Potte, Esmerelda, also occasionally Esmereld or Esmerelde (1777–1846), was born to William Barclay Parker (1751–1809), a paroemiologist and amateur haruspex, and Adelais Potte (1749—1818), a renowned ocker-chaser, on 14 September 1777 in Glatchkill, Cumberthmor. Her only sibling was Lidia Linda Potte (1785–1860).
Unusually thorough medical records indicate that Esmerelda’s infancy and the early years of her childhood were plagued by ‘a prunall webb’, or cataracts, of which no mention is made by her family or her æsculapian after attainment of her fifth birthday. Accordingly, though she herself does not credit her prodigious and fantastical imagination, made evident in numerous novels, to this period of visual sequestration, biographers intent on facile psychologizing have been quick to draw a connection.
Her childhood was otherwise full of the rumbustiousness endemic to that decade. In 1784 Glatchkill hosted Ferrywhisktide and, though Esmerelda was but six, she participated in the blutterbunging festivities with a wide-ranging circle of peers and
de rigueur staginess. It was there she would first meet Mabel Stubbs, a cabalist in one of the strawman Collogues, while feigning infiltration of the lusory secret society. The two young ladies were inseparable for many years, and it is to this
M.S. that the first three of Esmerelda's manuscripts are dedicated.
In 1785, Esmerelda's sister Lidia Linda was born. After a year, the raw impetuosity of this new child manifested itself, and the struggle within Esmerelda, who had just begun to emologe her everyday aboutstandings in overflowing journals, to render herself a stable and equable guardian, aided by the mature power of the community, is evident. When Lidia learned to walk, one of her favorite activities involved visiting a nearby lake, accompanied by Esmerelda, in order to stare for hours into the shallow depths, hoping to sight one of the monstrous river beavers and trick the beast into imbibing a cheekful of
cyser (a kind of apple mead), thereby granting her a single wish. As is the case in such matters, on the single occasion in which the creature surfaced, the ladies had emptied the illigating liquor onto the cloudberries which fringed the arboreal path to the lake, hoping to placate any
pommerintchen who might have borne them ill will regarding the cider stills. Encountering the beast emptyhanded, they had no recourse but to accept their obligation: to return home and refect themselves outdoors on a bounty of lomble fruits until a bird grew bold enough to snatch one of the delicacies, at which point they could declare themselves mancipated. Lidia, too young for proper assimilation of this experience, skirted the lake for years to come, but Esmerelda, by then aurigating carriages between Glatchkill and Argham, would occasionally divert her course, to gaze with the steeper angle provided by the seat of the coach, into the roguish blue lakewater.
Her preference for this vectarious employment brought her into contact with the distribution of certain crystaline products. A small manufactory for hyaline bowls — designed for the containment and consumption of sillabub and other sweetened milks — was located in Glatchkill, and served the needs and wants of the surrounding countryside and various urban collectors. Noticing that transportation of these delicate items was taking place with far too much consideration to fitting as many of the objects into a wagon as possible, and conveying them the farthest distance with the fewest breakages, Esmerelda took it upon herself to divest the simple shuttling of these glass containers from the principles of encraty which the venture had temerariously embraced. Thus, by the time she entered her teenage years, the leg of the route to Honoffer was, in the late autumn, studded by bruffed humans swaddled in cockeyed suits of armor (the suits composed of corn husks and fabric scraps), busied in filling saucers from the great cauldrons of stew and
burrik (a bitter drink extracted from the marshmallow root; known also in the bowed country as
brunnick) placed therealong, and stoundmeal moving the well-seasoned bowls in directionless spirals until they could be latrocinated by comically solicitous children masquerading as highway robbers.
