Austen scholars know that Jane Austen was familiar with the 1806 novel Lady Maclairn, the victim of villany (It’s spelled ‘villany’ on the title-page), because her niece Anna recalled how she and her aunt had a good laugh over its emotional excesses. There also exists a short satirical note that Austen wrote to Anna about it.
    I wonder if Austen managed to plow through all four volumes and 700 pages. I confess to skimming and skipping the last half, when the author was gearing up to introduce a whole new raft of characters and more subplots and backstories. Austen scholar Deirdre LeFaye counted ‘a total of nearly twenty flashbacks in all,’ and I don’t know if that includes the long narrative summary which commences the novel. However, even though I didn’t manage to read Lady Maclairn cover to cover, this forgotten novel deserves another look for a number of reasons: the attitude displayed in the book toward the slave trade, the Big Family Secret storyline, the naturalistic portrayal of insanity, and the harsh portrait of a clergyman.
    It appears that Lady Maclairn did not receive a review when first published. So here goes:
    Mrs. Dawson, a wealthy widow, never forgave her son-in-law for taking her daughter away to Jamaica, where she died far from home after giving birth to little Rachel Cowley, our heroine. Mrs. Dawson’s will leaves her fortune to Rachel, but Rachel will only inherit if the father returns her to England to be raised by Mrs. Dawson's respectable friends, the Hardcastles. It is just as well for Rachel, because she is growing spoiled in Jamaica where she can lord it over the enslaved people. Her character improves in England where she grows up with gentle little Lucy Hardcastle and her older brother Horace. Rachel looks up to him and she grows into ‘’the habit of yielding up her will to Horace.’’
   ‘’The tribute of Horace’s admiration was directed to the cultivating the taste and forming the judgment of'' our heroine....’’

    The previous forgotten book I reviewed, The Metropolis, dwelt on the seamier side of London life; the fleshpots of Covent Garden and the propensity of wealthy people to destroy their lives over a game of cards. The next novel I picked up, alas, instantly delved into the same theme, but there is a big difference between the two titles which is worth noting in light of the debates which were raging at that time over the morality and propriety of reading novels.
     The Metropolis received no reviews but if it had, I think the reviewers would have called it a book--to use their phrase--that you could not safely put into the hands of your daughter or sister. It is too detailed in its depiction of vice, and the vices and crimes committed in the book (fornication, gambling, cheating at gambling, highway robbery) are not sufficiently condemned or punished. The Decision (1811), while going over much of the same ground, and in fact including a main character who commits criminal acts, would be safe for a girl to read because it is overtly religious and didactic. A reviewer said: “We trace in these volumes a laudable endeavour to convey as much moral instruction as could be admitted into a work of fancy.” Yes, The Decision is stuffed like a plum pudding with the wholesome raisins of morality. The title refers to the heroine's decision to put her father's wishes ahead of her own, and later, to turn down a fortune in exchange for marriage.
     The Decision begins with a long and confessional letter from Charles Arundel to his old friend Mr. Beverly. Arundel married for love but becomes a gambler and a philanderer. At his dying uncle’s bedside, he sees that he’s been cut out of the will, which would lead to his ruin. He destroys the will and even poisons the uncle. He lives with his guilt until later on in life, after he is widowed, he decides to go to the West Indies and meet the young relative whose father was unknowingly cut out of the will.
    The mention of the West Indies will bring thoughts of slavery to mind for the attentive modern reader, but there is no mention of slavery or colonial exploitation as a sin or even as a cause of remorse in this book--a book which features many people who do things that they regret, such as marrying for ambition. Once again the West Indies are a plot device to remove the father from the action, so the heroine can live with the Beverly family.

Willoughby (1823)
     The same anonymous author also wrote Willoughby, or Reformation, the influence of religious principles (1823), The Acceptance (1810), and Caroline Ormsby or the real Lucilla, interspered with sketches moral and religious (1811). “Lucilla” is a reference to the heroine of Hannah More’s staggeringly popular novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, which spawned a host of imitators. I just peeked into Caroline Ormsby, but I read Willoughby to see how this Willoughby compared with Austen's character. Willoughby Coventry is the only son of a respectable family. From the outset of the novel, Willoughby is a dissolute gambler and a selfish coward. The subtitle promises us that Willoughby will redeem himself, but why I should care whether he redeems himself or not, I don’t know. 
    The Coventry family--and the father--are finished off with more financial blows; a shipwreck in which they lose some property, and a bank failure. Willoughby responds with nervous collapse and is no help in supporting his mother and sister. He somehow manages to win the affections of a silly young heiress, because he is “fascinating” and “handsome.” The author wasn't able to show the fascinating side of this character, though, we are just told he's fascinating. The young bride exults, Lydia-like, in having her way: “When I look at the ring on my finger, and think I am married, it is so droll, I quite laugh at the idea.” Alas, the marriage soon goes sideways, and Willoughby continues to be a waste of space. He finally pulls himself together after a near-death experience in the third volume, and after his wife’s death, he finds happiness with a worthy woman.
    Willoughby’s virtuous sister Elizabeth, on the other hand, doesn't hesitate to take a job as a governess to help support her mother and announces that it is no degradation to do so. 
​    Our anonymous author specializes in virtuous females who are brought into desperate straits by the bad decisions of their male relatives, but these heroines are always resigned and saintly and display unconditional love for their wretched fathers. In The Decision, Isabel resolves to obey her dying father's injunction to marry her cousin Horatio, even though she's in love with Valcourt Beverly and he with her: “watching the altered looks and languid breath of her father, she almost gloried in the sacrifice of her own happiness, could it ensure to him the blessing of peace in these last eventful hours.”
    In Willoughby, an off-stage character named Matilda consents to marry a rich man she doesn’t love to pay off her father’s gambling debts. Her husband dies, her father dies, and she dies of grief, so it’s hard to see what she gained by her sacrifice. But the author praises her up as a saint. This is evidently female behavior to emulate. Elizabeth at least ends up happily married with a convenient fortune.

