Lona Manning's Blog, page 6

CMP#188 What Has Been, continued

    This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. 
​​      This post continues the synopsis and review of What Has Been, an 1801 sentimental novel by Eliza Kirkham Mathews. CMP#188  What Has Been: the short life and forlorn hopes of Eliza Kirkham Mathews, part 2      ​Continued from the previous post: The letter telling poor Emily that the man she loves drowned in a shipwreck is actually the evil work of a friend of Mr. St. Ives. The scheming Mr. Besfield wants to tighten the net around Emily until she consents to become his mistress. When she promises to pay her aunt's and her mother's debts and then her bank goes bankrupt, leaving her with nothing, he sees his chance. Her misfortunes, she tells Besfield, “have rendered her a creature, lost to joy in this world… but she preferred imprisonment, death, all the accumulated sorrows which injustice or cruelty could devise, to loss of honour!”
   “Proud, imperious girl!” [Besfield retorts] while his eyes glared wildly in their sockets. “beware of what you do, for remember no insult to me goes unrevenged!”
    We later learn that with the connivance of Mr. St. Ives, the evil Besfield kidnapped Frederick and locked him up in a cottage. Frederick defies him: “You threaten to destroy the peace and innocence of the lovely Emily Osmond. Reptile! One glance from her eyes, beaming beauty and virtue, shall disarm thee of all power to injure her unsullied purity!"
   To hide from the villain Besfield and from debt-collectors, Emily flees to the mouldering old family castle and the affectionate embrace of the two garrulous but loyal old domestics. Naturally, since she's a heroine and they are servants, they look after her, serving her meals, etc. Not that she eats much--she's usually too upset to eat. She spends her time looking out of the window sighing, and going for pensive walks and--oh, lord--composing sonnets. Emily never volunteers to dust the library books or anything. (I know I've banged on about this before, but really, imagine being so genteel that you don't know how to wash a plate or boil an egg and just take it for granted that someone else will do it for you.)  Gothic elements
     Anyway, Emily has some gothic adventures. She finds an old manuscript in a chest; the brief but pathetic history of her ancestor, Mildred St. Maur, who was cast off by the family. “Be calm, my heart, awhile, that I may trace my sad, sad, tale of woe…”
    There is no indication that she uses her ancestor’s manuscript in her own novel, or for that matter, that she realizes -–hey, my own life is exactly like a novel! I might as well write down what is happening to me, right now! We have no details about the “work of fancy” she is writing. 
     One night, she hears noises and fears the bailiffs have broken in to the castle to arrest her: “Undetermined how to act, she raised the almost expiring candle in the socket, and was returning to her chamber, when, lifting her eyes, she beheld the figure of a tall man standing at the door. Uttering a piercing shriek, and only anxious to escape the stranger, Emily lifted the tapestry, and ran, or rather flew into the great gallery, where, stumbling over something which lay in her way, the candle was extinguished, and in the next moment she felt herself clasped in the arms of a man, and lifted from the ground.”   End of volume I, folks!   Surprise! Spoilers!
      But don’t worry, it’s Frederick! He escaped from Mr. Besfield’s clutches! 
    Frederick begs Emily to marry him. So what if they don't have any money? “I will be your protector, friend, and husband; the labour of these hands shall procure the necessaries of life.” he vows. “Those,” said Emily, “are the fallacious visions which hope presents to your enthusiastic fancy. Alas! We are surrounded by melancholy realities.” She marries him, though, with much foreboding.
   The love birds sneak out of the castle and set up in London where Frederick reluctantly looks for employment as a clerk but since he has no references he can’t find a job. Emily keeps her stiff upper lip as Frederick despairs. She urges him to keep trying: “perseverance and resolution conquer every difficulty.” It turns out that Frederick is so committed to female equality that he's fine with his wife being the chief breadwinner! So he convinces himself that she can write a best-seller.
   “Is it possible,” replied Frederick, “that you, Emily, can wish me to become the slave of commerce, when so many more eligible plans are open for our future subsistence? Do not entertain so contemptible an idea of your own talents, as to suppose they will not effectually emancipate us from the dread of poverty, and render our future lives comfortable!” Lawson and Agatha subplot
   A new London friend, Mr. Lawson, lures Frederick into gambling and socializing until the wee small hours. His real target is Emily. When he has her alone, he expresses sympathy, and offers to be her “friend in the absence of your husband.”  “Can a woman, possessing the exalted understanding which you do, be so prejudiced by that hydra-headed monster, custom, as to prevent you from using your reasoning faculties? Or are you frightened by the bugbear religion, which priests hold forth to ensnare weak and enthusiastic minds?" But the old “marriage is just priestcraft” argument doesn’t work on our Emily. So he turns to threats. He has lent money to Frederick and will send him to debtor’s prison: “by Heaven I swear, such shall be his fate, if you longer resist my entreaties!”
    “Then I will meet it with fortitude,” replied Emily, “and welcome any affliction, rather than purchase safety and affluence at the price of dishonour!”
    ​Lawson’s discarded and dying mistress Agatha shows up. He is filled with remorse when she forgives him on her deathbed: “But hark! I am called to heaven! Even now a band of angels strike on their golden viols. Ye bright intelligences, I come to bliss!... Nothing but virtue can secure peace in this world; delay not the hour of repentance. God—bless—you!”  Lawson also dies, of remorse.
​        I'll have more about how Mathews used this subplot to introduce feminist and anti-slavery themes in a future post. Bing AI Image More troubles before our happy ending
      Things still get worse for Emily and Frederick. They can’t pay their rent, they start pawning their clothes to get food to eat. (The grasping landlords and landladies in this novel for some strange reason begrudge providing free shelter to their social superiors). Emily does not take in sewing. She works on her novel and gives birth to a son, who sickens and dies.
​    Frederick is wrongfully accused of murder because he was in a church graveyard, surreptitiously burying his infant son at midnight, when a murder occurred nearby. This final blow—no money at all and Frederick in prison--will surely force Emily into the arms of that lascivious vulture, Mr. Besfield. No, she wanders the streets of London until collapsing at the doorway of a respectable dwelling which turns out to be the new home of her cousin Dorothea, who has just received a convenient inheritance!
    But that’s not all! Emily’s wealthy uncle Mr. Hartfield realizes that he can’t stand Mrs. Elton, who is only dancing attendance on him in hopes of inheriting his money, and sets out to find Emily and discover first-hand whether all the nasty things Mrs. Elton said about her are true.
     With the help of a friendly lawyer, Mr. Hartfield gets Frederick out of prison. They all shake the dust of the city from their feet. “Great cities,” said Mr. Hartford, “are nothing more than a sink for vice and folly… commerce! Civilization! Why, they have introduced more vices and follies than can ever be known in a country where agriculture is its chief support.”  He makes Emily and Frederick his heirs and they live comfortably and happily with the garrulous but loyal old domestics at the old family castle.
    “Emily still dedicated some hours in the day to study; her pen rendering her talents a means of enlarging their income, and the instruction she diffused useful to society at large. The subjects she chose tended to expand the understanding, meliorate the heart, and ‘justify the ways of God to man.’” Frederick, we suppose, lives the cultivated life of a gentleman that he was born to live. St. Mary Castlegate church in York, where Eliza was buried. Wikimedia photo by Chris06 Portrait of an aspiring author
   Emily never publishes her novel in this book, but she does receive encouragement from a publisher. Mathews breaks into the narrative to address the reader directly : “And here let me gratify the ardent desire I feel of describing a man, for whom all who know him must feel the highest veneration…. He appeared about forty-five, yet in truth was seven years older…”  This may be a flattering portrait of William Lane, the proprietor of the Minerva Press. Eliza might have met him in person when, as a newlywed, she visited London with her husband to meet his family. Perhaps she had an early draft of her novel and made the rounds of the publishers.  
  The publisher in the book praises Emily’s draft manuscript, “which evinces purity of mind in the author, and derives… the brightest instructions in the ways of virtue and religion—though it abounds in highly coloured imagery, sentiment, and intelligence, it is, in its present state, unfit for the press—it wants connection." He encourages her to revise it “then return it to me, and I will become its purchaser.”
   I don’t know what he means by “connection.” Maybe he meant the dangling sub-plots and the characters who come and go. My theory is that William Lane, well acquainted with what the patrons of his circulating libraries liked or didn’t like, gave specific directions to his authors: “Can you work in a castle, Mrs. Mathews? Maybe an old manuscript? We'll need some comic relief--put in a garrulous old domestic. And instead of just one vile seducer, how about another one for the second volume?” In fact, we know from that Eliza's brother-in-law was her agent with Minerva Press in London when she was in York. He reported that the publisher's wife made "some sensible suggestions" for "alterations," which he (the brother in law) put in. "I hope it has improved it."  Previous post: What Has Been, part one                     

