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...

  The many generous subscribers to Miss M.C. Squire’s first novel, The Beggar and His Benefactor (1809), must have wondered if they got their money’s worth. The book is only 120 pages long; it’s  the barest sketch of a novel grafted onto a travelogue about Plymouth and Cornwall. For a novel of the long 18th century, it's singularly devoid of sentiment or sensation.
    So why is Miss Squire my author of the week?  Well, for one thing, even trite and second-rate novels give me food for thought about the opinions and preoccupations of Austen's era. I'm learning about attitudes toward the class system and relations between the sexes. And for another, I'd like to bring Miss Squire to the attention of scholars because Squire uses people of color to teach a moral lesson in her first novel and her second novel includes a narrative of the slave trade. But first, a bit about the plots of her two novels...

​      I got a lot more than I bargained for when I started reading Fanny Fitz-York, Heiress of Tremorne (1818.) I expected just another novel of the long 18th century and I picked this one up as part of my investigation into whether the name “Fanny” connoted “sex worker” for 18/19th century novel readers. (It didn't). In Fanny Fitz-York, I discovered a novel filled with social and political criticism and strong female characters.
     Fanny Fitz-York came out in late 1817, the same time as Jane Austen's posthumous novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (though all are officially designated as having been published in 1818). Author Ann Ryley was 58 years old when her novel was published, so I've got some kindred feeling for her. I'll share more of her life story later this week.
    The Dictionary of National Biography entry for Ann's husband R.W. Ryley described Fanny Fitz-York as a "successful" novel but the only thing approaching to a review or reaction that I've found is a brief paragraph from 1860. Richard Wright Proctor, a literary historian and travel writer, called Fanny Fitz-York “a cleverly-written novel, of considerable interest, especially to women." He added, "though Fanny Fitz-York is now unknown to the majority of readers, who, in their eager pursuit of something new, are apt to overlook the treasures of the past, it still has an abiding place in the circulating library. Here the curious may find this slighted heroine of romance, this forgotten belle of a season, taking her natural rest, half buried in kindred dust, and literally shelved...”
   Should we wake Fanny Fitz-York from her slumbers? I think so, given the current academic focus on the social and historical context of novels, as opposed to intrinsic literary merit. Which is not to say Ryley is a mediocre writer; I think she's better than many of her contemporaries. And she holds up much better than her husband, who published five volumes of memoirs clogged with clichés: “A fortnight ago, seated in my cottage, enjoying the height of human felicity—peaceful, domestic, rural comfort—now on my way to the metropolis, preparing to merge into the vortex of public life, and plunge into the troubled sea of dramatic misery!”   
​      Ryley hasn't gotten any attention from scholars but I think she's worth studying because she offers a striking contrast to Jane Austen, for reasons I'll explain.
     But first, a bit about the story itself...

   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.