Deservedly forgotten?
     This author espouses beliefs and a worldview which might appeal to some traditionally-minded readers, but I'm coming to feel that the moral codes promoted in these sentimental novels will prevent a revival of this and other forgotten authors. My own interest arises out of looking at what these novels say about the preoccupations of the society they were written for, what publishers offered to readers, what critics praised or condemned, and how it compares to Austen.
     Austen handles the same topics and Christian beliefs but she's quite subtle and indirect: you can catch the faintest allusion to redemption and salvation in Mansfield Park, her most didactic novel, when Fanny Price is worried that her cousin Tom Bertram’s illness might be fatal. “Without any particular affection for her eldest cousin, her tenderness of heart made her feel that she could not spare him, and the purity of her principles added yet a keener solicitude, when she considered how little useful, how little self-denying his life had (apparently) been.” That “keener solicitude” might sail right past a reader not familiar with Christian doctrines.
​   Jane Austen also kept the sordid stuff off stage in her novels. Willoughby’s seduction of Eliza, Maria Bertram Rushworth’s adultery with Henry Crawford, and Lydia living in sin with Wickham--they are all discussed at second-hand, not directly narrated. We never enter a bordello or a gaming hell with Austen.

Snakes and Ladders
   After reading a lot of these novels, it really strikes me how often authors resort to beggaring a family through gambling debts or bank failures, or enriching a family through unexpected bequests of East and West Indian fortunes. It’s like a Regency game of snakes and ladders with heroes and heroines either tumbling down into financial ruin or suddenly climbing up to fabulous wealth, as their authors roll the dice and move them around the board. The Decision features a long-lost relative (actually in this case, an old friend) returning from the East Indies with a fortune to bestow on the heroine in time for her marriage. This is an exceedingly common plot device of the time. In Willoughby, one of Elizabeth's suitors comes into a fortune (one of those convenient uncles)  and she is able to marry and give a home to her mother. 
    Austen found a different way to impoverish the Dashwood girls in Sense and Sensibility, but a small West Indian fortune comes to the rescue for Mrs. Smith in the final page of Persuasion. 
    In all three of these novels--The Decision, Willoughby, and Mansfield Park--the fact of slavery and colonialism is present in the background, but not held up for examination or condemnation. No consequences flow from the fact that the wealth which props up these families comes from chattel slavery despite the fact that these novels grapple with the questions of correct moral conduct as a central theme. Other authors did condemn slavery, and it is interesting to see such a wide disparity of consciousness about slavery in the novels of this era.

About the author
    The works of this novelist have been misattributed to female authors such as Grace Kennedy, Barbara Hofland, and Jane West. But the reviewers of Caroline Ormsby speak of the author as a "he." The confusion seems to arise out of the fact that there were multiple novels titled Decision. Another possible clue is found in the second volume of Caroline Ormsby, which includes a letter from a mother to a daughter, advising her to avoid attempting to become a novelist, lest she neglect her domestic duties and make herself ridiculous. This, I suppose, makes it more likely that the author is a male, but I still suspect the writer is a female. However, I can't imagine any academic championing her as an author worth re-discovering.
    We know nothing about the author of these books other than the fact that (s)he was conventionally religious. (S)he includes a minor character, a fanatical Methodist woman who despises all earthly enjoyments, in Willoughby. (S)he gives away nothing about herself in her prefaces, and merely repeats the moral lessons she intends to promote in the story. Her/his books were published by Henry Colburn.

Previous post:  Brian, the lucky hero

   Author James Norris Brewer uses lecherous Methodists and radical freethinkers to liven up his tale of star-crossed lovers who get married in the third volume and have some more problems to sort out in the fourth volume in addition to uncovering the Big Secret that is quite obvious from the first volume. The narrator's voice is sardonic, while our hero and heroine indulge in the highest flights of exquisite sensibility. Consequently, the novel is an odd mix of overblown sentimental language, interspersed in a rather discordant way with the author’s  animadversions on  Mary Wollstonecraft, Methodists, social climbers and other bees in his bonnet, such as the drinking habits of Oxford scholars. 
    The heroine, Ellen Fitzjohn, was left in the hands of strangers as a newborn. Her mother was a soldier’s wife who died giving birth while travelling with her husband's regiment; the distraught husband was forced to march away to embark for the East Indies. (This soldier, everybody notes, has the air of a gentleman and not a common private.) Baby Ellen fortunately catches the eye of the local baronet, a lonely widower. He adopts her and raises her as his own daughter.
     Ellen grows up to be beautiful and virtuous. One day she goes to a nearby river to go fishing with an old family retainer; the bank gives way and she is swept off to certain death by drowning but luckily, a handsome youth who lives nearby leaps in and rescues her. With such an introduction, it is inevitable that Ellen and Charles Balfour fall in love...