CMP#187 Emily, the heroine who writes a novel

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. 
​
​“[D]o not impose on yourself false hopes, which may never be realized. You well know I allude to your genius for writing… let the chief part of the day be dedicated to the humble, but truly respectable employments of the needle.”  
                      --well-meant advice in What Has Been which was probably given to the actual authoress. CMP#187   What Has Been and the sad life of Eliza Kirkham Mathews, part one Following her Muse no matter what      I’ve tried twice before to read What Has Been (1801), a sentimental novel by Eliza Kirkham Mathews (1772-1802), but couldn’t get past the trite and mawkish prose of the opening scene. The heroine, Emily, only eighteen years old, weeps at the deathbed of her sister Matilda, the last member of her family.
    “Emily! Emily!” replied the almost exhausted Matilda, “forbear to embitter the last hours of my existence by useless regrets, or vain ebullitions of passion. Alas! My sister, let not your affection for me prompt you to execrate the unhappy Herbert, for unhappy he must be, since he has… forgotten the solemn vows he once made me, and in the hour of pain and misery, left me to reflect on his broken faith. But mine, Emily, is a death of triumph, for I die innocent.”
    Raised in genteel circumstances, Emily is left alone and practically destitute.
   But once I learned the real-life circumstances of Eliza Kirkham Mathews, I harbored a soft spot for her. She actually lived through the harrowing family loss and fall from gentility to poverty that she depicts in What Has Been. After losing her father, mother, and brother, she watched her sister Mary sink into a consumptive's grave, leaving her for a time alone in the world.  She married, but poor Eliza coughed herself to death in rented rooms in York, scribbling away to the end. Okay, so she was not a great talent--she is no Keats--but the sad tale always stayed with me, and it caught Virginia Woolf’s attention as well, because she tells it in a short story called “Sterne’s Ghost”  which you can read here.  Unregulated sensibility    We know about Eliza’s life through the memoir of her husband, Charles Mathews, a celebrated Regency-era comic actor. His memoirs were written by his second wife. Anne Jackson Mathews, who knew Eliza. She gives a sympathetic yet condescending account of Eliza’s aspirations: “[H]er habits of confinement, (for she still clung to the fallacious hope of gain by her pen, and was constantly devoted to its exercise,) and her anxiety to contribute to her husband’s narrow and inadequate means was such, that she neither allowed herself air nor proper exercise… she grew weaker and weaker….”
   Both Eliza and her alter-ego Emily in her novel What Has Been came from Exeter, both had good educations, both hoped to make money by writing a novel. Eliza’s true-life story reminds us that the orphaned heroine narratives of the sentimental novel have their basis in the grim reality of the times. However, I doubt that Eliza in real life was pursued by a relentless villain intent upon her seduction and ruin, nor that her mother's family owned a tumble-down castle maintained by a pair of garrulous but loyal old domestics, and we know that a convenient fortune did not arrive like manna from heaven to save her from destruction.
​   Was Eliza inspired to write a typical sentimental novel plot or was she writing to the market? I suspect the latter. What Has Been is a Minerva Press novel; a publishing house that specialized in  sentimentality and gothic thrills bound up with conventional morality. The heroine Emily's need to make money is one of the recurring motifs of the novel, and like her creator, she hopes to become a professional writer.  We can learn about the social attitudes of the time from even third-rate novels. Other themes in the novel are: sensibility is harmful if not regulated, and life is a vale of tears which only religious fortitude can help you endure.   Previous posts have dwelt on threats to female virtue. Instead, let’s focus on the attitudes towards employment and social class on display here.  Good advice from Mrs. Elton Okay, get your hankies ready!
    After burying the last member of her family, Emily accepts an offer to stay with an impoverished aunt and cousin, even though they really can’t afford to support her. Her cousin Dorothea politely but honestly tells Emily that her dream of supporting herself as a writer is just that, a pipe dream. "What publisher will buy a first work unrecommended?" The female villain of the novel, a wealthy aunt named Mrs. Elton, also discourages Eliza. She once made Eliza's late mother's life miserable with her jealousy and gossip. Now she drops in to say: “So, Emily Ormond, you have been writing I see, child; but a needle, in my opinion, would become your fingers infinitely better—you that are dependent on the bounty of those who can scarcely support themselves… I cannot see what hinders you from working.” She thinks Emily should apprentice herself to a milliner or mantua-maker (hatmaker or dressmaker.)
   “‘Indeed, Madam,’ returned Emily, checking the pride which swelled in her bosom, and crimsoned her cheeks, ‘I have no taste for those professions… it would be more respectable to superintend the education of some genteel children, or—my pen might procure me a comfortable subsistence.’”
    “‘Ha! Ha! Ha!” vociferated Mrs. Elton. “Miss Emily will commence author, and live upon the produce of her prolific brain in an apartment next the sky… I really beg your pardon… I knew not that I was in the company of a genius.”
     But for now, Emily feels too afflicted after nursing her dying sister ”from taking a situation honourable and independent… In which I can preserve my character and my conscience unsullied, and live unassisted by those, who, when my prospects in life were bright and alluring, called themselves my friends, but who now, in the days darkened by sorrow and poverty, regard me not; or if they do, it is only to wound my feelings by insulting pity or satirical advice!”
    In other words, “go sit on a tack, Aunt Elton.” Bing AI image Enter romance
    ​Mrs. Elton blames Emily for being too proud to work, thanks to having a mother who was the daughter of a baronet, and being educated above her station in life. And truth to tell, Emily can’t abide the thought of becoming a governess, and dreads it as much as Jane Fairfax does in Emma.
    While Emily hesitates, our hero appears, in the form of a young man who is the ward of a relative on her mother’s side. Frederick Mandred is "descended from an ancient family" but has no fortune. He is a ward of Mr. St. Ives and works for him as a clerk. Mrs. St. Ives sends Frederick to escort Emily to visit them, and she gratefully accepts. (Frederick also lives with the St. Ives family). Emily's visit stretches out to an unspecified number of months, I think for the better part of a year, while Emily occasionally tries to talk herself into looking for work.
    Mr. St. Ives, being in trade, is not completely genteel. Emily is quite indignant on Frederick’s behalf when he and she come in late for breakfast from a ramble on the beach and he is scolded for being late for work: “‘my counting-house is always opened at eight o’clock, and at that hour I expect to find all my clerks at their duty.’”
    “Emily felt her hand tremble; and she had nearly spilt her coffee, when, timidly lifting her eyes towards Frederick, she beheld his cheeks clothed with the blush of indignation, and his whole frame agitated with restrained passion, which each moment she expected to hear burst from his bosom; but a manly silence sealed his lips.”
    More trouble arises because Frederick falls in love with Emily and she with him. They have much in common: they both feel “rapturous enthusiasm” for “the enchanting scenery around them." “While her beauty pleased the eye, her ingenuous mind and excellent understanding captivated the heart, and interested the judgment.” And her forlorn situation is like catnip to him, because he is a man of sensibility. Bing AI image   This totally unexpected turn of events enrages Mr. St. Ives, who had arranged for Frederick to marry a local heiress and bring some money into his failing business. Frederick compounds the trouble by speaking to Emily at her bedroom door one night! “This is no time for the false refinements of delicacy, by Heaven: I shall go mad!” he exclaims. Up pops the master of the house. “Frederick Mandred!” vociferated Mr. St. Ives, “is this the return you make for the kindness I have ever treated you with? But come, leave the chamber of the young serpent who has seduced you from your duty, and robbed me of my peace.”
    “Sir,” said Frederick, “breath not a word against her purity, she is spotless as an angel, and by Heaven, shall be my wife!”
   Alas, Emily has outstayed her welcome. ​“To remain longer beneath the same roof with [Frederick] Mandred, after the declaration of love which he had made her, was the height of folly and imprudence; neither could her independent spirit brook the cool looks, and coarse manners of Mr. St. Ives; she saw he wished her to begone [after living at his expense for the better part of a year] but, alas! Whither was she to go? She had no home, no parent, no sister to receive her. Those who paid homage to her [well-born] mother… never now bestowed a thought on the poor orphan, Emily Ormond, unless it was to remark her imprudence in remaining inactive at Mrs. St. Ives’s when so many reputable professions offered themselves to her choice.”
   Mrs. St. Ives also drops a hint: “Upon my word… a young woman, so very destitute as you are, ought certainly to exert some of the abilities, which nature has so very liberally bestowed on her, for her own support, and not expect—I beg your pardon, her friends to maintain her.”    Emily vows (and not for the first time) “From this moment I will depend on myself alone, my own industry shall procure me subsistence, and I will forego all claims on my rich relations…” She decides to “retire to an obscure village, where she knew she could be boarded cheap, and from the production of her needle earn an humble maintenance. “ But she learns that her poverty-stricken aunt is in arrears on her rent (“fine words butter no parsnips”  snarls the landlord). Auntie is in danger of eviction or going to debtor’s prison. Emily pledges to give her the small inheritance she’ll earn when she turns nineteen, which, after clearing off her late mother’s debts as well, will leave her with nothing.
   The aunt, Emily, and her cousin Dorothea all resolve to move to some cheap cottage, but just then, the aunt has a stroke and lingers on for weeks before dying. Dorothea luckily gets an offer to go to Switzerland as a companion to a wealthy family, but that leaves Emily alone with no money or friends. Emily does have a wealthy uncle but thanks to the malicious gossip of Mrs. Elton, he thinks Emily is a hussy and a fallen woman (that Frederick-at-the-door incident) and has cut off all communication with her. Oh, and did I mention she received a letter telling her Frederick was dead? That he drowned while on a voyage to Ireland on behalf of Mr. St. Ives? (Well, we don’t believe that for a moment, do we, folks?)
     The story continues in my next post:  Charles Mathews, (1776-1835) courtesy National Portrait Gallery Echoes of Austen 
   Mrs. Elton asks the wealthy uncle Mr. Hartford, “if you liked the apricots which I sent you? I assure you they were [her daughter] Harriet’s own preserving, and never was a being more anxious to suit another’s taste than she is yours.” Anyone mentioning apricots makes me think of Mansfield Park. Mrs. Elton is the same species of bully/fawning flatterer like Mrs. Norris. 
    Emily tries to talk herself into working as a governess, but is repulsed at the idea: “Shall I attend to the education of children… be subjected to the caprice and insolence of parents, listen to the frivolities of visitors, and be admitted into their society as an inferior? Gracious God! I cannot support the thought.” The narrator calls Emily’s pride in her family descent an “error.”   
​    When Jane Austen visited her brother Henry in London, she saw Charles Mathews perform on at least two occasions, as we know from her letters.

Previous post: Mary Jane Mackenzie's Geraldine

CMP#186 Mary Jane MacKenzie's Geraldine

“If one scheme of happiness fails, is it not wise to try another?”
                                                              -- Geraldine: or Modes of Faith & Practice CMP#186   Authors After Austen: Mary Jane Mackenzie ​     Mary Jane Mackenzie must have been thrilled with the positive review she received for her debut novel Geraldine. The Lady's Monthly Museum hailed "with pleasure the appearance of a tale which may be put into a youthful hand, not only without danger, but with a rational hope that its contents will make a favourable impression on the side of virtue. To this high degree of praise the novel before us is entitled; it is evidently the work of an author who units talent to sound judgment and true Christian principles.”
    Blackwood's Magazine said: "This is the best written Novel, except Anastasius, that has been published in London for several years. The conversational style, one of the best I have seen–clear, natural, and unaffectedly elegant, and full of the spirit of good society."  The Monthly Review said: "Her novel is one of the few which possess the rare merit of entertaining and amusing us, while they are devoted to a moral and religious object.” 
  Geraldine, or Modes of Faith and Practice, was published in 1820 by the prestigious publishing house of Cadell & Davies, who also published the best-selling Christian author Hannah More (and this is the publishing house that turned down Pride & Prejudice years before it was finally published).
    The novel also contains some echoes of Austen--in my opinion. Let's see if you agree.  The cave of Trophonius in Livadeia, Greece. Etching by Elizabeth Byrne, 1813, after E.D. Clarke. Wellcome Collection.  Fanny is the flirty one, Geraldine is the quiet one
    Geraldine centers on the travails of a young heroine, Geraldine Beresford. In Volume I, the heroine’s beloved mother has died, and her father wants to travel around the continent to forget his grief. He parks Geraldine, who is about fourteen, with his sister Mrs. Mowbray, her husband, and her three cousins, who are all older than her. 
    One striking feature of this novel is that the dialogue--which Blackwood's Magazine praised--is crammed with poetical, classical, literary, and biblical allusions and quotes. The novel opens with a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Mowbray. Over a few pages, Mrs. Mowbray refers to a ‘veiled prophet,’ Horne Tooke, Johnson, Lowth, Mrs. Shandy, Griselda, ‘two stars kept their motion in one sphere,’ ‘bestow her tediousness,’ Glumdalclitch, and ‘sonnet to his mistress’s eyebrows.’  Mary Jane Mackenzie, whatever her merits as a writer, wasn’t shy about sharing her erudition. She presumes her readers will understand what a reference to the "Cave of Trophonius" is about. The characters in Geraldine also debate about the theatre, poetry, music, whether French cuisine and music is better than English, and religion. 
    Geraldine, being young and unused to the world, is taken aback by the glamour and worldly cynicism of her Mowbray relatives. She keeps quiet in the first scenes of the novel. At a dinner party she is “allowed the privilege of listening as quietly as she pleased.”  Her cousins are Geraldine, Fanny, and Montague. 
     Georgiana, the eldest daughter, marries a nabob (a man who made his fortune in India), and she goes to India with him. The narrator makes it clear that this marriage is motivated by worldly ambition. Geraldine, meanwhile, quietly loves her cousin Montague.
     The other sister Fanny is a witty flirt. ​Montague brings home a friend, Mr. Spenser, who “has lately succeeded to an unencumbered estate of 2,000 a year.” He and Fanny fall rapidly in love. Mr. Mowbray is worried that Spenser’s adoration of his daughter is intense rather than lasting, but he reluctantly allows the marriage. Fanny and Spenser go to live in Richmond and Geraldine misses her. “Geraldine, after the bustle attendant upon the dignity of a bride-maid was over, felt at leisure to regret Fanny exceedingly. The sight of the room she had occupied, and all the little vestiges it contained; the work-box, that had been thought unworthy of a bride—and the flower-stands, which had been pronounced unfit for Richmond, excited very painful emotions.”​ English brides arrive in India Religious fanatics and more Austen echoes
    A few years pass. Sometimes the Mowbrays visit their neighbours, the Wentworths. Miss Wentworth is a puritanical fanatic who frightens her little sister with threats of hellfire. Mrs. Wentworth who is an indolent lady who doesn’t pay any attention to her children.  We also meet a minor character named Miss Crawford.
​    Geraldine grows up into a lovely young lady. She has a handsome inheritance, since she is her father’s only heir, so the Mowbrays don’t object when their son Montague proposes to her. But then Montague becomes infatuated with a designing widow, and Geraldine breaks off their engagement.
    We learn that while Geraldine’s late mom was intelligent and respectable, dad is not a shining character. Mrs. Mowbray says of her late sister-in-law: “She contrived to give dignity and importance—nay, even a sort of lustre, to [her brother's] character.” Mr. Mowbray, a sort of sarcastic Mr. Bennet type, says, “even the leaden mantle of mediocrity did not weigh him down in his wife’s time.”
​    The Mowbrays receive word that Geraldine’s father has been spending all his money in Italy and running his estate into debt.  “Our measures must be prompt and decisive, Geraldine,” Mrs. Mowbray tells her. “if we can persuade your father to return immediately to England, all may yet be well." Mrs. Mowbray resolves to go to Italy and takes Geraldine and young Mr. Maitland, the clergyman, with her.​ Old History (detail) Alexander Jakesch Spoilers ahead 
    In Italy, Geraldine and her aunt discover that her father was tricked into marrying a young woman who then spent all his money. He is dying, and Geraldine gets to his bedside just in time to say goodbye.
   Mrs. Mowbray laments, “His fortune, thanks to the ingenious extravagance of this ‘foreign wonder’ is reduced to a complete wreck." So now Mrs. Mowbray doesn’t want Geraldine to marry her son. 
​   Mr. Maitland the clergyman suddenly becomes the romantic lead. On the voyage back to England, he falls in love with Geraldine but he hides his affection, because she's still carrying a torch for Montague.
     Meanwhile, the marriages of the Mowbray girls go badly. The climate of India has destroyed the health and good looks of the oldest daughter Georgiana. Fanny is miserable because her husband has lost interest in her and he’s having affairs. She in turn finds a lover and elopes with him! When the news reaches Mrs. Mowbray, “She was astonished and grieved… but it was not the sin, it was the disgrace by which she was chiefly affected. She pronounced it to be a shocking affair, a very shocking affair indeed; but she felt more irritated by the folly, the imprudence, the absurdity of Fanny, than humiliated by her [daughter’s] guilt. To forfeit such a station, to forsake a husband who neither limited her expenses, controlled her wishes, nor interfered with her pleasures, because he happened not to be immaculate, was either an act of positive madness, or of folly the most inexcusable.”
      Geraldine, on the other hand, is horrified. “Affected even to agony, she wept over the fall, shuddered at the guilt, and trembled for the future destiny of Fanny… this irretrievable evil might be attributed to her wretchedly defective education.” 
​     Fanny’s elopement leads to retribution for some, repentance for others. In the conclusion, Geraldine rejects the charming but unstable Montague Mowbray and marries the worthy Mr. Maitland. Portrait of a young woman with Bible, Jan Braet von Überfeldt, 1866 Other features
   Slavery and empire: Before her marriage, Geraldine's mother loved one Mr. Fullarton, but lack of money prevented their union. After Mr. Fullarton's romance with Geraldine's mother was thwarted, he inherited a “small estate in the West Indies." This is another example of sending a character abroad until you need them back for plot purposes, a very common device  discussed previously . However, Mackenzie also makes use of the West Indies connection to be more explicitly  anti-slavery  than Austen chose to be in Mansfield Park. Fullerton sold his property but "he [was] anxious, if possible, to secure the freedom and comfort of the slaves employed on it." After all, selling your plantation because you are opposed to slavery doesn't do anything for the enslaved people working there and quite likely could make their condition worse.
   Strong religious message: Upon his re-entry into the novel, Mr. Fullarton counsels Geraldine on avoiding the vices and snares of this world. Geraldine's Church of England piety is contrasted with the frivolous and worldly Mowbrays on the one hand, and the puritanical Miss Wentworth on the other--hence the subtitle, Modes of Faith and Practice.  The ultra-religiosity of Miss Wentworth is shown to be a form of vanity.
​​   English pride: Although Mr. Wentworth is lampooned as a bluff and ignorant John Bull type, throughout the novel everything English is held up as superior and safer than foreign countries and foreign ideas, and the countryside, of course, is better than the wicked city. 
    Charitable cliches: I previously quoted the passage in Geraldine in which the heroine fondly remembers how the villagers blessed and thanked her charitable mother. Harriet Auber, Mackenzie's companion  About Mary Jane Mackenzie
     Mary Jane Mackenzie (1783--1857) does not appear in the Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles Database of the University of Cambridge. Her family lived near the Tower of London and attended All-Hallows-by-the-Tower church, the oldest or one of the oldest churches in London. The extensive literary and classical allusions in her novels suggests that she had a good education and was an avid reader.
     Mary Jane never married and the downfall of Mr. Mowbray in Geraldine bears some resemblance to the troubles which beset her own family. Mackenzie was thrown into alarming poverty but fortunately her friends and admirers collected monies to provide her with a modest pension. In the last part of her life, she lived with her friend Harriet Auber, a hymnist and author of religious tracts. They were known for their sweet natures and their piety. They lived quietly in Ware and Great Amwell near Hoddeston, in Hertfordshire, and they both published anonymously.  Mackenzie published another novel, Private Life, and some religious books for young people, as well as pieces for magazines. 
  ​ This LitHub article says: Austenites, stop hating on Thomas Cadill because he turned down Austen's manuscript. He was actually very supportive of women writers.