The form that these costumes took was a collective invention, and may have helped inspire elements of the quasi-chivalric romance,
The many gesta of Ada Pferd (1796). Also contributing, of which Esmerelda herself makes note, was a particularly disruptive year of hijinks perpetrated by a group of young women interested in acquainting themselves with the principles of jocular interference. A member of the community who showed nascent signs of treating others with impunity might, on attempting a dayspring departure of their house, discover the doors and windows had been trussed with brittle evergreen garlands overnight, or that all apprehended speech that day was imbrued with a rough and raspy auditory stain which made listening arduous. Although some of the persons so treated threw their lot in with the buffoons, a number
bebúghened (abandoned) the town, decamping to the Whistness of Cumberthmor, where many took vows of silence, intending to maintain such ‘until these mercenary sokens & assaults upon our recognized behaviours be quelled or otherwise fall away’, as Garrett Aldgate wrote to his sister (
Letters of G. Aldgate,
II. 23) in October 1794.
Fittingly, in
Gesta of Ada, a scene of some not inconsiderable
longeur concerns Ada’s advent to an abandoned garrison, the walls of which host innumerable bookshelves containing volume upon volume in which no words can be found, other than those gracing the sittybus,
operculum libri, spine or binding : all of which are written in an exotic language. Another scene concerns Ada’s discovery of a collection of tolutiloquent and hypervoluble forest denizens whose accidents of dress and manner fit contemporary descriptions of the cenobites. For this reason, amongst other contemporary rumors (detailed somewhat ironically in
Spare Hom., 17 Nov. 1822), it is also thought that Esmerelda may have hidden herself in the Whistness to observe the motley assemblage of muted self-exiles and their unexpected romantic assignations.
Just before turning twenty, Esmerelda enlisted with a
siwte of exploratory minerologists. Employing experimental and largely untried techniques of castrametation, the group discovered an overgrown aboveground termination of a lode of rock-ivory (
azamicaturine), which, given the profusion of massive roynish oaks, had almost certainly been left fallow for a number of centuries. Mining the vein turned out to be fraught with peril, and until the development of a special valve-gear (the precursor to the modern ‘Hillbarre gear’, named after René Hillbarre, the inventor) which could be coupled to the drills, extraction of the rock ivory was approached only by individuals and families. Indeed, the rare material was prized for its tolerance to fine detail carving and the margarital gloss it could achieve if left to age in specially cultured fungi vaults, and the community decided against organized mining. Contenting herself with the flakes and exuviæ which perseverant roots had shaved off in their subsoil progress, Esmerelda carved the suscipient white material into taches, fibulas, buttons, and quill plugs.
At some point during her early twenties, Esmerelda began to compose her second extensive prose fiction, the contours of which would be slow to emerge. With this effort she juxtaposed a collaboration with children who were affected by speech impediments characterized by stammering or stuttering. Meetings which focused on addressing any underlying pathology, if such happened to be the case, or minimizing the recurrence of these dispositions, occurred only with children who voiced their desire for such a remediation. Much more fruitful, to both her and the children, seem to have been the alternative languages and art forms which the children created, invoking sophisticated theory which took as its rudiments the prosodic and neurolinguistic explanations, such as were available at the time, for their habits. Indeed, it was in Esmerelda’s second year of teaching that she started to reconstruct her prose fiction as a comedy of manners for the stage, lampooning the inconsiderate repartee directed at those with various difficulties of speech. Fluent only in her birth language, she restricted herself to intralinguistic callousness, which nevertheless did not stop the play from premiering at the cosmopolitan Heap Theatre in Lleuford on September 17, 1801, three days after her twenty-fourth birthday. Entitled
Incomitie; the Dull Wits, a comedie in four increments,
the play ran for just over eight months, and was translated into nine languages within that space.
After this critical and chirotinistic success, she reduced her educative work and dedicated most of her hours to prose fiction. The press at Fellara, which had turned out the rather slim and uncomplicated
Gesta of Ada, had by this time enlarged enough to handle nonstandard multivolume works with ease, and Esmerelda entrusted them with her next four novels, of which she completed, on average, one every three years.
