The Dead Letter Office is perhaps the most intriguing title on the list of novels associated with the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour (1808),  A "dead letter office" suggests many exciting plot possibilities. (Should I explain for the kids that this is the department of a post office where undeliverable letters end up?)  The subtitle--A Tale for the English Farmer’s Fireside--also teaches us something about book publishing in Jane Austen’s era, but I’ll get back to that.
     I was not able to read it until I visited England recently and looked at a copy in the British Library. I discovered it is not a novel with a plot built around the dead letter department of a post office. It is a pastiche, a collection of individual letters with no connection to one another except that they all portray folly or greed or vanity. A young man who works at the post office in London visits his aunt, an “antiquated spinster” (who is also the narrator), and shares letters which have ended up in the dead letter office with her. They are intended (naturally) to teach a moral lesson. 
     So we have some miscellaneous writings--what was called, in those days, "fugitive pieces"--including a poem, which could have lain in the author’s desk for years, patched together to eke out a two-volume publication. This author had already produced six novels in seven years for the publisher Benjamin Crosby, but after this title, there was to be only one more, The Splendour of Adversity (1814). The Crosby publishing firm declared bankruptcy in 1814.
​    The "dead letters" account for about half of the content of this two-volume title. The letters are basically mini short stories, similar to the short fiction pieces you will find in periodicals of the era, such as The Lady's Magazine. I won’t give details of all the letters, but here’s a sampling...

     ​Mrs. Forest and her daughters then return the social visit of the Lobbans. Hmm, there is no mat at the door, the carpet is dirty, and Mrs. Lobban and Matilda are caught in a state of slovenly undress, so they have to whisk themselves to their bedrooms to get dressed before receiving their guests. Mrs. Forest takes “a silent survey of the apartment.” The walls and woodwork, painted in impractical light colours, are dirty and scuffed. “The window-curtains had been pea-green calico, but they were soiled and faded, and heavily encumbered with tasteless draper and French fringe… ripped and hanging by a single thread in more than one place…. The chimney-piece was a picture of unmeaning confusion; china and biscuit ornaments were crowded and elbowed out of place by phials, parcels, tobacco-pipes, the halves of mouldy lemons, the ink-bottle…” Card-racks, [a bourgeois ornament intended to display visitors’ calling cards] supported the greasy notes of the butcher, and all the Farmer’s memorandums..”
     In case we haven’t got the point, the Lobban’s pet dog chews up a common prayer book lying on the floor.
    ​​Oh, but we’re not done! Turns out Matilda loves reading novels, and Mrs. Forest has something to say about that, but I’ll save that for another day.

We’re gonna need a montage
   The Forests continue to fix up their farm and the narrator tells us we're going to skip ahead a bit. The family befriends an invalid old lady and her granddaughter who live in a cottage by the ocean. Patience Martin has a bit of an inheritance coming to her, so Mrs. Lobban has announced that Patience, or Patty, will marry her darling son Ralph. Young William Forest is not too pleased with this idea. Ralph is a vulgar lout, who hangs out with the loutish Squire Wilson. Match-making Mrs. Lobban is also throwing her daughter Matilda at Squire Wilson, even though Mrs. Forest warns her that he is irreligious and a drunkard.
    Mary Forest, on her way back from a visit to her new friend Patty, pauses to admire the sea view and is startled by a young man hunting pheasants. He is Captain Freemantle, the handsome son of their landlord. He is smitten with the beautiful and artless farmer’s daughter. The author assures us that Captain Freemantle is not a cad. This is not George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) with Captain Donithorne setting out to seduce the dairymaid Hetty Sorrel. 
   The author then introduces some new characters, the poor widow Cooper and her four children. Just as Rev. Mirvan is above the Forest family socially, the Coopers are far enough below that Patty and Mary can bestow charitable attentions on them. You will recall Emma Woodhouse making this distinction between friends, objects of charity, and the people in-between that she can have nothing to do with socially, in Austen’s Emma. And alas, Dame Cooper needs help! Her oldest daughter Bridget, who had gone out to service at the Lobban’s farm, is with child! “Mr. Ralph swore that he would marry me!” she sobs. Patty had already realized that Ralph was not as wonderful as his mother said he was, but this news shocks and disgusts her. While the girls are still taking in this grim development, Mrs. Lobban storms into the cottage and assails Bridget.

