As Austen scholar Devoney Looser points out in her Great Courses series, Jane Austen’s juvenilia shows that the young Austen was acquainted, not only with good books, but “with the opposite of great literature.”
   She read novels with “avidity” and wrote “incredibly perceptive send-ups of their tics and tropes,” such as the fainting heroine. If you haven't read Austen's juvenile burlesque of the sentimental novel, Love and Freindship, it's hilarious! 
    Austen loved novels, but she was also developing her ideas about what she wanted to avoid in her own novels. While she enjoyed a good sentimental novel, it seems that she decided very early on that writing sentimental novels with weeping heroines was not for her.
     In contrast to the weepy, fainting, heroines of sentimental novels, it is notable how seldom Austen's heroines cry--and it's her sillier female characters who are rendered helpless by a crisis, as for example Henrietta and Mary Musgrove when Louisa falls off the Cobb in Persuasion.
  Recently, I started in on the now-obscure novel Constance (1785), under the impression that it was written by Eliza Kirkham Mathews, an author I wanted to write a blog post about.  I was well into the novel when I learned that Professor Jan Fergus had studied the account-books of the publisher and has shown that, in fact, Mathews is not ​the author of Constance. 
    The real author is Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, but she kept her authorship a secret with the cooperation of the publisher.  Reportedly, Hawkins' father wouldn't let her read novels so perhaps she also kept her authorship a secret from him! She didn't come forward as an author until after her father's death.
    If I had planned to pick a Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins novel to read, I would have started with Rosanne, because we have Jane Austen's review of it: 'We have got "Rosanne" in our Society, and find it much as you describe it; very good and clever, but tedious. Mrs. Hawkins' great excellence is on serious subjects. There are some very delightful conversations and reflections on religion: but on lighter topics I think she falls into many absurdities...There are a thousand improbabilities in the story.' (Having been criticized for an improbability in my first novel, I do feel for Ms. Hawkins here.)
     So this blog post will not be about Eliza Kirkham Mathews, but having gotten so far into the novel, I skimmed on to the end. Despite the occasional tediousness, I wanted to find out how Constance ended!

   Constance is a four-volume doorstopper with a “picture of perfection” heroine. In the first volume, Constance is engaged to her cousin, because her parents want the match and she's a dutiful girl. She likes him, but she gives him up promptly when he falls in love with someone else. This frees her cousin’s friend, Lord Calorne, to confess his love for her. And no wonder: Constance is beautiful, intelligent, and principled. But uh-oh, she’s so beautiful that rake-about-town Lord Farnford will not stop pursuing her. At this point Constance is living with her vulgar aunt. I thought she was a Mrs. Jennings type at first, but she turned out to have a more sinister side. The aunt incessantly pesters Constance to marry Lord Farnford, scorning the girl's scruples about this character and pointing out that he is wealthy, good-looking and popular. This is the heroine's best moment: like Fanny Price, she stands up to everybody.
     Farnford is willing to go to any lengths to obtain Constance's hand in marriage. He travels to her father’s estate and sweet-talks her dad (who needs money) into giving his consent to the match. Lord Farnford triumphantly brings dad's letter back to London and gives it to Constance. 
      After Constance has a good cry (naturally), she indignantly tells him, with a magisterial sentence that spools out into clause after clause: “If your lordship could be mean enough to rely on my father’s authority, you would soon see your error, he has an undoubted right to control all my actions, but he can have no dominion over my mind, nor will he, I am convinced, one moment urge the purport of his letter, when he knows how contrary it is to my inclination—his parental anxiety for my happiness, and the description of specious appearances have misled him; he will soon be better informed, and I hope, as you thought his patronage necessary in this influence, you will pay equal deference to his authority when he desires you to desist; your lordship was not ignorant of my opinion on the subject, and I must tell you that I cannot look on this privately obtaining the sanction of his approbation as any other than a very unhandsome method of endeavouring to impose on my judgement, and such as no gentleman would have adopted: it has however failed, and ever will fail.”
    I enjoyed Constance's speeches in the first volume; by the third, the conversations between Farnford and Constance become tedious and interminable and made me wish she would just bash him over the head with a heavy vase. In this respect, Hawkins is like Richardson. We recall Henry Austen saying of his sister: "Richardson's power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in Sir Charles Grandison, gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst [Austen's] taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative." 