​Scholar Rachel Howard describes Geraldine​ as a "conversion novel," (in other words,  a novel in which a character has a "come to Jesus" moment), and it is described as a sub-genre of the "moral-domestic" novel. She spotted the many of the same Austen parallels that I did.
​Howard, Rachel. Domesticating the Novel : Moral-Domestic Fiction, 1820-1834. 2007. ​ Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. I’ve also been blogging about now-obscure female authors of the long 18th century. For more, click "Authoresses" on the menu at right. Click here for the first in the series. 

CMP#185 Olivia, the Heroine of Colour

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. ​ CMP#185:  Book Review:  The Woman of Colour, by Anonymous ​    The Woman of Colour, first published in 1809, has drawn a lot of interest in academic circles because the heroine is a mixed-race woman of colour. It was certainly an unusual and perhaps daring choice to have a main character who is a sympathetic, intelligent, educated woman of colour who can quote Shakespeare, Cowper and Milton, The novel is remarkable in that sense, and it is unusual because it does not end with a marriage, but it is not, as we will see, remarkable for its literary quality. It is in other respects a typical sentimental and didactic novel of the long 18th century.
    Olivia is the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved woman and a plantation-owner. This sounds like a pretty serious bar to admittance in "good" society. But she is also heiress to 60 thousand pounds, three times more than Mary Crawford had in Mansfield Park, and ten thousand more than Miss Grey had in Sense and Sensibility. Further, we should not be surprised to learn that Olivia’s mother was “majestic,” beautiful,” “sprung from a race of native kings and heroes,” and a convert to Christianity.
    Once you know Olivia’s mother is descended from African royalty and she's an artless and confiding Christian girl in love with a white man, and if you know your 18th century tropes, you will know she's dead: “In giving birth to me she paid the debt of nature and went down to that grave, where the captive is made free!”
   This is an epistolary novel, so the voice you hear is Olivia Fairfield, writing to her “earliest and best friend," her governess Mrs. Milbanke. Let's hope the ship she's sailing on has fewer holes in its hull than this book has plot-holes, the first one being: If Mrs. Milbanke is a governess, why doesn't Olivia just pay for her to come along on the voyage? She really does need a respectable older escort in a situation like this.​ But of course Mrs. Milbanke is a device for exposition, not a character in the novel.
​    Olivia writes to Mrs. Milbanke that her father’s last will and testament ordained that she can keep her inheritance only if she settles down in England and marries her (white, of course) cousin Augustus Merton; if they don’t marry, the money goes to his (already married) older brother George, who will decide how much of the money Olivia gets to keep. That's why she's sailing for England.
    Why did dad make such a strange will? Because reasons. Let’s just roll with it... ​“You will ask me why I recapitulate these events? Events which are so well known to you.”
   And why is Olivia explaining biographical facts to her governess, facts Mrs. Milbanke would be perfectly aware of? 
   Umm, because the author isn't skilled enough to work the exposition naturally into the narrative, maybe?  Nope, it’s because “I love to dwell on the character of my mother; it is that here I see the distributions of Providence are equally bestowed, and that it is culture not capacity which the negro wants!”
    So right away we have strong references to Christianity and a plea explicitly founded on that religion for the natural rights of people of color. We'll return to that.
     At any rate, our heroine is enjoying the company of some fellow passengers on the journey to England: the ailing Mrs. Honeywood and her adult son, who looks at Olivia and sighs a lot, heaven only knows why. At least, Olivia doesn't know why.
    The good ship ***** docks in Bristol, where Olivia parts with the Honeywoods (for now) and, with understandable trepidation, meets her uncle Merton, her sister-in-law, Mrs. George (Letitia) Merton, and her intended bridegroom Augustus. She likes Augustus! She thinks they might be compatible. He doesn’t seem that enthused though, which she fears might be his reluctance to marry a woman of color. He is melancholy and he sighs a lot.
     Next we have the most-discussed scene in the novel, where the despicable sister-in-law makes a point of serving Olivia a big bowl of rice at dinner, with the professed but insincere objective of making her comfortable, because rice is what negroes eat. Then the Mertons’ little boy comes in exclaiming over the dirtiness of her servant Dido’s skin. Olivia sweetly and calmly explains to him that their darker skin colors are not caused by dirt.
      The scene with little George reminded me of other books I have read, aimed at children, in which a wise adult explains to a startled or disdainful white child that negroes are normal human beings who just happen to look different. If I come across any other examples, I will list them. The difference between this scene and similar scenes is that Olivia is advocating for herself--no helpful white person is doing it for her. In-laws in trade (shudder)
      Olivia and Augustus tie the knot within the allotted time set out in her father’s will, even though it is clear he is harbouring a secret sorrow. He treats her well. They take a honeymoon trip to visit the “lions” of London, which is a slang term for the sights of London. She enjoys London, but no more than is proper for a heroine, because heroines must have a decided preference for the country. We also have some samples of the rude things that people say about the "sable goddess" behind her back but within her hearing in public places.
   George Merton and his wife are objectionable company. Letitia is lazy, languid and obviously holds Olivia in contempt; George is engaged in grubby commerce, which holds no interest for Augustus. Olivia, whose fortune, let’s remember, comes from the labour of enslaved people, says this of her intended spouse and she evidently means it as a compliment:
   “The plodding track of cent. per cent. and addition on addition, never suited the taste of Augustus, and leaving his brother to accumulate thousands upon thousands, he is content to live on the fortune which my father’s will bequeathed to him with his wife. The wise father [that is, Mr. Merton, Sr.] and the plodding brother, may laugh, but they cannot persuade him, that a ‘man’s life consisteth in the abundance of things which he possesseth,’ when the Word of God, and his own heart, both teach him the contrary.”
   Olivia shows similar disdain for other characters in the book who are from the merchant classes. Mutton Dressed as Lamb, Fashion History Museum   And objectionable neighbours
     So it’s off to the countryside, living on the interest of a mere 60,000 pounds (3,000 a year, more than Bingley’s fortune in Pride and Prejudice) where: “the conversation of my husband, a contemplation of the beauties of nature, the society of rational and well-informed friends; books, music, drawing, the power of being useful to my fellow creatures,--to my poorer neighbours;--the exercise of religious duties,--and the grateful heart, pouring out its thanks to the Almighty Bestower of such felicity!”
    It turns out that rational and well-informed friends are a little thin on the ground in the country, or at least, Olivia’s letters to Mrs. Milbanke back in Jamaica are taken up with describing the objectionable and ridiculous characters: there’s Colonel Singleton, an ageing lothario who thinks he’s devastating to the ladies. His spinster sister, Miss Singleton, makes herself “ridiculous” with her “poor shriveled and thin neck“ on display, along with her “bared ears, and elbows, and back, and bosom.” She plays no significant part in the story and is just there to be laughed at and held up as an example to avoid. 
     Of slightly more importance to an upcoming sub-plot are Lord and Lady Ingot, a couple with an immense East Indian fortune. More grubby commerce. A reminder though, that it's typical for novels of this era to feature a gallery of kooky characters who exhibit a variety of faults, as we find in Austen as well (just think of the people Anne Elliott has to contend with in Persuasion). It's also typical for people who made their money in trade to be portrayed as vulgar social climbers. At any rate, the antics of these characters fill out the pages between Olivia's wedding and the big Surprise that is coming.
     On the "rational and well-informed" neighbours side, we have Mr. Bellfield, (the upright and old-fashioned uncle to Lord Ingot), plus Mr. Waller, (tutor to the Ingot’s teenage son), the clergyman Rev. Lumley, and his family. Mr. Waller is sweet on Caroline Lumley, which gives us a minor romantic subplot.
    Olivia and Caroline, as good heroines, engage in acts of charity. They work on establishing a “School of Industry” for the poor of the village, and all their doings are relayed back to Mrs. Millbanke in Jamaica.  Spoilers ahead! Spoilers ahead! 
    This happy life in the country doesn’t last long. First, a mysterious woman, a “fair incognita,” comes to stay with a small child in a cottage nearby, arousing the curiosity of the entire neighbourhood. Olivia's sister-in-law Letitia comes for a visit, even though it’s obvious she hates Olivia and Olivia despises her.
     An extremely fierce storm rages through the neighbourhood, and the next morning, Mrs. Merton is strangely happy and interested when Olivia and Augustus decide they had better visit the fair incognita to see if she is all right. Just as they arrive, the F.I. rushes out, distressed (we later learn it is because the lothario Colonel Singleton has been pestering her) and runs into Augustus, who is… her husband!!!
     Olivia is “ruined,” because she is not married after all. She refuses to believe that Augustus could have willfully deceived her, but she receives no explanation for how this could have happened.  The sure refuge of the poor but virtuous heroine, a cottage in Wales. Moss Cottage, by John Steeple Where do you go in a case like this? Wales, of course!
    ​Olivia removes herself swiftly from her once-happy home, not before receiving a letter from the leering Colonel Singleton, offering to take her “under his protection,” if you get my drift. Her in-laws George and Letitia receive her fortune, and she has only a small pension to live on. She takes a cottage in Wales with the faithful Dido.
     But ere long, the faithful Dido discovers that Mr. Honeywood, their old shipboard companion, is one of the neighbours. When he visits to condole with Olivia, she responds: (and this is the theology of the author in a nutshell): “It is not for us, narrow-sighted beings as we are, to inquire into the dispensations of an all-wise and all-just God! Afflictions fit us for another world—for a statement of enjoyment; they make us eager to quit these scenes of transient sorrow, and to go to the regions of eternal bliss!”
   Olivia’s mulatto skin and her “ruined” state do not dissuade Honeywood from proposing marriage because he fell in love with her on the voyage to England, though Olivia had no idea! He also has a convenient inheritance due to the convenient death of a hitherto-unmentioned relative, which is certainly more genteel than just earning the money in trade. Honeywood proposes marriage in an impassioned and lengthy speech, which Olivia transcribes for Mrs. Millbanke back in Jamaica, but she rejects him: “I now, and to the last moment of my existence, shall consider myself the widowed wife of Augustus Merton.” (That doesn't mean she wishes him dead. She wishes him happy, but he is dead to her.)
     Further, she asks Mr. Honeywood not to visit any more; it would not be proper for her to receive him as a visitor, since they are both single, and the neighbours would talk. Backstory time
    Next, Olivia learns the backstory of Augustus, which explains everything. We turn back the clock a few years: her evil sister-in-law was the spoilt daughter of a rich tradesman in the city of London. Letitia was sent to the wrong kind of boarding school, the kind which only feeds her vanity. The family takes in a poor orphaned niece, the daughter of a clergyman, Angelina Forrester, who becomes the Cinderella of the household. Angelina is forced to read sentimental novels from the circulating library aloud to Letitia by the hour.
   Letitia's father and old Mr. Merton are business partners and they hit on the idea of marriage between their offspring. Letitia prefers the youngest son, Augustus, but Augustus refuses the match because he doesn't like her. He falls in love with Angelina. They secretly marry.
    When Letitia and her mother find out, they arrange for Augustus to be sent to Ireland on business. Then they deceive Angelina into believing that Augustus tricked her into a sham marriage ceremony with a fake minister. The Fate worse than Death! That means she's a ruined woman! They pay for Angelina, now pregnant, to go away into Wales. “She only wished to hide her shame and sorrow in obscurity!” A convenient bout of smallpox kills all the servants with any knowledge of what has transpired, and Augustus is told that Angelina is dead, too.
     Augustus is therefore acquitted of having deceived Olivia as to the existence of his first wife.
     So… instead of being a knave, he’s a bit of a fool? Never mind, let’s roll with it.
    Letitia goes on to marry the eldest son, George, yet she still burns to revenge herself further on Augustus for rejecting her. With the news about the Jamaican heiress, her opportunity comes, plus she has the chance to poach Olivia’s fortune.
       But... wait a minute... the sister-in-law could have revealed that Angelina was alive right away, and she’d have gotten the money right away, because Augustus couldn't marry Olivia if he was already married.
       Then we wouldn’t have the central drama of the story, would we? Deathbed repentance Confession and Repentance
      Olivia learns all this weeks later, after Letitia Merton--wait a minute, when Angelina ran into the arms of Augustus, why didn't he exclaim: “They told me you were dead!” and why didn't she say, “Well, did you ask where I was buried, or speak to the attending physician when you got back from Ireland, or anything?” This could have been cleared up in two minutes and it dragged out for weeks and weeks?
       That's right, the full story doesn't come out until Letitia Merton “was seized by a violent and alarming illness" and confessed the entire plot. She produced “proofs of her guilt.”
        Oh, now we’re asking for proof? Why didn't anyone ask for proof before?
        Facing Almighty judgement, Mrs. Merton repents, and Olivia forgives her.
       We also discover that the upright and decent old Mr. Bellfield--wait a minute. If Augustus thought he was a widower, why didn't Olivia notice when he signed the marriage register as a "widower." He had nothing to hide in that respect. So why--
         Never mind. As I was saying, decent, upright Mr. Bellfield turns out to be the great-uncle of Mr. Honeywood and the nephew of the Ingots. Mr. Bellfield moves to  Wales to live with Honeywood, because he is much kinder than those vulgar Ingots. He visits Olivia and pleads Honeywood’s suit, but she refuses again.
       Olivia is called upon throughout to exert the highest levels of moral fortitude, which calls for a lot of referring to herself in the third person. Her faithful servant Dido also speaks of herself as “Dido” and in the third person, (“me don’t mind that though”). Olivia does it out of literary convention and Dido is doing it because, although she's lived amongst English-speaking people all her life, she hasn't mastered subject versus object pronouns--and no wonder, if the people around her start talking to each other third-person style whenever they get worked up.     "Is it the venerable, the good Mr. Bellfield that seeks to persuade this beating heart to become an apostate to its first love?" {Olivia says to Mr. Bellfield]
     "Is it Miss Fairfield," [Bellfield responds sternly] "is it Miss Fairfield who talks of a passion [for Augustus, married to someone else] which she ought never to name?--which she ought to exert all her fortitude, all her resolution, to extirpate for ever from her heart?" Missionaries spreading Christianity Religious moral
​     After all the unhappy marriages we've read about in this book (including Mrs. Honeywood’s ill-starred marriage to a West Indian planter), the wrap-up gives us some happy unions. In addition to the reunited Augustus and Angelina, Mr. Waller is given a good living and he marries Charlotte Lumley.
     But what about Olivia? Will she relent and marry Mr. Honeywood? No, she says that had Augustus died, she would never have remarried: "this bosom could never have known another lord." The fact that he is not dead makes no difference to her. She explains this several times.
​     She returns to Jamaica and her friend Mrs. Milbanke, with some of her fortune restored, to do some Uplifting: “I shall again zealously engage myself in ameliorating the situation, in instructing the minds—in mending the morals of our poor blacks.” Despite what's happened to her in England, Olivia gives the nation a respectful benediction because it has produced a few excellent men, like Augustus, Mr. Bellfield, and Rev. Lumley.
      We conclude with the double lessons the author hoped to convey: (1) “there is no situation in which the mind (which is strongly imbued with the truths of our most holy faith, and the consciousness of a divine Disposer of Events) may not resist itself against misfortune, and become resigned to its fate" (and 2) "teach one skeptical European to look with a compassionate eye towards the despised native of Africa..."          I surmise that the author was bold enough to suggest that a woman of color could marry a white man on a basis of social equality, but in the end, she did not insist upon the point. Olivia's notable piety and her life of celibacy  can be compared  to Yamboo, another novel with a saintly black main character. He inherits an English estate but does not dream of presuming to marry the (white) woman he loves. The person of color can be accepted into English society--but only so far... Modern approaches to the novel     
    The modern reissue of The Woman of Colour is issued by Broadview Press, edited and with an introduction by Lyndon J. Dominique. This edition includes some valuable appendices with a listing of other books of the era which include people of colour. ​You can find some more examples here as well in my earlier posts. In his introduction, Dominique points out that the Jamaican legislature  strictly limited  the amount of monies the mixed-race children of white Jamaicans, or blacks in general, could inherit. Although this isn't spelled out in the book, perhaps this accounts for Olivia's father's strange will.
   Lyndon J. Dominique discusses The Woman in Colour in this online lecture, adroitly managing to interpret the motivations of the main character without once referencing the Christian faith she explicitly cites throughout the novel. He also defines the word "accursed" as meaning "a strong dislike for someone." The book discussion starts at 17:00.

