Ann WIngrove's The Spinster’s Tale (1801) caught my eye because of the title. It received no reviews when it was published, so here is another of my better-late-than-never book reviews. 
    The Spinster’s Tale is jam-packed with numerous plot-lines, backstories, and weddings. Plus a separate short gothic novel is stuck in the middle. There are so many characters, it’s difficult to remember them all.
    Have you seen people in social media point out that Regency romances are unrealistic because there weren’t that many eligible young dukes and earls in Regency England? Well, that was the case from the get-go; the novels written at the time featured handsome, eligible lords by the bushel. There are half-a-dozen titled men running around in this novel, all of them in want of a wife, and they all marry girls of humbler birth.
    One thing that sets this novel apart is that two of the major protagonists, and one minor, are older ladies. The titular spinster, Mrs. Caroline Herbert, ("Mrs." denotes an older lady, not necessarily a married one) is approaching 50. The kind and charitable Dowager Lady Brumpton has a fun back story where she dresses herself in boy’s clothes and climbs out a window after she’s abducted by a libertine. The minor character Miss Woodley is the impoverished authoress of the novel-within-a-novel Langbridge Fort. “Romance is not my forte,” she tells one of the young heroines, “but I had been told nothing would sell now, but the horrible, the wonderful, and the improbable.”
​      In addition to centering older females, The Spinster's Tale has other features which might be of interest to academics...

   After wrapping up my blog series about unflattering portraits of Methodist ministers in 18th century novels, I came across The Vicar of Wrexhill by Frances Trollope. This 1832 novel is a bit outside the date range of novels I study, and the titular vicar is not a Methodist, but an evangelical in the Church of England. However, like the ministers in 18th-century novels, the evangelicals in this story are ranting fanatics or hypocrites and their followers are deluded fools.
    Many people might pass over The Vicar of Wrexhill because its once-controversial subject matter--"High church" Anglicanism versus evangelism--would be of little interest in a post-Christian age. However, the story still offers snarky humour, heroines in peril, a cantankerous old married couple, and romance. The dialogue is sometimes stilted--it's hard to believe that 17-year-old girls actually speak with such complex sentences, but then I feel that way about Marianne Dashwood as well.
    I liked the way Mrs. Trollope--like Jane Austen in Mansfield Park--designed her characters to come into conflict because of their differing personalities and world views. But for me, the biggest payoff was realizing I was reading about a 19th century moral panic, with so many parallels to the debates preoccupying society in our own times, specifically in the way people behaved--intimidating one another, condemning one another, freezing people out. Buckle up for a slow-motion train wreck in which you're not sure whether the characters are heading for ultimate tragedy or a happy ending...

    “Miss Melinda Harley, of Yorkshire, may pass well enough for a country body; but really her history was not worth bringing up to town.”
    So goes one of several dismissive contemporary reviews for The History of Melinda Harley, Yorkshire (1777). The Westminster Review gave it only one sentence: “the history of an ephemera, that is born and dies on the same day.”
    Another reviewer joked: “It is the general character of many romances, that they are good for nothing; but we must except the History of Melinda Harley from this censure, for we can affirm, from our own experience, that it is admirably calculated—to procure sleep.”
    Ouch, ouch, and ouch, anonymous authoress! I feel for you. Yes, the plot is slight, the characters are wooden, and the detail is sparse, but I became quite interested in the wide variety of moralizing comments that Melinda Harley trades with her BFF Amanda Beaufort while Melinda is away visiting with family friends. The girls share their thoughts on the folly of dueling, the pending loss of the American colonies, and the consolations of religion.
   Some of their exchanges are the sort Mary Bennet would approve of:​​ “Most of our wants are artificial, and his happiness is much better assured who has learned to contract his desires.” “It is a great inducement to the exercise of benevolence, to view human nature in a fair light, and to put the best construction on one anothers’ actions.” Some remarks are explicitly political or feminist in tone.
  Some of these epistolary sermonettes touch on situations with similarities to Austen novels. I am not saying Austen drew from this novel, rather, that both writers drew from topics and situations prevalent at the time. I will share a few examples but I won’t point out which passage in which Austen novel they remind me of. If you’re not a Janeite, it won’t be relevant to you, and if you are a Janeite, you don’t need me to tell you...

CMP# 136   Who Was Rosalia St. Clair?
    In the previous post, I discussed the 1824 novel The Banker's Daughters of Bristol by Rosalia St. Clair, which combined conventional morality with some radical sentiments. It is easy to guess that "Rosalia St. Clair" is a pseudonym; the kind of romantic name that Anne of Green Gables might choose for herself.
       Rosalia St. Clair was the pen-name used by Agnes Crombie Hall (1763-1846) for the novels she wrote for Minerva Press. As Rosalia, Agnes spun tales about dukes and earls with liveried servants and carriages. She also wrote about star-crossed lovers who gave up everything for each other and a little cottage. That is what the reading public wanted, but Agnes's life was a world away from the lives of her characters.
   ​   A publisher's foreword for one of her historical novellas, re-issued some years after her death, sketches her origins and then gives us a poignant anecdote: "Agnes Hall was “the only daughter of Mr. [John] Crombie [of Jedburgh, Scotland], a writer in [Jed]burgh, who flourished about the latter half of the last century; he possessed considerable property,.. Marrying a Dr. [Robert] Hall, a medical man... she left her native place only to endure a chequered life in the metropolis, for her lot was one of trial and privation. When the accustomed sources of support failed, she had to betake herself to her pen to eke out a precarious subsistence for herself and family… Her talents were not without recognition, for when reporting was more a literary art than it is now, she was engaged to attend the debates in the House of Commons as a reporter. Such were her extremities from domestic straits, that she was wont to borrow apparel for these occasions, from a pawn shop."