“Where is my Fanny? Why do I not see my little Fanny?” asks Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, and posterity snickers.
   Where I'm from, "fanny" means a derriere, as in "get your little fanny over here." But I've read that it's also a slang term for lady parts. I wanted to confirm this, then I got embarrassed when I thought about my Google search history, so I stopped. Then I found a useful book called The Lover's Tongue, which says "fanny" “emerged around 1928, and is now a familiar, albeit quaint, euphemism for the buttocks. The word fanny might have been inspired by John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the protagonist of which, Fanny Hill, is frequently exposing her bottom.”
   Author Mark Morton adds: "Fanny has also been used to refer to the female genitals which might make a connection to Fanny Hill even more feasible.”  So there you go.
    Anyway, there are many slang names for lady parts, that’s for sure. And the ​derriere is undeniably an important part of female charms and is particularly in vogue today, it seems.
     The question is, when we think of Fanny Price, are we supposed to think about lady parts? And when we think about lady parts, are supposed to think about prostitutes? And when we think of prostitutes, are we supposed to reflect that, after all, marriage is pretty much like prostitution? And are we intended to go on and realize that Mansfield Park "rigorously links prostitution to courtship and courtship to corruption in the culture at large"? Because, look at how Fanny's brother William got promoted to lieutenant... 
​      In Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions, Subversive Laughter, Embodied History, scholar Jillian Heydt-Stevenson argues Austen intended for her readers to follow this ramshackle train of thought...

CMP#99  Celia, the smiling heroine--with inverted quotes around “smiling”​

 ​What if I told you…
     there's an 1809 novel that contains 14 uses of the word “slave” and one use of the word “plantation” and features a wise and benevolent character named Mrs. Mansfield ?
      Well, if you aren't hip-deep in Mansfield Park commentary, I suppose you would say, “so?” But if you are au fait with modern scholarly analysis, you would know that Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) is generally thought to be named after Lord Mansfield, whose 1781 ruling in the Somerset case effectually ended slavery in the United Kingdom. And you’d be aware that although there is only one reference to the slave trade, in which no opinion is expressed, many scholars think Mansfield Park has a pro-abolition theme.
     So what if I told you that Celia in Search of a Husband, despite using the word “slave” 14 times, and despite having a character named Mansfield, is absolutely not about slavery at all? The writer of this novel chose the name "Mansfield" because it's a fine old English name, and even though debates raged over slavery, it was common to speak of ladies making "slaves" out of their admirers, or being a "slave to fashion." (Austen has "Miss Crawford was not the slave of opportunity" in Mansfield Park.)
       Celia in Search of a Husband has other fish to fry instead of British imperialism; it was written to take advantage of the popularity of Hannah More’s moralizing best-seller Coelebs in Search of a Wife which came out at the end of 1808. The success of More’s novel about a single man looking for a good wife led to many sequels (written by others, not More) and imitations. And yet, Celia in Search of a Husband is not really about a search for a husband, although a husband eventually shows up near the end.  It’s about the heroine, Celia Delacour, travelling to the wicked city, observing its vices and follies, and explaining her Christian principles to anyone who will listen and lots of people who won't...

   Here’s the second post in my new occasional series of books that never got a book review when they were published. For the first, click here.
    This time, I’m reviewing Stratagems Defeated (1811), a four-volume effort by Mrs. Meeke, a prolific authoress who wrote for Minerva Press, a publishing house that specialized in knock-off gothic novels and other sensational fare. It seems her works were a guilty pleasure for the British statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay; he read them avidly, but surreptitiously noted their titles in his journal in Greek.
   Mrs. Meeke may have been a stepsister to the successful authors Frances Burney and Sarah Harriet Burney, but she didn’t use the Burney name on her title pages. Instead she published under the pseudonym “Gabrielli,” a name which connotes Italian exoticism. Stratagems Defeated features a wily Sicilian priest and not one, but two people held prisoner by someone trying to force them into marriage, but it is not a gothic novel. Neither is it a tender romance-- the female love interest doesn’t even show up until the final volume, and there are no impediments to keep hero and heroine apart once they meet. In fact, by the time they meet, the hero is the most ridiculously eligible bachelor in the United Kingdom. 

     Scholar Anne Hawkins estimates that almost five hundred women brought out novels between 1789 and 1824. One of those women was Jane Austen, whom you might have heard of. Another was Caroline Burney, author of Seraphina, or A Winter in Town (1809), who you probably haven't.
    One proviso: we can’t be certain that Caroline Burney was a woman. The name is probably a pseudonym, an attempt to cash in on the fame of Frances Burney and her half-sister Sarah Harriet Burney. When Sarah Harriet’s publisher brought out Traits of Nature, he advertised: “'The publisher of this Work thinks it proper to state that Miss Burney is not the Author of a Novel called "Seraphina," published in the year 1809, under the assumed name of Caroline Burney.” Well, Caroline Burney identified as a female, so that should be good enough for our purposes.
     In addition, the subtitle A Winter in Town is an echo of the best-selling A Winter in London by Thomas William Surr, which I reviewed here. According to scholar Chris Stevens, Surr’s novel created such a sensation that it briefly inspired its own “microgenre,” the “Season” novel, meaning of course the social season in London, Bath, Brighton, or wherever.  These “Season” novels featured wealthy and titled characters behaving badly. Sometimes these portraits were obviously based upon real people, which added to the appeal of the books. London as a sinkhole of vice was such a popular theme in novels that Jane Austen jokes about it in a letter to her sister Cassandra, quoted above.    
​    Some of the older novels I’ve been reading were reviewed in their day, but many came out to no fanfare, and Caroline Burney’s three-volume effort is one of those. So, out of fellow-feeling for these neglected authoresses, I’m instituting an occasional series of book reviews for novels that never got a book review. This post, (I think), is the very first review of Seraphina, or A Winter in Town...