 Mrs. Lobban on the rampage
   “So,” said she, “this is the way the young hussy tries to excite compassion, is it? Ladies, she is an infamous strumpet! Get out of my sight you abandoned wretch, and don’t dare to breathe your wicked lies!” and very unceremoniously Mrs. Lobban pulled the hair of Bridget as she lay on the ground, and kicked her with vehemence… “unsay all you have said, directly, hussy, or I will get you whipped round the village the next revel day!”
    Dame Cooper protests: “I will defy the whole parish of Arlburton to produce a more modest girl than my Biddy was, [when] she went into your service.”
   “And do you mean to say my house corrupted her, you old canting, doating fool?”
    [Bridget repeats] “Indeed Mr. Ralph promised me marriage.”
   “Marriage--you marriage?” cried the almost raving Mrs. Lobban; “You! You out-scout of filth! You dreg of the dung-hill!...”
    Mrs. Lobban and Ralph continue to pressure Bridget to recant, and Mrs. Lobban even suggests that William Forest and Captain Freemantle have beaten a path to that hussy’s door, if you know what I mean. Biddy refuses to accuse an innocent man and stands by her story. As Mrs. Lobban feared, this means the end of Patty’s half-hearted promise to marry Ralph. This development makes young William happy, and he is swift to offer to escort his sister Mary to Sea Cottage whenever she wants to pay a visit. 
    One evening as they are returning to their own farmhouse, William suddenly leaves Mary on an isolated path and dashes away, telling her to wait. Mary doesn’t understand what’s going on, but after a while, Captain Freemantle appears and explains that Dame Cooper’s cottage was on fire—he, Captain Freemantle, has rescued everyone, and William, having spotted the flames, ran to assist. William is still there, working to extinguish the last of the blaze. At such a dramatic moment—fresh from his heroic exploits—alone with Mary in the moonlight, Freemantle can’t help himself—he reveals his love for her and asks her to be his wife.

 She was only a farmer's daughter but...
     ​Here, the narrator addresses readers directly and defends Mary from being an ‘unnatural character’ because Mary, after going home to pray, weep, and struggle with herself, writes a letter turning him down.
    Her father backs her up, and later explains his views in an encounter with young Freemantle. The class gulf between them is too wide, the Freemantles would never accept Mary, and she could never fit in. He basically makes an explicit defense of the British class system, which I might excerpt in full in a future post. Thus our author is placing herself firmly in the anti-Jacobin conservative camp, against the wild egalitarian notions of the progressives.

Who set the fire?
    So, what about that suspicious fire at Dame Cooper’s? Ralph is suspected. The shock of the event probably helped hasten the premature labour and subsequent demise of Bridget, who is laid to rest with her stillborn child in the parish churchyard. When Mrs. Lobban hears the church bell tolling, she calls Bridget a “hussey.” Mrs. Forest sermonizes that at least she died repentant.
    But the Lobbans and the Forests are still speaking to each other, because Ralph and his drinking buddy Squire Weston invite everyone to come to a theatrical performance by a troupe of strolling players. The next day, we learn that neither Matilda nor her brother have returned from the play. Ralph has run off with one of the actresses, and Matilda has eloped with Squire Weston. Mrs. Lobban is triumphant until it becomes clear that the squire has seduced Matilda, not married her.
    Mrs. Forest moralizes over how badly Ralph and Matilda were raised, while the narrator sums up the fates of each of the characters. Humiliated by their daughter’s disgrace, the Lobbans pack up and move to (where else) Wales. (The author of this series of novels always packs people off to Wales in times of crisis.) Ralph joins the army, William marries Patty and at the last minute, the author conjures up a nice young curate for Mary, which raises her into the lower ranks of gentility. Captain Freemantle marries a good woman of his own social class, the landed gentry.
    “In the sober enjoyment of domestic comfort, in industrious pursuits, in active benevolence, and in the cheerful exercise of a pure religion, the Forests continue to pursue the ‘even tenor of their way.’” The end.