    ​By the end of volume 3, after several incidents in which Constance is unfairly persecuted, she is on the eve of marrying the man she loves. Farnford abducts her (for the second time!) and tricks Constance into a marriage ceremony. 
   Volume 4 is devoted to cleaning up the mess and reuniting Constance with Lord Clahorne. This includes a long letter of apology/confession from Lord Farnford, including a review of the deceptions he engaged in to come between Constance and Lord Clahorne.
​   If Sense & Sensibility was originally an epistolary novel, as scholars believe, then Willoughby's dramatic explanation/apology would likewise have been a letter in the original version, a long monologue without Elinor's interjections.
    There is no resemblance between Farnford's letter and Willoughby's speech to Elinor, and I don't mean to imply that Austen borrowed the idea from Constance. The situations and the transgressions are different. But there are similarities. Both Marianne and Constance extended forgiveness, something the modern reader is not so likely to do--well, I'm not inclined to do, at any rate. In Constance's case she was thinking in explicitly Christian terms of Farnford's redemption and salvation. Another similarity is that neither Willoughby's confession nor Farnford's letter are essential to the denouement of their respective novels.
​    Four volumes gives Ms. Hawkins enough time and space to bring her heroine and hero to the brink of death and back, and nearly kill off her bad guy as well. Basically we have our cake and eat it too; we nearly have a tragic ending with three dead people, followed by a happy ending with two marriages, plus a restored fortune. 
    Hawkins must have been encouraged with the reviews she got for her debut novel. The Monthly Review said Constance was “one of the best-written productions of this sort that has appeared since Cecilia.” The Critical Review said: “In this artless narrative, the incidents are numerous and striking, the situations interesting and pathetic, the morality unexceptionable (that is, no-one would take exception to the moral lessons).”   
       In my next series of posts, I'll be looking at the debate, one might say a moral panic, around the idea that novels should include moral lessons.

    The novel reminds us what a constrained life young women led in those days; how impossible it was to travel without an escort, or even leave your box at the opera and get to your carriage without an escort. This close supervision helped to preserve ladies from “insult,” and kept their reputations above suspicion. 
     In an earlier quote of Hawkins I referenced, she is very sympathetic to the situation of “fallen woman.”  Likewise, there are two fallen women in Constance, and the heroine behaves with compassion toward them and wants to hold the guilty men accountable. ​

    In my series of posts about Mansfield Park, I listed some of the theories about why Austen chose the name Mansfield. I won’t review them here, but I recently learned of another theory: In her entertaining and informative Great Courses series on Jane Austen, Professor Devoney Looser mentions a novel called Amelia Mansfield (English translation 1809) which features a niece controlled by her powerful family. I’m not saying that Looser is endorsing this particular theory; she mentioned it together with the more widely-held notion that the book is named after Lord Mansfield.
   Well, I was curious, so I read the novel to see what parallels there might be to Mansfield Park. I’ll get back to that connection later, but first, here’s a book review with spoilers:
    This is a sentimental novel in which the author, Sophie Cottin, skillfully arranges her characters in situations which exploit emotion and pathos to the fullest. I really have to admire the talent with which the author set up the doomed romance and the facility with which she wrung every last possible drop of angst, hope, and despair out of the various misunderstandings and obstacles.    
​    The whole fraught unfolding of events drew me in and kept me turning the pages to find out what would happen—despite not respecting the heroine and especially not liking the hero (for reasons I'll explain).

    ​Amelia Mansfield is a sentimental heroine, in the mold of the “pictures of perfection” who made Jane Austen feel “sick and wicked.” Well, she has terrible taste in men, but we are repeatedly told how wonderful and beautiful she is. As the hero writes to his friend:
   “Oh, Adolphus! did you know all her enchanting powers; were you to see that lovely bashfulness, that tender emotion, that affecting serenity which her heavenly features alternately express; could you conceive the force of her eyes, the charm of her smiles; were you to behold that union of melancholy and vivacity, that modest mien and that exquisite shape;  (etc., etc.)….” *
   Ernest Woldemar, the hero of Amelia Mansfield, is a horrible person in childhood; we are told he becomes better as he gets older. Amelia's first marriage was unhappy; her husband's dead and now she's living with his uncle. Ernest renews his acquaintance with Amelia under false pretenses, coming to the chateau where she lives with her late husband's uncle.
     Ernest lies about his true identity, lies repeatedly, ​uses his friend to cover up for him, and hangs around after his host has told him to leave. He emotionally blackmails Amelia into meeting him in the middle of the night, vows eternal love and pressures her to sleep with him, which she does. This leads to Amelia's doom, 18th-century-style. 
   Ernest pursued Amelia when he was not free to marry her. In that respect the main conflict of Amelia Mansfield resembles Elinor's situation in Sense & Sensibility. And of course Marianne Dashwood is a sentimental heroine who almost dies of unrequited love. But Austen has Marianne explicitly reject her self-martyrdom, apologize for her selfishness and promise to live for her family. Amelia, on the other hand, pursues her obsession with Ernest, falls ill, and dies. So the hero ends up causing the disgrace and death of the heroine.
    Austen doesn’t romanticize death the way Mme. Cottin does. Ernest's friend Adolphus remarks: ‘our joys [are] so transient, and our sorrows of such long duration—Ah! If man in his cradle could foresee the woes inseparable from existence, where is he who, to escape so fatal a present, would not hasten back into annihilation?” 