About the author
     The question of authorship of A Woman of Colour is an open question because of a tangled history of attributions of titles, including some deceptive attributions, on the title pages of other novels of the period, coupled with the common custom of using anonymity. This is why several now-obscure authors have been credited with this title, such as Mrs. E.M. Foster and Mrs. E.G. Bayfield. I discussed another novel attributed to Bayfield, The Splendour of Adversity (1814), here. This article by the Women's Print History Project explains the tangled attribution chain and even includes a flowchart! 
​   Although written in the first person, which implies that it was written by a woman of color, the novel is presented in the "here are some letters which I've found/been given" style, aka a framing device. The author presents herself as the "editor" of the work, and leaves it open as to whether Olivia Fairchild is a "real or imagined" person. Presenting a novel as a collection of real letters, or somebody's real diary, was not uncommon in the 18th century, but I think both epistolary novels and the "this is a true story" gambit were outdated by 1809. ​ Previous post:  Cecily, the resilient heroine

CMP#184 Cecily, the heiress who bounces back

“[W]hen young women of respectable situation, either tolerate or applaud vice, the wretched morals of the age are fixed beyond redemption.” 
​                                                              -- Mr. Delamere, in a typical prosing mood, in Cecily Fitz-Owen CMP#184    Book Review & synopsis: Cecily Fitz-Owen; or, a Sketch of Modern Manners (1805)  A kindly advisor ​    Like our previous author, the anonymous author of Cecily Fitz-Owen had a lot he wanted to get off his chest, and so the story of our heroine Cecily’s search for true love is interspersed with much commentary and moralizing on various topics from both the narrator and Cecily's friends the Delameres. Janeites will recall that Austen playfully joked that her novel Pride and Prejudice needed more such digressions:  "it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story: an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté, or anything that would form a contrast." But she didn't mean it, of course. Austen is not as didactic as other authors, as I've learned. The didactic tone and the overall technique of this novel reminds me of Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife, except that Cecily Fitz-Owen has a little more plot and arguably is better written than Coelebs.
    Another comparison to consider-- are there any intelligent, older people who give excellent advice and admonition to any of our Austen heroines? Mrs. Gardiner comes to mind as playing a small role in that way, but apart from that, I can't think of anything in Austen that's comparable. Leaving out love interest mentors, like Mr. Knightley, that is. 
     With so many digressions, the author has not left much room to devote to Cecily. I’m going to skip over the digressions, the “Sketch of Modern Manners” part, and focus on Cecily Fitz-Owen for now, then get back to the digressions, because they are of social interest. Bing AI image An eligible heiress and the dangers of novel-reading
  ​Cecily, an orphaned underage heiress, has two guardians, a lawyer and an ambitious churchman. She mostly lives with Rev. Trollope and his equally ambitious wife. Cecily’s first venture into romance teaches her how treacherous the world can be. While staying with the Trollopes, a handsome and engaging relative comes to visit.  Cecily falls for Captain Thomas Crawford and the Trollopes happily anticipate folding Cecily's fortune into their family.
   When Cecily goes to visit another family, the captain follows and urges her to elope with him, but she refuses. Later, she accidentally overhears Crawford arguing with a young woman named Fanny O'Byrne. He had promised Fanny marriage; she lived with him and bore him a daughter. He tells Fanny he will support her and their child with “a liberal allowance” once he marries the heiress. He then discovers Cecily fainted at full length in the grass.
    Crawford realizes he has ruined his chances with Cecily forever, (“Eternal furies blast you!”) and we last hear of him shipping out to the East Indies (the novelistic equivalent of exiting stage left).
​      Cecily consoles poor Fanny and hears her backstory. She is from modest means and was apprenticed to a milliner: “The young women in the shop were in the constant habit of reading novels—The amusement was too gratifying for me not to partake of it; and I here found, in volumes without end, that love was the great object of life—that every woman, the least interesting, must be deeply plunged in the passion.”
    Although Fanny is a fallen woman, Cecily and Mrs. Delamere combine to set her up in business “as a person for whom we felt an interest,” on the condition that should she ever receive an offer of marriage, she must disclose “the errors of her youth” to her potential husband. Fanny then drops out of the narrative.  Stock character: the gluttonous clergyman Enter our hero--and some mystery
​    ​Without any great fanfare--no encounter such as a carriage accident or a near-drowning--Cecily meets another young man, Henry Darleville. Henry is withdrawn and perpetually morose because he was brought up in utter seclusion by his reclusive mother who arrived in the neighbourhood under mysterious circumstances. Henry adored his mother and with her death, he’s left without anyone in his life, having also, as we learn, lost his best friend and his first love (to worldly ambition, not death). Mr. Delamere kindly advises him to get out and mingle in the world.
    Meanwhile, Cecily’s two guardians try to pressure Cecily into marriage with Rev. Trollope’s noble relative, Lord Layton. But Layton has led a dissolute life and Cecily, with the backing of the Delameres, firmly refuses him.
    Trollope is frustrated because he hoped to benefit from facilitating the match of the heiress and the nobleman: “Thus might all greatness be put a stop to, and everything lost through the idle delicacies of a foolish girl, and the squeamish fastidiousness of a canting moralist [ie Mr. Delamere]."
    Trollope still hopes to become a bishop: dreams of preferment “floated in his brain—when the shrill voice of Mrs. Trollope was suddenly heard crying—'Dean, why Dean, the tea has been ready this half hour!' Canons and prebends in long succession—doors suddenly expanded—the organ’s swell echoing along the aisles—the awe-struck multitude—all, all vanished—and the Dean sat down to tea with Mrs. Trollope.” But just like the ambitious Dr. Grant in Mansfield Park, Dean Trollope is soon a victim of his appetite: “The dean sat down to a repast which bishops might have envied. The bottled ale was excellent—the ducks roasted to a turn—the fricasseed veal and scalloped oysters were not to be resisted—and, to crown the whole, such stewed cheese had never been tasted; no, not even at the table of his Grace the Archbishop…”
    The following morning, Dean Trollope’s “six brown bays [of his coach and six] were waiting…[but] The Dean was already called another way, had already commenced another journey. In the middle of the night the gout had seized his stomach; and, at half past eight o’clock in the morning—he died!”  The mystery unveiled! (ie, spoilers)
    Lord Layton, the rejected suitor, goes off and drinks himself to death. His father, Lord Merefield, summons Henry Darleville to his side and asks to hear his backstory. Turns out Merefield was quite struck by how much Darleville resembles.... himself! Henry explains his mother never told him who she was or who his father was, but she left a sealed packet with him that was only to be opened if someone who claimed to know her asked to see it. (Henry is such a mama’s boy). “That mother, that dear and tender mother, fond idol of my affection!-"
    “—Was my wife!” groaned Lord Merefield, “my disgraced, my innocent, my murdered wife!” –clasping his hands on his forehead, he rushed out of the room, leaving Darleville aghast, stupefied with horror and surprise.”
    Meaning, in other words, that his recently deceased wastrel son was the product of Lord Merefield’s second, bigamous marriage, while Henry, the son of his first wife, is the proper heir.​
​    It turns out Henry’s mother agreed to leave her home after Lord Merefield saw her being embraced by her long-lost first love (who did not die in a shipwreck, as she thought). Since she had fainted when she saw William Daubeney, she was not responsible for the embrace--he embraced her.  But Merefield assumed the worst, of course, and even questioned the paternity of the child she was carrying.
    Henry’s mother never attempted to reconcile with her husband, she never prevented him from entering into a second, bigamous marriage, she  never saw her long-lost love William again. She spent the rest of her life being gently sorrowful behind the high walls of her country home, and condemning her son, the true heir, to COVID-like social isolation for his entire life. Because this, folks, is true feminine delicacy. “”[W]hilst her husband continued to view her as a criminal, could she wish her name, her history, to appear to the world! One thing only she intreated—if, by any happy accident, [her husband] should become convinced of her innocence, she implored him to inform her that her purity was no longer doubted.”
​       Anyway, now that Henry's the new Lord Layton and the future Lord Merefield, Henry is worthy to address Cecilia. Her guardian, lawyer Fusby, gets busy drawing up the elaborate marriage articles, and the pair are happily wed. Cue the Welsh harpists and dancers legging it to Of Noble Race was Shenkin.   As a love story, Cecily Fitz-Owen is rather tqme. You don't really see hero and heroine falling in love with each other. 
 Cecily, our heroine, is no shrinking violet. She is observant, compassionate, and she shows firmness in turning down unwanted suitors.
  Henry Darleville the hero is not called upon to do anything but try and cheer up a little. He, like Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, is released by circumstances. Like Edward he shuns a public life and just wants domestic happiness.”
     The narrator tends to hop from one topic to another, but there are many fine flourishes of prose, such as in the Dickensian opening description of Cecilia’s guardians: “Counsellor Fusby talked! Counsellor Fusby blustered! Counsellor Fusby fumed! But all was going wrong, till, on cross-examining the adversary’s evidence, three witnesses were leered out of their testimony by the wily glance of his eye, and there more were sunk to the bottom of the witness-box by the dignity of his frown." Other features​​We have many examples of marriages contracted for mercenary or ambitious motives in this novel. Marrying without love is bad, but so is expecting to live on love and romance. Cecily’s wise mentor Mrs. Delamere (who enjoys one of the few happy marriages in the book) advises Cecily to cultivate her own interests and not live exclusively for her husband. This way, they won’t get tired of each other and secondly, if she is widowed, she will have avocations and people to live for. Cecily also learns a valuable lesson when she briefly visits an unhappy couple, the Treadrairs: “the systematic art of habitually teasing—of consenting to be perpetually miserable, on condition of being able to inflict perpetual misery on others, was, to her, equally new and horrible. In Mrs. Treadrair was beheld a disposition, wantonly prepared to feel anger at whatever should occur; resolutely bent on being dissatisfied, and the only gratification she could enjoy in return, was the satisfaction to think, that whilst she vented her spleen on others, she, in some degree, decreased her own misery, and, in a still greater degree, created misery in them.”I can’t believe what it was like to attend a playhouse in those days. Everybody just chatted throughout the performance! The author describes the conversations that go on all around the heroine and her mentor host and hostess, but the Delameres also carry on long conversations with Cecily, explaining the characters and faults of the people she’s overhearing. We have effete fops from the city: (“Why, just so: --breakfast at two;--Park—Broad-Street—St. James’s—auction—curricle—picture-gallery, till six; --dine till ten;--play—opera—coffee-house, till twelve’ –gaming till four; --and da capo—da capo—da capo.—Oh, tis horrid!”) or ignorant country squires who talk of nothing but horses and hunting. There's gamblers, there's a know-it-all. The women are all equally contemptible or silly.Some modern scholars have claimed to find lesbian undertones in Emma and Mansfield Park. Hey guys--check out how Henry talks about parting from his best friend Henry Carlton “the hour of parting was to me an hour of anguish” and reuniting with him: “I folded him in my arms.”The author works in an incest tease--oddly popular in those days--because Henry Darleville’s first love Julia is the daughter of Sir William Daubeney. When Henry’s mother hears the name “William Daubeney,” she faints, and Sir William turns pale when he meets Henry. The mystery is only cleared upon later, but leaves the reader to speculate that Julia and Henry are half-siblings.Fornication and adultery and social class: Fanny O'Byrne the milliner lived in sin with Captain Crawford. Had she been a woman of higher social standing, I think the author would have been obliged to kill her off. Because of their disparity in social class, Cecily can become Fanny's patron, but never her friend. Julia, the hero's first love, makes a glittering marriage and then commits adultery just one time with Henry Carlton. Out of remorse she goes off and lives in seclusion in the country. She and Henry Darleville, her first love, will never find their way back to each other. She is now beyond the pale. About the author/contemporary reviews
​    ​The author is anonymous and no other novels have been attributed to him/her. Somewhere along the line, the author was identified by one name: “Frank,” but that name does not appear on the title page and I don’t how this suggestion originated.
    Novels that "lashed" the manners of the age generally received praise from the reviewers. The European Magazine said: “If a happy talent at delineating characters and catching ‘the manners living as they rise,’ be a claim to praise in the career of Novel-writing, we cannot deny that claim in the instance before us. While the reader is amused by the various portraits that are sketched, he or she may learn useful lessons for their conduct in life, by drawing just inferences from the incidents with which the work abounds.”
    If the book does not improve people’s morals, it will certainly do them no harm: “as we give children coral, who will otherwise rub their guns with the first thing at hand, so we recommend such innoxious volumes as the present to those literary babies, novel-readers, who might, if we did not, cut their [teeth on] what would, probably, not even have the merit of being harmless."
    Final note, the printer of the novel is one W. Blackader! For all you fans of the Blackadder television series...