The author's afterword
    ​After a pro forma modest declaration in which the author declares “she tremblingly feels her own inferiority,” she explains she got the idea for her story about the Forest and Lobban families from a best-selling novel by Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie, a Tale for the Farmer’s Inglenook (1808). An inglenook is the space on either side of a large fireplace. Hamilton’s story concerned a respectable retired servant who moves in with her Scottish relatives and tries to improve their unhygienic and slovenly ways. The story was a big hit, so that's why publisher Benjamin Crosby swiftly re-named this novella about the Forests and the Lobbans, as "A Tale for the Farmer's Fire Side," even though the book had already been set up by the compositors. It was originally titled “A Tale for Farmers’ Wives and Daughters” but he went with the copy-cat subtitle to imitate Hamilton's bestseller. You can still see the original subtitle, “A Tale for Farmers’ Wives and Daughters” in the second volume, and in the running head along the tops of the pages. The narrator even refers to her original title in one of her remarks to her readers: “Even if we should succeed in getting farmer’s wives and daughters to peruse our little story, we guess, that they will frequently yawn over cottage scenes, and cottage conversations; so not entirely to sicken them, we will hasten Mary Forest away."  Ironically, Crosby made a huge fuss when another publisher brought out A Winter at Bath the same year that Crosby brought out A Winter in Bath. 
    However, despite this effort to link this book to Hamilton's book, despite the tacked-on epilogue making the connection, I think The English Farmer’s Fireside more closely resembles a story for young people by Maria Edgeworth, The Contrast (1807), which compares two farm families, the Franklands (good, who raise their children well) and the Bettesworths (lazy and selfish, who raise their children poorly). The Bettesworths come to a bad end. I reviewed The Contrast in an earlier blog post.

CMP#261   Book Review: The Banks of the Wye: or, Two Summers at Clifton (1808)​

​     The Banks of the Wye is one of 21 novels in the attribution chain involving the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour. This is a novel which has ben speculated about and commented on in academic circles because it was so unusual to have a mixed-race protagonist in a novel of this era.
     For more about the attribution chain (“by the author of”) and how it relates to the mystery of who wrote The Woman of Colour, click here. I was not able to read The Banks of the Wye when I was reading my way through the other novels earlier this year, because it is not digitized. Last month, however, I visited England and spent several mornings reading it in one of the peaceful and sedate Reading Rooms of the British Library.
      Now that I’ve read every book in the attribution chain but one (Fedaretta), I would nominate The Banks of the Wye as the best-written of the 21 novels, with The House That Jack Built as a close second. The anonymous authoress sustains her story through four volumes. She sets up her major plot points with skilful foreshadowing, telling us the story of a young bride named Teresa who went astray, and then reiterating her doom in the life of her granddaughter. She handles a lot of characters and sub-plots and keeps them all in motion. It was a frequent fault of novelists of this time to introduce a gallery of crazy characters just for the sake of having crazy characters—such as, an assortment of people at a vacation resort. The Banks of the Wye’s comic characters are not there just to be ridiculous; they play some part in the plot. My favourite is Miss Patience Perkyns, a woman on the wrong side of thirty who haunts vacation spots in search of a husband and makes a lot of noise about her maiden virtue. 

Good girl, bad girl
     ​Like some other novels in the attribution chain, The Banks of the Wye sets up two young women, in this case sisters, to contrast virtue with vice. As is typical, vice turns out to be more interesting than virtue. Because Emily stays at home with her parents, she has nothing to do in this novel but worry about her siblings and conceal her secret love for Henry, the wealthy squire’s son. The authoress was aware of this dramatic problem: no “display of the novelist’s powers; no adventures and no hair-breadth escapes have yet presented themselves in [Emily’s] history—She is unfit for a heroine, and yet perhaps in the exercise of all the social and relative duties, and in strength of mind and sweetness of disposition, we might venture to set her against any heroine of romance or novel, ancient or modern.”
     Emily's younger sister Teresa is first seduced by her own vanity when their decadent city cousins come to visit the family at their remote vicarage and her cousin Rinaldo starts to make much of her. We see here the usual contrast between the wicked city, where people marry only for advantage and money, and are sucked into the vortex of dissipation, versus the pure delights of the country, where heroines can spend their time reading, watering their gardens, and dispensing charity to the poor. The visit of the city slickers is like introducing the snake into the Garden of Eden, a plot point we also see in The Farmer of Inglewood Forest or Mansfield Park. Luckily, our heroes, Frederic Warrender and his wealthy friend Henry Wharton, quickly see through cousin Clementina’s ridiculous and affected behaviour. Their hearts are in no danger. Rinaldo’s mother was bored at the vicarage because they have no novels to read-- Austen laughed about this habit of disparaging novels within the pages of novels in Northanger Abbey. The wife of a wealthy merchant herself, the aunt constantly name-drops her titled friend “Lady Slingsby,” which was a handy way to introduce a significant character who does not appear until later in the novel. In the same fashion Austen has Emma talk about Jane Fairfax long before she actually appears in Emma.

