of Dorothea Brooke who might only have been happy married to a Casaubon (or unhappily married, as George Eliot’s novel points out). She was particularly close to her livelier sister, Katharine, but considering that both women were wealthy, were considered beautiful and enjoyed socialising, it is surprising they never married. Uglow suggests this was through choice – “they rejected all the proposals that came their way” – but it is tempting to speculate on the choice they made. The extended Losh family was a vast one. Did they simply feel that was family enough? Did they never fall in love?

If either of them did, Uglow has not uncovered any evidence of it. After the death of their father, the sisters travelled to Europe and it was in Italy in particular that Sarah saw monasteries and works of art that would influence the design of her church later in life, and the ruins at Pompeii had a special effect on her. Back home, she began tentatively enough, concentrating on the family home she shared with her sister, adding rooms and remodelling the south front of the house. In harmony with the nostalgic fashions of the time, aided by the popularity of Walter Scott’s novels, her designs had romantic hints of the past. They also built a school for girls, and designed it, too. Their interest in history led to excavations of local sites – Sarah was particularly interested in fossils (Uglow reminds that women couldn’t become members of the Geological Society, just as they couldn’t become architects) but her enthusiasm was forced to remain on the amateur side.

After Katharine’s sudden death in 1835, Sarah turned all her energies to building, and from her grief the church at Wreay was born. She indulged her own ideas, but she was also professional, sticking to clean lines and simplicity, preferring a Romanesque design to the more popular Gothic. She worked without an architect, and she also sculpted fossil designs for the windows, from alabaster. She attended to every detail, including her beloved pinecones, a symbol of fertility. She also had a statue of her sister carved from a picture she herself had drawn.

Uglow talks of Sarah’s work as “something dark, troubled and visionary … more like Coleridge than Wordsworth”, and writes that she “found building seductive, an exercise of power, and some of her work is disturbing”. Her building suggested a belief in a supreme deity, and also in pantheism. Perhaps what is dark in her comes from the troubled, often violent times she lived through, even though she was protected from so much of it. Certainly, we cannot know what darkness existed in her psyche without access to diaries and letters. Uglow has found a fascinating, forgotten subject for her biography, whose outer work can only tantalise about what lay beneath.