Previous post:   Ellen, the lucky heroine--or is she?

CMP#183: Ellen, the lucky heroine--or is she?

Clutching My Pearls is mostly about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality.  Click here  for the first in the series. For more about other female writers of Austen's time, click the "Authoresses" tag in the Categories list to the right. CMP#183   Book Review: Mystery and Confidence (1814) -- with bonus amazing
                 resemblance to another famous novel Bing AI generated image      We’ve had heroines who were foundlings who turned out to be the daughters of Earls in previous novels, but the heroine of Mystery and Confidence really is a farmer’s daughter who marries an Earl. Ellen Powis really hits the jackpot. Constantine Mordaunt, aka Lord St. Aubyn, loves Ellen for her beauty and good principles. He is an older mentor/lover to her, teaching her about literature and art. But all is not what it seems (cue ominous music). He is haunted by some secret sorrow: “Ask not, inquire not… let me, if possible, forget the dreadful, the hateful subject…”
   The drama of the story takes place after the wedding. Ellen doesn't know that her husband is an earl until after the honeymoon; she thinks he’s simply a wealthy gentleman. Then Pinchard adds in gothic elements such as travelogue sequences, sleepwalking, and a murder mystery. 
    Ellen knows only that her husband had a first wife who died abroad, and every now and then he gets moody, breaks out in exclamations and abruptly leaves the room. Has she married a murderer or something? No, it couldn’t be. She has complete confidence in him, despite the mystery he refuses to unveil... Happily Ever After?
      In Volume 2, Ellen takes up her new life as Lady St. Aubyn. Like all good heroines, Ellen prefers the innocent pleasures of the country to the dissipation of the city. We meet the neighbors, an assortment of side characters useful for displaying laughable or admirable character traits, even if they don't advance the plot. There’s a “mutton-dressed-as-lamb” old maid, a neighbor who likes to complain a lot, and a beautiful young girl, pious and learned, who is dying of consumption. She studies Greek and hopes to learn Hebrew, but she is not, heaven forbid, pedantic about it.
    More adventures await in London, where Ellen goes to a masquerade ball where--absolutely nothing untoward happens! Talk about a plot twist. Ellen's good sense and sweet nature win over Lord St. Aubyn's proud and unbending aunt, who gets “the better of the shock he gave my pride, call it prejudice if you will, by marrying you." ​   When they go to the opera, Constantine starts acting strange again because the opera they are watching, Artaserse (1730), features a man accused of murder who cannot prove his innocence.
​   As well, in the lobby, Ellen bumps into her old village suitor Charles Ross, who assumes that she’s a painted doxy seduced by Mr. Mordaunt (he’s been to sea and hadn’t heard she was married). Luckily, they clear up the obvious misunderstanding in no time.
   Just kidding. No, they don’t. Ellen faints, Charles insults Constantine, and they arrange to fight a duel, and then Constantine assumes that Ellen is carrying a torch for Charles. Things get pretty serious before Constantine stops raving long enough to listen to reason. 
   The couple are reconciled and go back at their country estate to await the birth of their first child. Constantine’s ward Edmund de Montfort shows up, which forces Constantine to finally explain to Ellen why he keeps smiting his forehood and rushing out of the room. Edmund is the younger brother of Constantine's first wife, who died under mysterious circumstances in Spain. In a cave with a gunshot to the back of her head, in fact. With his dueling pistol left at the scene of the crime. All the circumstantial evidence points to him, when really (he swears) Rosolia was murdered by her lover, who hasn’t been seen since.  Countertenor Franco Fagioli sings Vol solcando un mar crud from Artaserses. 
​
I am crossing a cruel sea
Without sails or a sailmaker.
The wave threatens, the sky is darkening.
The wind increases and I have no skill
Or courage to seek to save myself,
But I am forced to continue.
How unhappy I am!
In this plight I am abandoned by all.
I am left alone with my innocence
Which leads me to shipwreck. Bejarano. A Bolero dancer, 1842 Spoiler time--Secrets Revealed
   As an aside, I think the author chose to make Rosolia and her brother Edmund half-Spanish to account for their tempestuous natures, and it allows her to place the melodramatic section of her plot in the exotic setting of Spain.
     Edmund, no less than Constantine, is haunted by the death of Rosolia. He prowls around sleepwalking. exclaiming in broken phrases about his lost sister. We learn in the backstory that Rosolia neglected her infant son, who died. She ignored her husband, flirted, danced suggestively in public, and started passing on her jewels and money to her lover in preparation for running away with him.  If that's not bad enough, we are told she took no pleasure in the sublimities of the Spanish landscape: the “charming and picturesque views…. Alas! The heart of Rosolia was shut to them all.”
    Edmund has now reached his legal majority (in his case, the age of 24), which is when he promised to either absolve his brother-in-law of murder, or to actively prosecute him as a murderer.
    So how do we get out of this situation? How does Constantine clear his name and solve the mystery? "Wonder-working Providence!"
   The author takes our hero and heroine back to Wales so Ellen can visit her father and show off her baby boy. For the first time, the narrator mentions that this Welsh village just happens to be near the sea. And there just happens to be a violent storm. And there just happens to be a shipwreck, and among the survivors rescued by Constantine and the men of the village, we have everybody necessary for wrapping up the plot—young Charles Ross is swept ashore to his home village, along with a mysterious “Algerine,” who turns out to be the fugitive De Sylva, Rosolia’s lover. Plus, also bobbing in to shore is a Catholic priest who can act as an impartial witness to take down De Sylva's confession in his native French, to send to Edmund. (De Sylva claims he tripped and the gun went off by accident, so he fled with the jewels.)
   Well, the great Charles Dickens was not above using a similar amazing coincidence in David Copperfield. And the shipwreck ties in with the opera Artaserse, because Arbace compares his situation to being shipwrecked.
 ​  De Sylva dies after declaring that Constantine is completely innocent. Constantine and Ellen live happily ever after. Status symbol and fashion statement ​ Other features
   Pinchard likes to drop in allusions to literature. She occasionally commits poetry and she starts her chapter headings with quotations from the poets and from Shakespeare. These quotes, like the opera, tie Pinchard's tale to themes in literature and poetry, such as jealousy.
    In her spare time, the heroine does charitable deeds for the poor.
    There’s a passing mention of “two black servants” in the lavishly decorated home of a lounging society woman who is fond of turbans and incense and revealing attire. They are exotic displays of her wealth and taste.
    Slavery comes into the conclusion of the novel when we discover where the villain who seduced the first Lady St. Aubyn has been hiding all this time: he was kidnapped by Algerine pirates and enslaved in North Africa. The enslavement of Britons by Algerine pirates is simply a plot convenience here, a fact of life. It's another marker of the villainy of the villain that he willingly converted to Islam when adopted by a Muslim merchant during his captivity. “Robber! Murderer! Vile apostate from thy God!” exclaims Constantine. He probably doesn't appreciate the sublimity of nature, either. Mrs. Danvers and the second Mrs. De Winter Okay, speaking of "intertextuality"...
     ...which is the academic term for resemblances/influences between works of fiction, you can't miss the similarities between this novel and Rebecca.
   As it happens, when Daphne Du Maurier published her best-seller in 1938, she was accused of plagiarizing from a Brazilian novelist, Carolina Nabuco, as well as from the author of a novel called Blind Windows. This synopsis makes it clear that there's no significant similarity between Blind Windows and Rebecca--only a big house and an older man marrying a younger girl. The Brazilian novel is eerily comparable to Rebecca, according to a Nov 16, 1941 New York Times article, except that the denouement is not so dramatic.
 There are many similarities between Rebecca and Mystery and Confidence (villainous and unfaithful first wife dies mysteriously, older man haunted by the past marries naïve girl, big country house), yet there are many differences as well. Ellen is amazed but not completely intimidated by her elevation in society. Her husband's housekeeper, Mrs. Bayfield, is fiercely loyal to him, not to his dead wife. Constantine is secretive and moody but he's not as deranged as Max De Winter. But... apart from all the other similarities, in both books, the mystery is resolved because of a shipwreck! I mean, come on! Did Du Maurier read Pinchard? You have to wonder. ​About the author
    Elizabeth Sibthorpe Pinchard (1768-1835) married a lawyer and according to a public genealogy website, had eight children. A memorial plaque to Elizabeth and her husband was placed in St. Mary Magdalene Church in Taunton. Just as with Jane Austen, this plaque does not mention Elizabeth Pinchard's identity as an author.
    Mystery and Confidence received a favourable review from the Critical Review: "This tale is naturally told, and it also possesses the advantage of being disencumbered from episodes, under plots, and counterplots, which, of late years, chilling thought! seems to have become necessary to eke out five or six volumes of novel or romance. It contains one clear unbroken chain of events, connected by a moral, interesting and unaffected narrative.”
   I found Mystery and Confidence to be a quick read with a number of likeable characters. The heroine is "a picture of perfection" but she's not obnoxious. There are some nice little vignettes of gossipy village life. The backstory of Rosolia is Gothically entertaining and the travelogue sections make me want to visit Wales.
       Pinchard wrote several other novels as well as works for young people, such as the best-seller The Blind Child (1791). ​Bonus bonus thoughts: Austen echoes
  This 1814 novel provides many examples of incidents and techniques which, if you had only read Jane Austen, you might assume were unique to Austen: The hero meets the heroine when he helps her get home in a thunderstorm when she slips descending a hill, he uses his influence to raise Charles Ross from midshipman to lieutenant, he's a mentor as well as a lover, the proud aunt deplores the marriage and is rude to Ellen (at first), the heroine goes to her room to compose herself because she is too happy to appear in company, and the narrator skips over the actual proposal scene.
​   Of course there are many things in Pinchard that we don't find in Austen, such as masquerade balls, white slavery and anti-Catholicism. And when it comes to giving the reader clues about a mystery, Austen reached a level of sophistication in Emma far beyond what we find in Mystery and Confidence.  Previous post:    A comic novel and a sweet heroine