A well-organized plot
    There are some descriptive passages which rise above the usual cliché, and even hint at free indirect discourse, as when the author describes Teresa’s gradual descent into regret and insanity: “Teresa listened with apparent satisfaction to [Rinaldo’s] proposal of changing the scene. She began to think that Brighton was of all places the most cheerless at the approach of winter; --the roaring surge on the beach surely sounded here unusually hollow. The wind, as it blew through the trees, and despoiled them of their foliage, sent forth a mourning sigh which reached her heart; even the clouds looked more murky here than in Monmouthshire.”
    Mind you, there is a lot of novel cant as well: Before Teresa dies, her loving family reunites with her and forgives her: “a temporary renovation seemed to take place in the enfeebled frame of Teresa; but it was like the last quivering flame of the expiring taper; her spirits were raised beyond her strength, and her sorrowing friends saw too clearly that her dissolution was approaching!”
   The touches of comedy are not so successful either. There is the usual “howsomedever” garrulous menial explaining a backstory and some forced misunderstandings between the lovers. Our tastes have changed in this respect. If these episodes seem contrived and gratuitous, I think we can say the same thing about the scene in Sense and Sensibility when Mrs. Jennings thinks Colonel Brandon is proposing to Elinor. 

​Some more Austen parallels
    When the city cousins leave the vicarage, they offer to take Teresa with them, but her parents refuse. Poor Teresa! Just like Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, panting to see the bright lights. The narrator notes sympathetically, “She wished that she had been of the other sex; then she must have gone into the world as well as her brothers, but now there was a gloomy void before her, no incident, no variety, no interesting object to divert her thoughts.”
      Luckily, or unluckily, as it turns out, Henry Wharton’s rich spinster aunt offers to take her to Clifton, a scenic resort near Bristol, to serve as her companion. There, Teresa snags herself a rich and not-very-bright husband, like Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park, but Teresa loses everything when Rinaldo crosses her path again.
     As with Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, the fall of the erring sister is traced to faults in her upbringing—as the baby of the family, Teresa was overindulged. But even amongst all the moralizing, the author adds some sophistication and nuance when she ridicules the self-righteous Miss Perkyns: “On seeing [Teresa] she shrunk back, and placing herself with her back to the corner of the wall, she held her clothes tightly round her legs, as if she feared that the flounces of her petticoat should be contaminated, if it should have the slightest contact with the garment of Teresa.”
     The narrator adds sarcastically, “[Teresa’s] spirit supported her, to return the broad stares, which was cast on her by this immaculate virgin….”  
      In the same way, Austen portrays a range of reactions to Lydia's transgressions. Elizabeth forthrightly but silently condemns Wickham and Lydia for letting their passions overpower their virtue, but Mr. Bennet is scornful when Mr. Collins advises him to cast Lydia out of the family.

Slavery
    And, speaking of Mansfield Park, in this novel we have--once again--an authoress condemning slavery much more openly than Jane Austen ever did. When Frederic and Emily’s grandfather gives his backstory to his new son-in-law, he describes a trip to the West Indies: “At length we landed in the island of Jamaica, the new and peculiar feelings which agitated my mind at beholding the novel scene before me I should vainly endeavour to retrace. I shuddered at seeing herds of my fellow men, labouring and sweating as beasts of burden for the lordly planter; but I was unique in my commiseration of the poor negroes, nobody wondered or seemed shocked but myself; they considered this poor race of beings as ranking below the scale of man in creation, because the Almighty had given them a darker skin. I felt for their injuries, but I felt in silence, for I had not the power of reliving them from their oppressors."