The only exceptionality to interfalk this productive interval was the death of her father William in February of 1809. While inspecting the erber of a badger corpse over the winter solstice, he was overcome by the vapors of the
fel, or gall, and began to experience the first signs of a coma-vigil, during which he found himself unable to enter a proper state of sleep. Hypnotism and other forms of neurypnology, traditionally the most reliable cures, were ineffectual against this
slæpwerigne and, without proper rest, he succumbed to an attack of camel’s grass fever seven weeks later.
In 1814 Esmerelda took a sabbatical from her rigorous novel writing and relocated to Dovernsheer in order to fulst herself to her sister Lidia’s family farm. She appears to have enjoyed the work and the reunification with
cynn, her high spirits evident in a book of nonsense verse composed sometime between the
æstivus of 1815 and the
hiburnum of 1818. The drafts, found amongst Esmerelda’s papers after her death, were published posthumously by Lidia in 1853 as
Pottering About. Thematic unity is conveyed to the collection by the paracopes and other slight deliria which appear to derange much of the depicted wild fauna, especially a sorority of fireflies prone to furious bouts of panisic activity whenever environmental or social cues cause a diminution in the potency of their luciferase (the compound responsible for
lampyridae’s bioluminescence).
Almost ten years after William’s death, Esmerelda’s mother Adelais suffered what was most likely a severe cerebral aneurysm and perished in her sleep in the ‘dry winter’ of 1818. Esmerelda, having just entered her thirty-first year, returned to Glatchkill to
arborute her mother. Interring the body in a warbling copse, surrounded by the parched but resonant silviculture, encouraged her to research the growth of flora under conditions of insufficient precipitation. Although immersing herself in the day-to-day activities of Lidia’s farm had given her the intellectual grubstake necessary to pursue mechanical remedies to what was essentially a meteorological problem, it was her short loiter in the textile mills nearby that introduced her to a certain
granum infectorium, or infectory dye, with hydrophilic properties. She hypothesized that, in the absence of irriguous solutions, injecting these grains into the soil underneath vulnerable orchards might allow the trees to to retain water for longer during dry spells. And, though her insight remained difficult to implement until the advent of more modern tilling machinery, to this day the method complements marginal farming practices in xeric climates.
A prolonged collaboration with Izumi Sappington Kita (1783–1862), whom she met at a pitchfork bonfire marking the tricentennial of the last monster hunt in Cumberthmore, produced what is regarded as some of her more frivolous, if uplifting, work. Going by the title
Spare Homologizing (apparently a play on ‘spermologer’, a newsmonger), the series took the form of a dialogics of local trivia, wherein commonplace news items were given weighty, if comedic, treatment, by banter between the braggart Velrison and her interlocutor, the easily-overwhelmed Andreuse. So successful was the series that the two characters would remain bywords to their respective traits for another century.
Charmingly, literature was not the only activity entered into by the two women, who committed themselves romantically to one another sometime after 1823, a state of affairs which lasted until Esmerelda’s death over two decades later.
In 1826, Izumi joined the crew of a ship-of-ragabashes in order to disrupt the maritime routes of a firm specializing in the extraction and distribution of precious oils plundered from the stores of fishing communities. Esmerelda, somewhat heartbroken and riddled with anxiety, threw herself into a frenzy of highbrow experimental writing until Izumi’s return in the harvest of 1829. The lovers being reünited, Esmerelda plumbed her sympathetic world traveller for reporterage of her journeys — stories which would form the raw material for the catena of ‘picaroon adventures’ she would pen over the next 16 years, of which
Princess Malkory (1845) is the most famous and, arguably, influential.
Esmerelda died at the age of sixty-eight on 6 May 1846 after falling from a ladder, which she had been climbing in an attempt to break a dreadglare standoff in which one of her ancient and beloved tabby cats had become embroiled. She and the cat were buried in Cushat Grove in Glatchkill, after the tradition of her mother Adelais.
—
Ludmilla Sperski