     It's true that Austen is against marrying without love. Two of Austen’s heroines – Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price – turn down marriage proposals from men they don’t love, even though the matches would have benefitted their families. In Pride & Prejudice we have the countervailing example of Charlotte Lucas, who does marry for security. 
   Mme. Cottin features prominent countervailing voices in Amelia Mansfield as well. Amelia and Ernest each have a chief correspondent; Amelia has her older brother Albert, who is a bit of a wet blanket, and Ernest's friend Adolphus is a stern, unemotional type. They serve as a Greek Chorus of disapproval.   
   “I no more comprehend your language than your situation…” Adolphus tells Ernest, “so much does your conduct augment the contempt I have ever felt for this ridiculous phrensy.” 
  ​  Though lip service is paid to conventional virtue and morality, the hero and heroine sacrifice everything, even their lives, to the ideal of romantic love.  “To die for love!” as Marianne exclaims to her mother in the 1995 Sense & Sensibility movie. "What could be more glorious?” 
    In addition, Cottin makes it clear that Amelia experienced sexual pleasure in her union with Ernest, with references to “a mutual fire” which “darted through our veins,” and “celestial felicity” and “those heavenly raptures which I am unable to describe." 
​    The sentimental novel, in short, is a subversive novel in terms of 18th-century mores. The review of Amelia Mansfield In the Quarterly Review included a lengthy editorial about the dangers of reading this kind of novel (The entire review is here). Novels of this sort were an unrealistic and dangerous diversion and particularly improper for young girls. 
   The reviewers praised a previous work by Mme. Cottin (Elizabeth: or the Exiles of Siberia) as being upright and excellent, but said they could not recommend Amelia Mansfield. “It is extremely improper that such characters as Ernest and Amelia should be held up, as they evidently are, to our love and esteem.”

    All right, back to the question of whether Amelia Mansfield inspired Mansfield Park. I don’t think so. I see no resemblance in tone or underlying message between this sentimental novel and the novels of Jane Austen. Austen's message is not about dying for love. Her heroes and heroines do not behave as Amelia and Ernest do; they do not faint or weep buckets of tears on every other page, or threaten to kill themselves, or announce that someone else’s cruelty will kill them. Austen’s heroes do not use emotional blackmail: if you don’t meet me alone at midnight, I’ll fling myself into the lake. Was this repellent and childish behaviour considered to be irresistibly romantic? Not everybody thought so. The Quarterly Review says Ernest Woldemar behaves "with a profligacy incompatible both with honor and humanity.”  
     The resemblances between the two novels are superficial: Both girls live with their uncles and both are very attached to their older brothers. Amelia, like Fanny, is under strong pressure to marry a man she dislikes. Well, many 18th century novels and plays are about girls in this situation. If the girl gets to marry the man she loves, it's a comedy. If she doesn't, it's a tragedy. 
   The “Mansfield” in Amelia Mansfield’s name comes from the very brief and unhappy marriage at the beginning of the novel. Amelia's marriage to Mr. Mansfield is told in flashback and it’s merely a prologue to the main event; the author is setting up her heroine for the persecutions and suffering she will undergo as a result of the implacable hatred and resentment of Ernest’s mother, the Countess de Woldemar. She was angry when Amelia refused to marry Ernest, and Ernest originally intended to seduce Amelia and then dump her and reveal his true identity, to punish her. The Quarterly Review points out “This was certainly a design which no one who deserved the name of a gentleman could entertain for a moment; yet with unpardonable inconsistency, the author evidently intends that Ernest should be regarded as a man of high and generous spirit."
    And as I said, the sentimental novel is a different genre altogether from Austen’s comedies of manners. I don't think Austen would give a shout-out to a novel that portrays people behaving in ways Austen would never endorse.