Other features
   Although the forgotten novels of Austen's era are notably similar in theme and style, you never know what is going to pop up in them. This novel contains a description of Munchausen by Proxy. Mrs. Woodley is a mother who domineers her sickly adult son. When he elopes with Teresa, she is distraught: “No never, never,” said she: “for I am sure nobody can make Billy happy but me. Who can understand all his ways but me? Who can tell all his symptoms but me? I discovered his illnesses when nobody else could; I prevailed on him to take physic when he felt no pain, to avoid the illness which I could foresee… Oh my heart will break.” As it turns out, her love for her son is entirely conditional. 
    There is also a brief description of a neurodivergent woman, albeit in a minor character. This same author also put a neurodivergent woman into her novel The Splendour of Adversity.
    There are several discussions of fashion which I think would be of interest to the fashion historian. Clara Wharton gives her opinion that when girls started wearing diaphanous dresses without pockets, then they had no place to carry their handkerchiefs and their smelling salts, so they gave up the affectation of fainting fits.
     “Fashion cannot change the character,” Emily counters.
     “Fashion can do any thing she pleases,” said Mrs. Clara.

About the author
    As the English database explains, this novel has been attributed to “J.H. James, but no other evidence about such an author writing in the period has been discovered. James Henry James… was the author of The Banks of the Wye and Other Poems (1856).” This is how James’s name got connected to this title and the sequence of novels connected with it.
   Our anonymous authoress--and her publisher, Crosby--must have been pleased with this review from The Ladies’ Monthly Museum: “We have seldom met with a more interesting or unexceptionable novel than the Banks of the Wye. The style is easy, unaffected, and chaste. The characters are drawn without overstepping the modesty of nature, and the sentiments do honour to the writer. The incidents occur naturally, and are diversified with skill; no tedious descriptions fatigue the attention, no extravagant romantic flights, disgust common sense. The moral is excellent, and is not forced upon is, as it is after the perusal of certain pernicious trash, like a pill after a fit of indigestion; but occurs from our own reflections on the gradual fall of innocence, led astray by vanity and pride. Many of the scenes depicted are calculated to awaken the liveliest sensibility: on the whole, it is entitled to our warmest recommendation.”
 
    As I mentioned, The Banks of the Wye is not in the Corvey Collection of digitized novels. A few copies survive in university libraries (Harvard, Exeter, and Manchester) and at the British Library. The subtitle, Two Summers at Clifton, indicates that the publisher was trying to associate it with a sub-genre called the "season" novel, a novel set amongst fashionable people at a fashionable place. The author had previously published the "season" novel, A Winter in Bath. 

    The Banks of the Wye has yielded some additional evidence about the authorship of The Woman of Colour. Stay tuned.

Previous post:  The Miser Married, a bit like Moliere

    In 1822, writer Catherine Hutton praised Jane Austen in one of her letters: “her novels are pictures of common life, something like mine, but much more varied; and her character is either something like mine, or what I would wish mine to be.” As a biographer of Hutton notes, the “comparison is apt…. [Hutton] share[s] Austen’s self-described attention to ‘3 or 4 families in a Country village'.”
   The Miser Married, a novel in letters, or epistolary novel, tells the story of what happens when a lively mother-and-daughter team move into a country village and become neighbours to a confirmed miser and misanthrope. Mrs. Mereval and her daughter Catherine are joined by Mrs. Mereval’s niece Emily. We meet the miser through his letters to his man of business, then the lively Catherine takes over with letters to a friend. We learn that she had expected to inherit her late father’s fortune, but a long-lost relative has returned from the East Indies; as a male, he inherits the baronetcy, but he is also entitled to the estate? They are in suspense as the matter works its way through the courts.
    To add to their worries, Catherine and her mother, in anticipation of her inheritance, allowed themselves to live beyond their means and get into debt. They have fled their creditors, which is why they are in this quiet village, and in fact they are living under an assumed name. Their real name is Montgomery...

