I know Agnes so well and I also don’t know her at all.
Agnes Tyrrell (1846-1883) was a genius composer, and this blog is where I chronicle my adventures playing and researching her extraordinary music. I sometimes post snippets over here.
I feel like I know her intimately from playing her music for the past couple of years. I know she’s better at playing thirds than I am, and I know she likes to end a piece with a shrug and a smile instead of a giant big finish (though she likes those too). I know she’s frugal with her manuscript paper: she’ll write half a measure at the end of a line, like writing half a word at the end of a line with a hy-phen. But I don’t know her from her words, except for the occasional tantalizing moment in English (her dad was British and earned his living as an English teacher, so she was fluent). She translated Goethe’s Egmont into English and signed it with a humorous inscription: “Translated by Agnes Tyrrell, a very dear little thing, with an ugly face but as industrious as any living creature.” I can’t stop thinking about that, to the point where I should probably say “stop me if you’ve heard this before.” I love that Agnes could gently mock herself, and that she was so proud of being industrious. Me, I haven’t been so industrious lately—I was felled by the terrible cold that’s been going around, and I’m just not at my most productive when all I can do is sleep and cough and blow my nose. How did Agnes actually compose incredible music when she was so sick she couldn’t tour?
I wonder about that all the time. But I don’t actually know from her own words, because most of her documents are written in old German handwriting, and I can’t read them. Yet! Last year when I was at the archive I took pictures of all the documents I could find there, and I’m hopeful that this summer I’ll get to read Agnes’s letters and writings. I’ve got a student excited about deciphering and translating them: we’ll use one AI to read the handwriting, and then run the German through two different AIs to come up with readable English. I tried out the process last year in the archive on a page that was maybe a memoir, maybe a short story, and I was able to turn an incomprehensible page into a few paragraphs about a childhood memory of enjoying Aunt Hilda, so I think it will work. We really do live in the future. We turned in a grant application a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m crossing all my fingers and toes we’ll get the funding for that project this summer.
So a few weeks ago, before The Cold That Wouldn’t End, I was looking through my photos of the letters, feeling kind of like a kid shaking presents under a Christmas tree, and I found some correspondence that struck me: a note, in English, from the magazine The Family Herald, granting Agnes Tyrrell permission to translate the story “The Gloved Hand” into German. I had seen it before, but this time it struck me that it would be interesting to read the story, since Agnes liked it enough to translate it, or at least the magazine, to find out what kind of stories Agnes liked to read in English.
I emailed my superhero librarian friend Betsy—a major theme of this whole journey is “librarians are superheroes”—and asked if she could help me find any copies of the magazine so I could get a sense of what Agnes liked to read. About half an hour later she emailed me a link to the actual story:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/snVPAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22gloved%20hand%22
It’s a dark Victorian thriller, about a woman who is tortured with her hand held over a candle flame, and ever after wears a glove on that hand. At the beginning she has two suitors, a rich one and a poor one. She chooses the poor one, but stays friends with the rich one, who hires her husband to manage some of his estates. She keeps the accounts of the estates, and notices the rich man is behind on his debts and close to ruin: he’s three thousand pounds short on his mortgage of his manor house, and the bank is going to call it in. She and her husband arrange to sell some property to cover the debt. The husband is about to travel with the cash when an evil servant (whom she never liked) and his brigand friends come up with a scheme to lure the husband away and steal the money from the woman. But she has had the foresight to hide it, and she won’t tell them where it is, even when they hold her hand over the candle flame. The commotion wakes up her son, who toddles in and says “what are you doing to my mamma?” Just then the husband returns with help, so the kid is fine. The thieves are sentenced to fifteen years. Everyone praises the woman for her heroism, including the rich suitor whose mortgage she saved (now happily married to someone else). It’s interesting that the woman has so much agency and so much recognition. It’s also interesting that the woman can’t play the piano anymore. And here’s another interesting thing: the woman is the narrator’s Aunt Hilda, and the opening is about how much the children enjoyed her visits to the nursery.
Aunt Hilda? Wait a minute. Wait a minute! It’s definitely the one page that I ran through the AI to see if I could read it. I’m so happy I know it’s a translation of a thriller; I’ve had it in the back of my mind ever since, that I was looking forward to reading the rest of that narrative. I’m so, so glad I know it’s a translation now, rather than reading the whole thing in the translated AI version and thinking it’s a memoir. I do think I would have figured out that it’s a story, not Agnes’s memory: it talks about names of houses, and she lived in an apartment. But I can also imagine that, at least for a while, I could have thought “my god! Agnes had this heroic aunt with this chilling tale!”
So thank you, heroic librarian friend Betsy, for keeping me from being incredibly wrong about Agnes in this one particular way. And I do feel like I know Agnes a little better, from enjoying reading a story that she enjoyed reading. I can’t wait to read more of what she actually wrote.