19. Eloise and Abelard

Chosen by:
Professor Constant Mews,
School of Historical Studies, Faculty of Arts

Eloisa to Abelard / by Mr Pope. (London : Printed for Bernard Lintot at the Cross-Keys between the Temple Gates in Fleet Street, 1720)

Letters of Abelard and Heloise To which is prefixed a particular account of their lives, amours, and misfortunes: Extracted chiefly from Monsieur Bayle by John Hughes Esq, to which are added the Poem of Eloisa to Abelard by Mr Pope and Abelard to Eloise by Mrs Madan. (London: B. Law, T. Lowndes, T. Longman, T. Caslon, R. Baldwin and E. Johnston, 1776)

Eloisa in deshabille. A satirical poem / by the late Professor Porson to which are added The Modern Fine Gentleman, Modern Fine Lady, Curtain Lectures and the Squire and the Parson (London: J. J. Stockdale 1819)

In 1717, Alexander Pope was so taken with reading an English translation of the letters of Abelard and Heloise that he was inspired to create his own version, Eloisa to Abelard. Although the original Latin text had been published in Paris in 1616, it was only after the publication of a highly imaginative French translation of the correspondence in 1693 that these letters began to attract wide public attention.

John Hughes (c. 1678-1720) was not a great poet, but his translation of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, preceded by a summary of their lives by Pierre Bayle (first published in 1713), was of enormous popularity throughout the eighteenth century. While Abelard attracted interest as an intellectual at odds with the ecclesiastical establishment, Heloise was seen as the paragon of an articulate and outspoken woman, who did not hesitate to express both her love for Abelard and her frustration with his emotional distance from her. Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard expressed Heloise’s emotional rhetoric with great intensity, deeply shaped by the language of Ovid’s Heroides, with which Pope was also intimately familiar.

Pope’s poem was itself widely emulated. Besides a 2nd edition of Eloisa to Abelard, published in 1720, the Monash library also owns a 1776 edition of the Hughes translation of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, to which was added Pope’s poem, as well as a response by “Mrs Madan” (née Judith Cowper, 1702-1781), a great admirer of Pope, who helped develop her literary career. Monash also owns a 1788 edition of The Letters that includes even more literary responses to Eloisa to Abelard.

Eloisa in deshabille (“Eloisa in undress) is a satirical imitation of Pope’s masterpiece by Richard Porson (1759-1808), a brilliant, though maverick scholar of ancient Greek, who had a long history of falling out with the ecclesiastical establishment, and delighted in pointed wit. The openly eroticized image of Heloise, facing the title page, contrasts with the more sober image in the editions of 1720 and 1776. Porson’s poem, ‘inscribed to the beautiful Mrs C. who never was a Nun,’ does not hesitate to speak about Heloise’s sexual longing and her response to the brutality of Abelard’s castration:

Immured in this prison, so dull and so moping
Where vows and high walls bar all hopes of clopping;
Where close-grated windows scarce shew us the sun;
What means this strange itch in the flesh of a nun? ...

You’re dead in the eyes of the statutes of Venus,
Her genial warmth you’re unable to feel,
Nature, spite of the proverb, is conquer’d by steel