CMP#182 Charlotte, a down-to-earth heroine

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. ​ CMP#182     Book Review: I'll Consider Of It! (1812) by Anonymous Imperfect heroines -- Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) in Northanger Abbey      I’ll Consider of It! is a strange book, but it’s a refreshing change of pace from all the deadly serious, “virtue under threat” novels that I’ve been reading lately. I should have thought of this sooner—the way to get away from stories where the plot impetus revolves around the chastity of the heroine, is to switch to comedic novels. Jane Austen, for example, wrote comedy.
     Of course, dramatic novels contained some comic leavening, usually provided by a garrulous servant who speaks with a regional accent. And comic authors still inveighed against the follies of the times. The anonymous author of I’ll Consider of It!! weighs in on a lot of topics, such as female education, boarding schools, animal cruelty, unhealthy corseting, and uncharitable people, but it is an essentially light-hearted novel. It was written in imitation of a fabulously successful book which had come out the year before, titled Thinks I to Myself. The narrator and characters keep repeating '"I'll consider of it!" on every other page, which gets tiresome. But the odd thing it, the narrator of I’ll Consider of It frequently interrupts himself to take a poke at Thinks I To Myself. I’ll get back to the strange relationship between TITM and ICoI later.
   First, let’s meet our heroine, Charlotte Clarkson, who lives with her paternal grandfather, General Littlefame, and her widowed mother. The family are neither wealthy nor of high status, but the author arranged that Mrs. Clarkson fortuitously won five thousand pounds in the lottery, which is enough to get by with a single servant and to send Charlotte to a good boarding school. Mrs. Clarkson has high hopes for her lovely daughter… Charlotte and her friend Valencia at boarding school. Bing AI image   Certainly, she hopes Charlotte will marry well, but her main ambition, oddly enough, is that Charlotte will become a successful author, and writing and publishing is one of the many topics taken up in this discursive novel.
​    Here is part of the author’s first description of Charlotte. Charlotte sang well, but “she could not endure the fatigue and trouble of learning music, or the scientific, or rather flourishing part of that charming accomplishment, she always declared her inability when called upon to perform. She was very fond of working in the garden, digging, hoeing, riding on horseback, feeding poultry, and playing with dogs and cats; she was not fond or working at her needle; wristbanding of shirts was her aversion, and she hated the trouble of writing a letter.”
    Janeites will, I think, be reminded of another heroine who was created before 1800 but wasn’t published until 1818. At any rate, Charlotte is not interested in becoming an author.
      Charlotte is a good-hearted, good-natured girl, who is quite aware of her feminine appeal. I think the author gives a more realistic picture of a young lady than you’ll find in the melodramas. For example, instead of having only one true love, Charlotte has three suitors—the young and handsome Mr. Dorimon, who is wealthy but avaricious, the older but handsome Major Farringdon, proud of his family tree, and Henry Denbigh, an open-hearted young man who is the heir to his father’s huge East Indian fortune. When she thinks Mr. Dorimon has injured himself in a fall from his horse, she tries her best to faint, as a sentimental heroine should. When Major Farringdon calls in the morning while her hair is still in curl papers, she races upstairs to her bedroom. Man Milliner (note the yardstick): 'Indeed Mr Fribble... your yard is too short by an Inch.' Lots of topics and characters
        Heroes and heroines in comic novels have impediments keeping them apart, just as they do in melodramas, it’s just everything is handled with a humorous tone. Charlotte and Henry (for Henry is our hero) meet accidentally on the street when he pulls her out of the way of a runaway carriage, but they don’t know each other’s names, and he has to go off to Madeira to retrieve some of his father’s papers. She meanwhile, imagines herself in love with Mr. Dorimon but also is attracted to Major Farringdon, and he to her, but he can’t overcome the fact that her father was a lowly tradesman, a "man milliner," no less. Mr. Dorimon’s parents also discourage his courtship of Charlotte because she has no dowry, but that changes when General Littlefame suddenly inherits thirty thousand pounds, (as one does). 
   Although Major Farringdon is faulted for his vanity and vacillation, he is portrayed as an honorable man and he appears to be the mouthpiece for the author’s opinions. For example, here he is talking about the faults of modern women and how he lost his first wife: “they are utter strangers to the domestic duties, and the rearing of their own offspring, when they come to be mothers, which, however, the cold steel of their long busked stays, which many do not throw off when even in a state of pregnancy, bids fair to deprive them of the sacred title of a parent, and to depopulate our country more than an eight years disastrous war. Such,” added he, with a sigh, “was the sad and fatal result of Mrs. Farringdon’s inordinate love of modish attire; her only child was destroyed before it ever saw the light, and continual spasm and cramps terminated in an inward complaint in the chest, which baffled all the skill of the physicians, and soon sent the victim of fashion to the tomb.” Lady con artist tries to enchant the miserly Mr. Caseknife, but fails. Bing AI image  Cons and Characters of Color
    We also have two con artists, a brother and sister who spent most of their lives in India, the son and daughter of "an English drum-major" and his wife. They take on half-a-dozen names in the novel but I’ll call them the Jenkinses. There's a fun episode where they try to pretend a letter revealing their evil plans is actually part of a manuscript for a novel. They pretend they've been offered one hundred guineas for the manuscript, a sly inside publishing joke at a time when some publishers were paying as little as ten pounds to aspiring authors. Mr. Jenkins "was of that very dark complexion, as served to engender doubts in [his father's] breast, whether or no he was not the unlawful offspring of some man of colour; but, as some men of title, high birth and fashion, very quietly put their branching antlers in their pockets, so the poor drum-major thought it best to do the same.” The narrator then goes on to say things about mixed-race unions that I won't repeat here but it might be of interest to researchers; it's at Volume 2, page 53.
   That said, Jenkins' racial heritage is not used to explain his criminal propensities, rather the opposite; the narrator suggests it is contact with Western culture that has corrupted him. Jenkins' multiracial identity is useful for the plot because it enables him to pretend he is a famous dead-but-reincarnated “brahmin,” or Indian mystic--because, and this might truly seem bizarre in an English novel published in 1812--another theme of the book is reincarnation. The author uses Hinduism and reincarnation the same way a gothic novelist might use ghosts: “Jenkins, by some chemical preparation, made the lights burn dim, and played, for a short time, a faint phosphoric blaze over his own head; then after having duped the enthusiastic Henry [Denbigh] of his watch and valuable pocket-book, he stole softly out, slipped off his Brahmin’s disguise in one of the passages, walked boldly into street, and walked quietly home.” Coincidences and a plucky heroine
​    Things kick into high gear in the third volume, when the author adds some new characters who all converge on London for various reasons. Charlotte realizes she doesn't want to marry Mr. Dorimon when he is cruelly dismissive to a poor old English ex-pat looking for a job as a clerk. I enjoyed the scene in which she firmly breaks up with him, with his parents and her mother and grandfather present. Soon after, she is coincidentally reunited with Henry Denbigh and realizes she’s found her soul mate: “The mind of the amiable Charlotte, relieved of the leaden weight which had oppressed it… and full of the remembrance of Henry’s fine person, his elegance of manners, and the benevolent and generous disposition he had evinced sunk into a calm and sweet repose, as she prest her downy pillow, where visions of happiness flitted before her fancy, and bound her sleeping senses in rosy fetters.”
    What she doesn't know, but learns later, is that Henry is the source of the thirty thousand pounds that lifted her from being a nobody to an heiress, nor did he know about her existence generously shared his inheritance with General Littlefame. Well, in this book the coincidences are satisfying. We learn the poor old ex-pat’s backstory and his unfortunate ties to the nefarious doings of the Jenkinses in India. All the pigeons come home to roost at a gambling den in London, when Henry Denbigh catches Jenkins in the act of fleecing one of his friends. The victims get restitution and the Jenkinses are sent to New South Wales.    So, I enjoyed the plot of I'll Consider of It, including some subplots I don't have space to mention, As the author himself says, you can skip past the digressions if you don't like them. There are a few digressions I liked because they give a vignette of social history. Here is a digression on sealing wax on letters: “how pleased is the sailor or the soldier, when he beholds the thimble’s impression on the... sealing wax, which only half secures the letter’s narrow fold, from his beloved Susan, or Patty, or Sally, no matter which, or the half wafer, well punctured by the needle’s point! And how delighted are the girls, or wives, in their turn, to break the seal of the lover or husband’s letter, imprest with the button, marking the number of the soldier’s regiment.”  Authorial rivalry?
   It's one thing to write your book in imitation of a best-seller. Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife spawned a host of imitations. Gothic novelists were basically copying Anne Radcliffe. Then there were the “season” novels I’ve discussed elsewhere. But here, an author has imitated the discursive style and lighthearted tone of Thinks I to Myself with the similarly titled I’ll Consider of It, but then repeatedly takes a poke at the book he is imitating! 
  I’ll Consider of It got no reviews when it came out, which is unfortunate, as a reviewer might have shed some light on the author's sly allusions to famous people and nobility, for example, the Countess of C____ and O____, and a review would have mentioned this author’s strange fixation on the novel he is trying to imitate. Sense and Sensibility, I'll Consider of it, and Edward Nares' second novel, I Says, Says I, all listed in the Edinburgh Review, Nov 1812. As well, Traits of Nature by Fanny Burney's sister, advertised as "Miss Burney."  A reminder that these forgotten best-sellers were contemporary with the "all perfect Austen." Thinks I To Myself frontispiece, 7th edition   Jane Austen's wealthy brother Edward had a copy of Thinks I To Myself in his library, a library Jane used whenever she had the chance.
  The author of TITM is Edward Nares. Thinks I To Myself got lukewarm reviews at best but it went through six editions in less than a year, and a seventh edition with a different publisher, which suggests Nares had a break with his first publisher, perhaps a disagreement over money matters. The 7th edition included a frontispiece of the author, hiding his face. The narrator of ICoI keeps referring to the number of editions of TITM.  He seems to be hinting at some inside knowledge about the reasons behind the success of Thinks I To Myself.
     This strange attack on one novel by another novelist has led some people to suggest that the same author wrote both books and it's just a running gag. Possibly, but TITM and the follow-up novel, I Says, Says I, are written in the first person. I’ll Consider of It I'll  A tale, in which 'Thinks I to myself' is partially considered, is written in the third person and is published by a different publisher. And although ICoI is written in imitation, it still feels like a different voice, at least to me.​    
​     Nares has an interesting backstory. He was an Oxford vicar who became involved in private theatricals at the stately English estate of Blenheim. In 1797 he eloped with a Lady Catherine Spencer. Sadly, she died five years later. The story is told in A Spencer Love Affair (2013) by Allan Ledger.
    I previously mentioned TITM in an earlier post about female education, a theme it shares with ICoI. Nares also wrote non-fiction and religious works.

​Previous post:  A melodrama about adultery

CMP#181 Lorina, the erring heroine

Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. I’ve also been blogging about now-obscure authors of the long 18th century. For more, click "Authoresses" on the menu at right. Click here for the first in the series. ​ CMP#181   Book Review:  The Worst of Stains (1804) by Henry Summersett     This novel is a moral tale, written to persuade, or rather frighten, young people away from having sex out of wedlock. Sort of a “Reefer Madness,” but for adultery. Summersett's jeremiad is a suitable book to cap off my lengthy series on how novels of the era focused on female virtue--not that I'll be able to stay away from the topic in future book reviews, because so many novels revolve around female virtue.
    Our story begins with a female voice pleading for help, heard outside the humble cottage of Gabriel and Mary Feller. Mary used to be a servant in a posh household, and the daughter of that household was seduced by one Captain Berringer. She flees to Mary to hide her shame and to go insane after she delivers an infant boy. She then drowns herself in the river.
     Baby William is passed off by Gabriel and Mary as their nephew, but strangely, the mother gave him the surname of her seducer, who, everyone agrees, is a loathsome reptile. The rest of volume One is taken up with William’s boyhood, and meeting the girl he marries… "Men of war" cariacture, 1791, detail Wedding before the end of Volume I
    ​William grows up on brotherly terms with the Feller’s boy Robert, and their country childhood is pretty idyllic. In one interlude, Robert visits a nearby town on market day. It’s common in novels of this era for the “good” characters to dislike the glitter and vice of London. In this story, Robert is repulsed by what he sees in an average market town; London would probably finish him off completely. He saw a public execution, and a starving woman whipped for stealing some mutton. Furthermore, “[a] lame beggar, to whom I had given a penny, stole my handkerchief out of my pocket….at a little distance, a fine-drest lady was drinking gin and eating gingerbread with a black trumpeter. I then said to myself, if this be seeing the world, I hope I shall never leave my home again.”
    William is a discerning young boy who saw that the village clergyman was a hypocrite and a cold fish who preached charity but didn't help the poor in his parish. This clergyman dies, and his successor, Rev. Lackington, takes notice of William. The young lad spends a lot of time at the rectory with Rev. Lackington. In a modern novel, this could mean only one thing, but in 1804, it means that Lackington wants a son and heir. Sadly, Lackington doesn’t update his will in time, and his intention of buying a farm for William falls through. The good news is that Lackington’s beneficiary, Lady Augusta, is well off in her own right and despite her faults of character, is willing to do something to help William. She offers to buy him a commission in the army or find him a job as somebody’s secretary. William chooses the army. The author set us up for this choice by telling us that William, although very bright, is not really academically minded. At any rate, William has also acquired a lovely bride, Lorina, the daughter of a reduced gentlewoman who has come to live in the village. The young people get married on little more than hope and great expectations.
    That’s pretty much the entire first volume of the novel. The author has introduced most, but not all, of our main characters and gotten them all arranged and organized. No hint of a looming crisis, no depiction of faults or unfulfilled wishes in the bosoms of our main characters. No inciting event in sight. Bing AI image       Lorina presents William with a son. William campaigns in Europe against the French and is wounded. Here, we might note that while the author does not give specific details of the battle, he does attempt to summon up the horror of warfare and its aftermath.
     On the voyage back, William nurses an older soldier who is consumed with guilt and anguish and it turns out to be—you'll never guess—go ahead, guess—you guessed it—his own father, serving under an assumed name. Apart from giving us a portrait of the wages of sin, Summersett does not use the reappearance of the father as a plot-changer. Perhaps it’s intended to show our main character hardening in his attitudes against immoral behaviour. As a dutiful son, William prevents dad’s body from being heaved overboard; he brings him to England and buries him. We still haven’t had our inciting event.  Spoilers beyond this point: all minors must be accompanied by an adult
       The inciting event is this: The beautiful Lorina attracts the attention of one of William’s brother officers, a Captain Russel, who mounts an extended campaign to persuade Lorina that he is dying for love of her and further, that her husband William is carrying on a secret affair with Lady Augusta.
      Lady Augusta is a sort of Mary Crawford-like character, and the most interesting person in the book, though we see very little of her. She confides a shocking secret: when she lived in Italy, ( before her recent marriage) she gave birth to an illegitimate child! By an Italian!
​      I suppose William’s gratitude to his benefactress keeps him from stalking out of the room then and there. But he respects her and promises to keep her secret. She tells William she is planning to separate from her husband. William, shocked, urges her to try to reconcile with her husband before resorting to anything so drastic. She pleads:       “Would you believe Heyland to be capable of brute violence—of savageness, which is to be found only in those whom men should be ashamed to call men? Gay, hypocritical villain! Look at this arm!—”
     “Good God!” –It is black with bruises—who did this mischief to you?”
     “Heyland. He dragged me on the floor—griped, beat me. He could not have more abused the vilest strumpet of the town.”
      “She drew up the sleeve of her morning dress, and exposed her injuries. The heart of Berrington was full of pity and indignation; and scarcely knowing what he did, he… pressed his lips on the bruised and discoloured flesh. At that moment Lorina entered….” Deceived with a forged letter. Bing Image AI Green-eyed monster
    Lorina knows that there is something going on between Lady Augusta and her husband, but William is not free to discuss anything with her. When he goes to visit Lady Augusta in London, he keeps it from his wife. William’s promise to Lady Augusta, or rather the rather wobbly premise the author sets up that William can’t say anything to relieve his wife’s suspicions, even when he knows she’s upset, is what sets off the fatal tragedy of the novel. Captain Russel is all too willing to fan her paranoia, telling her that Lady Augusta and William had a daughter together. 
   Deceived by Russel, Lorina succumbs to a night of passion while her husband is away. She immediately regrets what she’s done. Like William’s mother before her, she calls aloud for her own death, and tumbles toward insanity. Completely unable to hide her anguish from Berrington upon his return, they have a final explosive conversation, excerpted in part below:​     “Dare you confess yourself an adulteress?”
   “I do confess it—Hear me—I am such: Foul as contagious itself! Wicked as those whom God has abandoned…Berrington, let my miseries be now ended by your hand…. My oath is broken—I have stained the marriage bed…My soul is sinking into perdition!”
     “Let it fall—Let it still fall!... Wretch! May an eternal night hang over your accursed head.”
     “It gathers!” cried Lorina, madly “…I see my mother’s lips trembling with a curse!... My deeds—”
     “Silence! Neither shall you speak, nor will I hear of them again…”
   A bar of iron, which was used for securing the window-shutters, was by his side. He snatched it up, and hurled it at his wife. It struck her head, and the bone yielded. Death was in the blow: She fell: No groan escaped her. Moonlight on the Norwegian Coast, Knud Baade "Let my miseries be now ended by your hand"
   Lorina's death is not unlike a biblical stoning. ​Berrington raves for a while over his wife’s corpse, bids a frenzied goodbye to his little boy, then goes out to find Russel and…. And…
     Um, actually I don’t know what happens next because there is one page (page 196) missing in the digitized copy and that one page is the page where Russel meets his death and Berrington also gets wounded. Anyway, on page 197, Berrington, bleeding from his wounds, raves some more, then flings himself into the ocean from a fisherman's rowboat. “She who bore me, could not keep herself in the ways of virtue—Prostitute!—She who was the mother of my child, ran into the broad path of vice, heated by licentiousness, and fearless of a cheated God—Adulteress--wicked adulteress!”
      Triple tragedy, three corpses and one little orphaned boy.
     William’s foster brother Robert Feller, now married, takes the orphaned child into his home, with the promise that when he’s old enough, Berrington’s army buddies will sponsor his education at some good school.
     The author ends with an impassioned plea to the women of England to maintain their virtue and chastity, and for "Reason" to prevail, with a final sarcastic fling at “Philosophers,” by which he means the likes of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft: “And they would shew the growth of intellect, the expansion of wisdom, the absurdities of worn-out prejudices!” Fatal consequences of adultery   Foreshadowing and pacing
   The denouement of this story is, as I mentioned, extremely intense. However, Summersett doesn’t really start building up the tension until we’re well into the final volume. Possibly Berrington’s reaction was the stronger because of his shame over his own mother’s fall from virtue, which explains why Summersett opened the story the way he did. But the author made no use of this. William Berrington's illegitimacy was never an issue for him in his progress through life. We had no foreshadowing that we were heading for a tragedy, to explain why this kind and loving husband would flip into a deranged misogynist (I have barely quoted the things he said about Lorina before he killed himself). 
    Summersett could have likewise developed the character of Lorina to show that she was too easily swayed by others, or a little vain of her beauty, or something, to explain why she was vulnerable to Russel's blandishments. Austen, by comparison, gives us plenty of foreshadowing in Mansfield Park to warn us that Maria Bertram is headed for a fall.  Cultural norms: Co-ed public shaming for adultery in Japan  Cultural Norms
    When it came out in 1804, The Worst of Stains received a single brief review in the Imperial Review. The reviewer did not deride the tale for being unrealistic or overblown. He wrote: “This is, alas! A romance of real life; it is an interesting, impressive, and truly moral tale.” No quibbles about whether the wages of sin were a tad excessive here. 
   As scholar Michael Giffin points out: “Literary criticism in the twentieth century has been highly secular in character, and thus has made it difficult for the academic critic to glimpse into the horizons of the ‘religious’ author and text…. The reader—whether secular or ‘religious’ –is ill-equipped or unable to recognize those subtexts.”
     A reader of 1804 would have the religious knowledge—whether or not they had the actual religious convictions—which enabled them to pick up on the allusion to “Gabriel” and “Mary” in the book’s opening, to understand why William’s mother had to be declared insane to be buried in the churchyard, to understand that adultery was not merely a hurtful betrayal of one's spouse, but a statutory crime and a broken Commandment. A modern Western reader doesn’t necessarily have this knowledge, and most don’t share these beliefs, though they are certainly still extant in other cultures today. 
​   Finally, a reminder that although this book is as serious as the plague, and living a chaste and upright life was the prescribed social norm, people still committed adultery and people joked about adultery, known legally as "criminal conversation," or informally as "crim con." Lady Augusta has a bastard child and is punished with nothing more than an unhappy marriage, poor health and in the end, dying in exile from England. But she’s a toff, after all, and they are above the consequences of their actions in the way that ordinary folk aren’t, and perhaps a better writer would have made more of the contaminating influence of the aristocracy on the manners and morals of the lower orders. Below a cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson. About the author
   Scholar Steve Orman has provided a preface to The Worst of Stains in a 2014 re-issue by Valancourt books, which has also republished some other of Summersett’s forgotten novels. Of Henry Summersett himself, Orvan says, almost nothing is known. He does not rate a biography in the 1816 “Dictionary of Living Authors of Great Britain,” which lists only a few of his titles. He was a prolific author of novels and he wrote some poetry and a play. Most of his novels appear to feature a male protagonist.
  Orban focusses on tracing the evident literary influences on the novel, for example, Othello. However, Desdemona did not cheat on Othello. William Berrington is not presented as a flawed human hastening toward a tragic downfall, as Othello is, but as a loving husband and father and an upright man whose wife fully acknowledged her guilt and said she deserved to die. The moral here is, “don’t have sex outside of marriage,” not “take a deep breath and count to ten.” Previous post: the hidden storyline in Jane Austen's Emma Giffin, Michael. "Jane Austen and the Economy of Salvation: Renewing the Drifting Church in Mansfield Park." Literature and Theology 14.1 (2000): 17-33.
​
The Worst of Stains. Edited by Steve Orman. Valancourt Books, 2014. Steve Orman is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English & Language Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University.

CMP#180 The hidden truth about Austen's Emma

Here's a special post for Janeites -- the insights in today's blog post will be intelligible only to people who are well acquainted with the plot of Jane Austen's masterpiece Emma. CMP# 180    Guest Blog: "It is a certainty. Receive it on my judgment."    Dear Readers:
​   I recently received a flurry of emails from a well-known (if controversial) Jane Austen researcher asking to rebut my "completely misguided" comments about Jane Austen's novel Emma. He said I was "blissfully unaware" of the real reason that Emma Woodhouse prevented Harriet Smith from marrying Robert Martin. His theory is that Emma contains several hidden plots, all of which indicate Austen's truly radical beliefs.
   In a gesture of good faith, I have agreed to share his theory that a dramatic “subterranean story” (one of many) lurks beneath the placid surface of Emma. What follows are his insights, not mine:  The subterranean story in Emma
   My careful research has exposed the subterranean stories in Emma that concern the side characters. Just to briefly recap my discoveries, Harriet Smith is really Miss Bates’s daughter, or possibly Jane Fairfax’s half-sister.
    Since I’m a committed feminist, I take it for granted that whenever a female character gets ill, it has to be about her reproductive organs. This is not reductive misogyny, it's just a fact. Therefore, Jane Fairfax is hiding a secret pregnancy in the third volume. Mrs. Weston is only pretending to be pregnant (you notice she never gets ill) and she adopts Jane Fairfax’s baby.
​     These stories represent Austen's suppressed howl of rage against the patriarchy, but more on that later.
    But what about Emma herself? It’s time to unveil the biggest subterranean story of all! How could anyone read what Emma Woodhouse says about Robert Martin—that he’s ignorant, and “clownish,” and “remarkably plain,“ and not smell a rat? Surely, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, “the lady doth protest too much.” Emma is just throwing sand in Harriet’s eyes... ​Emma is secretly attracted to Robert Martin!
    The evidence is there from the very beginning of the novel. We’re told that Emma is sad. Sad because her governess got married? No, of course not. It’s because her father accidentally ruined her arrangements for getting together with Robert Martin. Mr. Woodhouse suggested that Mr. and Mrs. Weston hire Hannah, the daughter of the coachman, as a servant at their house. Yes, Emma tries to cover it up and pretends like it’s a great thing, but underneath, she’s really seething!
     Why was Hannah essential to Emma's secret meetings with Robert Martin?  It’s so obvious, but I’ll explain it anyway. Mr. Woodhouse says, Hannah “always turns the lock of the door the right way and never bangs it.” Emma need a servant who can open and close a door quietly to sneak Robert Martin into the house and up to her bedroom! Emma brings Hannah to the house supposedly “to do needlework” so don't overlook the phallic symbolism of the "needle" in "needlework."
    Mr. Woodhouse, like most of you readers, is completely in the dark about Emma's secret affair. He had a lot of illegitimate children himself in his younger days and probably has syphilis, but that doesn’t mean he wants his daughter involved with a farmer.
     At any rate, Emma is wondering if she can start meeting Robert Martin at Mrs. Weston’s house, and we have proof that Mrs. Weston is in on the plan. Mrs. Weston “could not think, without pain, of Emma’s losing a single pleasure,” such as not having a private place to meet her lover! So, “many a long October and November evening must be struggled through at Hartfield” until Emma can rearrange things. Austen makes sure to tell us that Emma can walk to Randalls (“solitary female walking”) which means no witnesses.  "after looking very respectfully at" Emma  Mrs. Weston is an accomplice
    ​Emma and Robert Martin at least attempted to meet at the Westons, because later, we notice—well, if you’re an alert reader, that is--we notice Austen’s suspicious wording when she mentions Mrs. Weston’s “consciousness of there being but two spare rooms in the house.” Consciousness? Why would she use that word? A word which sounds so close to conscience, in an obvious nod to Shakespeare's Hamlet: “conscience makes cowards of us all.”
    Obviously, Mrs. Weston feels self-conscious when her husband talks about inviting everyone to sleep over at Randall’s for the night, because it reminds her of how she helped Emma sneak into those spare bedrooms before!
   So, no wonder Emma interferes when she realizes that Robert Martin is attracted to Harriet! And do you think she would have taken Harriet for a visit to Abbey Mill Farm, even for fifteen minutes, if she thought that there was a chance Harriet would meet him there? No! Emma knew he wouldn’t be there because she had already made arrangements to meet him nearby. That business about her going to visit an an old servant who lived nearby was just a cover story.
     Then, there’s another giant clue—after Harriet and Emma leave the farm, there is that strange business about the Westons. Why is Emma in such a bad mood just because they aren’t at home? (“I do not know when I have been so disappointed.”) Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction? Of course it is. She isn’t in a bad mood because the Westons aren’t home. She’s in a bad mood because the Westons “had both been out some time,” and that means they will be back soon. Do I have to spell it out for the dull-minded? All right, I will—this means Mrs. Weston screwed up the timing of the plan—the plan that Emma just communicated to Robert—that they would get together--in one of those “spare rooms”--that very afternoon at the Westons. “So provoking!” as Emma says. Or should we say, “so provocative”! Again, the delicious wording gives it all away. "seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised"
   ​Emma first tries to distract Harriet away from Robert Martin by telling her that Mr. Elton admires her ("It is a certainty"). Later, when she thinks Harriet has fallen for Frank Churchill, Emma feels confident enough to actually throw her affair in Harriet’s face when she tells her: “there have been matches of greater disparity.” Clearly, she thinking of a match between herself and Martin. But while Emma thinks she is deceiving everyone, she is also being deceived. 
   Harriet throws Emma off the scent when she pretends to have a toothache. She goes to London, meets up with Robert Martin and gets engaged, with the help and connivance of Emma's sister Isabella.
  When Mr. Knightley gives Emma the news, she is so shocked she almost gives the game away as she exclaims: “No, this is impossible!” Then she pulls herself together and pretends to be delighted, even pretending that she's never met Robert Martin before: “It would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin.” Oh, please! Not, "be introduced to" him, or "make his acquaintance," as you might expect Austen to phrase it. No, Austen is playing with a double meaning here. Emma's already known Robert Martin quite a few times--in the biblical sense of the word. Just as in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing: "She knows the heat of a luxurious bed."
 Rib retort man
   Now, how could anyone say this theory is just projection on my part? No, not when all the pieces fit so neatly together. All I did was point out what is right there! Because I was the only person clever enough to find the hidden story!
    Still unconvinced? I’ll lay down my final card, and it is truly unanswerable. The anagram for “Robert Martin” is “rib retort man.” “Rib” is clearly a sarcastic reference to Genesis 2:22-24, when God created woman out of Adam's rib. Women are oppressed under the patriarchy, and the secret subplot I’ve uncovered is Austen’s devastating retort. That should overturn all the safe, conservative interpretations of Austen! 
​                                                                                                                        --  Solo Farlip, independent researcher Previous guest bloggers have posted here....  and here .... and here. Previous post:   Glamping in the abbey with Annette                

CMP#179 Annette, who isn't a heroine at all

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. ​ CMP# 179    The Romance of the Forest (1791) by Ann Radcliffe  Is Robert Martin wearing a farmer's smock under his jacket?    The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliff, the queen of Gothic novels, is one of the two books which Harriet Smith recommended to Robert Martin in Emma, the other being The Children of the Abbey. Emma Woodhouse makes a fanciful connection between Harriet, a girl of illegitimate parentage, and a typically friendless and dispossessed novel heroine such as Adeline of The Romance of the Forest. It is this connection which causes Emma to fantasize that Harriet must be from genteel stock and should marry accordingly--which means she shouldn't marry Robert Martin.
   However, the Gothic plot of The Romance of the Forest (abandoned abbey, a chest with a skeleton in it, a bloody dagger, secret passages) bears no resemblance to the prosaic doings of the little village of Highbury.  Susan Allen Ford points out that Donwell Abbey, set in the English countryside under a sun bright, without being oppressive, bears no resemblance to a half-ruined abbey in a Gothic novel. The heroine Adeline is a beautiful, virtuous, and accomplished girl who shows more resolution and courage when faced with danger than Harriet did in her encounter with the gypsies.
​    But I want to discuss a minor character named Annette... a very minor character... Caught in the act of communing with Bambi by Louis La Motte ​ Gothic 17th-century France
​    The Romance is set in 17th-century France, and it opens with a not-at-all-admirable Frenchman, M. La Motte, escaping Paris and his creditors, along with his wife and two “faithful domestics.” Why La Motte’s wife Constance--or his servants Peter and Annette--should be loyal to La Motte is beyond my comprehension because thanks to him, the family is financially ruined and on the run from the law.
    Along the way, the La Mottes unintentionally acquire our heroine Adeline under mysterious circumstances, after which they get stranded in the middle of a forest because La Motte insists on proceeding in the dark and they break a carriage wheel on a boulder. They find a large half-ruined deserted abbey. La Motte decides to hide out there indefinitely and use their manservant Peter to bring groceries and supplies from the nearest village. (The villagers fortunately stay away from the abbey because it’s haunted.) So there we are: because of her husband, Madame La Motte gives up the social whirl of Paris to camp out in a haunted abbey--and she still loves him and gets jealous when she mistakenly thinks he and Adeline have something going on the side.
    It took me a while to remember that the La Mottes have more than one servant on hand because while Peter plays an ongoing role in the plot and he has dialogue, the female maidservant, Annette, is only mentioned in passing when a fire is built or a meal appears and usually not even then. 
​     At one point the group takes refuge in a hidden tunnel, because they heard someone enter the grounds of the abbey, calling for Monsieur La Motte. After a prolonged silence, a volunteer is needed to check to see if the coast is clear. “La Motte considered that if he was again seen, he should be effectually betrayed; [while his family] were all unknown to the officers... the person he sent should have courage... and wit enough to conduct it with caution. Peter, perhaps, had the first; but was certainly destitute of the last. Annette had neither.” Ouch.
     Adeline, having both courage and wit, goes forth to spare La Motte from the consequences of his actions and discovers that the person halloo-ing around the Abbey is the La Motte’s soldier son, come looking for them.  Image created by Bing AI Nonentity is spelled "Annette"
   While the varying hopes, fears, misconceptions and agitations of the main characters are all dwelt upon, we have no idea how Annette feels about leaving Paris and being the dogsbody for an extended glamping expedition with no weekends off. If anybody praises her Poisson avec Champignons Sauvages, we never hear of it; Radcliffe gives no details of the "repasts" which the family eats. 
   In academe today it has long been popular to examine how Ann Radcliffe subverts the patriarchy in her novels. As Wikipedia says: The Romance of the Forest "is the subject of much critical discussion, particularly in its treatment of femininity." But clearly, Radcliffe conjured Annette into existence for one reason: without her, Madame La Motte and Adeline would have to do all the cooking, laundry and housework themselves, which would leave Madame less time for worrying about her husband and Adeline less time for lute-strumming, poetry-reciting, and exploring secret passages hidden behind a tapestry. Annette, then, is a sort of human appliance, a drudge who is given no dialogue. The callous way she is treated goes unremarked upon. When the La Mottes give up their bedchamber for some unexpected house guests, Adeline gives up her bedchamber for them, and “remove[d] to an inner chamber, where a small bed, usually occupied by Annette, was placed for her.” No mention of where Annette goes to sleep after being evicted from her bed.
   The last specific mention of Annette comes in Chapter 14, halfway through the book, after Adeline has escaped an attempted ravishing by a Marquis, seen the man she loves being wounded, arrested and hauled off to prison, and has been returned as a captive to the Abbey. Annette brings her some “refreshments.” Then the servant drops out of the story completely. Does she return to Paris with the family? Does she ever get paid?
    Another servant, also named Annette, appears in Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and is the subject of some feminist analysis, as in: “Servants and country people, in turn, construct a pedagogy for reading gothic texts that permit heroines to deconstruct metaphors of ghostly haunting embedded in their tales and resist patriarchal hegemony and interpretative authority over gothic texts.”  But nobody asks why our Annette doesn't get to construct a pedagogy to resist patriarchal hegemony in The Romance of the Forest. Is this fair?
   Seriously, Adeline's lute gets more attention from academics than Annette receives. Recently, a scholar offering a lengthy “close reading” of the novel describes La Motte fleeing Paris with “his wife and the manservant Peter” with no mention of Annette at all! 
    Someone should explain why Radcliffe sacrifices Annette to the gender and class restrictions of the times, or else explain how she's really subverting the gender and class restrictions of the times while appearing to reify them. Maybe if we explore the margins of the text, or consider the importance of what Radcliffe leaves unsaid, we'll understand that Annette is slapping down those platters of Venison a la Mirepoix with a bit of an attitude.      ​Another feature typical of novels of this era is that Radcliffe drops in some pro forma anti-Catholic remarks: The La Motte’s soldier son is exploring the grounds: “In advancing, he perceived the ruins of a small building, which, from the traces that remained, appeared to have been a tomb. As he gazed upon it, here, said he, are probably deposited the ashes of some ancient monk, once an inhabitant of the abbey; perhaps, of the founder, who, after having spent a life of abstinence and prayer, sought in heaven the reward of his forbearance upon earth. Peace be to his soul! but did he think a life of mere negative virtue deserved an eternal reward? Mistaken man! reason, had you trusted to its dictates, would have informed you, that the active virtues, the adherence to the golden rule, do as you would be done unto, could alone deserve the favour of a Deity whose glory is benevolence.”
     Finally, I note that Adeline’s love interest is actually a hero who does something heroic and at great cost to himself, as opposed to the kind of hero who does very little outside of believing every slur cast upon the heroine's virtue (Looking at you, Lord Mortimer ). The virtuous end happily, the redeemable are redeemed, the irredeemable are dead and who knows what happens to Annette. Cue the happy peasant dance on the shores of a Swiss lake.     ​​  In addition to the story, the travelogue scenes in Gothic novels must have been a diverting entertainment in an age when very few people could afford to travel.
​      While I usually give a synopsis of the plot in these posts, it’s not necessary in the case of The Romance of the Forest; Wikipedia has a synopsis for those interested.
  The reviewer for the Monthly Review praised Anne Radcliffe’s story-telling skills: “The principal personage of the romance, Adeline, is a highly-interesting character, whom the writer conducts through a series of alarming situations, and hair-breadth escapes, in which she has very skillfully contrived to hold the reader’s curiosity continually in suspense, and at the same time to keep his feelings in a state of perpetual agitation. Through the whole of the first two volumes, all is business, hazard, and alarm.”  Although we may laugh at these old Gothic novels, people are still drawn to the melodramatic morality tale, if Internet clickbait is anything to go by.   The reviewer also commended Radcliffe for keeping the Big Secrets (concerning, among other things, Adeline’s true parentage and social rank) under wraps until the end of the book. I hope it is not considered a spoiler to note that when you have a friendless and abandoned heroine, you can count on a handsome inheritance coming her way before the final page, in addition to revelations about their parentage and rank.

​Previous post:   Harriet Smith's favorite novels, part one In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland knew from her reading of gothic novels that "all the dirty work" in the fictional "abbeys and castles... was to be done by two pair of female hands at the utmost." In the 1799 novel Rosella, which is a satire on sentimental and gothic novels, the character Miss Beauclerc asks herself: “how, how in the names of the household gods, can the mysteries of the menage be conducted! Who washes, who dusts, who irons, who cleans, who mends, who cooks?” Much more about Rosella by Mary Charlton in future posts. Barlaskar, Reema. "The ‘Contagion’of ‘Ridiculous Superstition’: Representations of Lower-Class Voices in Ann Radcliffe's Novels." Gothic Studies 20.1-2 (2018): 184-198.

Class, Monika, in Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century, Berndt, Katrin and Johns, Alessa, eds. De Gruyter, 2022