 A Damocles of debt
   So we don’t have a “picture of perfection” heroine here. Financial disaster is hanging over Catherine’s head if she loses the lawsuit but despite her worries she remains witty and cheerful. The author’s innovation here is to take the saucy sidekick who converses with “ease and vivacity” and switch her from second-banana status to main heroine, while relegating the “timid, gentle, retiring” and very virtuous heroine (Emily) to the sidekick position. This is what Jane Austen did in Pride and Prejudice.
    Mr. Winterdale, the miser, is unsociable, so the only other “genteel” family in the country village is the not-very-genteel clergyman and his wife. Mrs. Thacker is a wealthy fishmonger’s daughter, meaning she is loud, fat, and vulgar, with a cockney accent. The cast of characters is rounded out by Mr. Strong, a nephew on an extended visit with his aunt and uncle. Strong is very weak and effeminate—I think we are looking at a standard comic type here--but he regards himself as an irresistible catch. He is attracted to the gentle cousin Emily.
     Chance brings the miser together with the ladies when he breaks his leg while passing their house. Apparently broken legs were treated in those days by immobilizing the patient for weeks, so the miser becomes Mrs. Mereval’s house guest—he can’t even be taken to his own house on a stretcher--and by the time he’s well enough to move, his son Henry is in love with Emily, Catherine is in love with Henry's college friend Mr. Montgomery, and the miser is engaged to Catherine’s mother.

Theme one: duty to parents
​    The plot unfolds in a leisurely fashion. There are two long scenes, recounted in Catherine’s letters, where Mrs. Mereval deftly parries questions and surmises from the clergyman and his wife about the "Mrs. Montgomery" the miser is going to marry. We learn that although Catherine has been foolish with money, she does have principles, and she’s deeply uneasy that her mother is luring the miser into marriage without disclosing all her debts, for which he’ll become responsible once he’s her husband. This “would be worse than artful; it would be base; and Mr. Winterdale would be the last man upon earth to marry her, if [the debts] were known.”
    Charlotte’s mother was a spendthrift and she’s being deceitful, Henry struggles with his miserly father, and Henry’s friend Mr. Montgomery happens to be the son of the relative who is suing Charlotte for her entire inheritance. The young people struggle with their parents’ behaviour, trying to adhere to the moral and social convention that they must respect and obey their parents. They discuss their dilemmas but there are no solutions—they can only watch events unfold. As Catherine said, “My mother is indebted to every tradesman employed about her house and person; her real motive for retiring into this country… was to elude her creditors; and she has married Mr. Winterdale, without informing him of these circumstances. Ask me not whether I excuse or condemn such proceedings. Different duties forbid me to do either.” 

A very short honeymoon
     ​The Winterdales’ marriage soon becomes a battle of wills. The miser expected complete and unquestioning obedience and is astonished when he doesn’t get it. The new Mrs. Winterdale is cheerful and attentive, but she laughs at his complaints when she buys an expensive carriage, has the house redecorated, and drags him on a vacation to a seaside town. Yet, despite his complaints, it seems his life is better—she draws him out, getting him to travel and meet people. Catherine observes that in public, her mother “makes her husband the principal object of her attention. No remark of his, however trifling, falls to the ground. She waits a moment, to see if it is noticed by another; if it is not, she replies to it herself; places it in the fairest light, and adds to its consequence. In a word, she draws him out, and draws more good sense out of him than any person ever suspected was in. Shy, and almost timid himself, his face shines with gratitude for such distinction.”

 Theme two: what makes a good marriage?
  Catherine more than once returns to questioning the dilemma of how to choose a spouse. Should women put up with tyranny for the sake of financial security? “Shall I sit down to breakfast, to dinner, to supper, every day, with a man who may hate, or despise me, or to whom I may be indifferent! Shall this man have a right to enter my apartment any hour of the day; and shall I not have the power even to exclude him at night! Avert it, heaven! For I could not exist under it.” After observing another local couple, the Elringtons, where the husband is a sneering jerk to his wife, she asks herself: “Is the situation of woman such that she must play the tyrant, or become a slave? And is man such an abject creature that he must either domineer or crouch? Cannot two rational beings steer a middle course, in which each should alternately assert its rights, and give them up to the other?”
    I won’t recount the entire plot here, but for a while it appears that Catherine faces a future without the man she loves and with no money, either. She bravely faces up to circumstances which her own past extravagance have helped to bring about. After some difficulties and of course some remarkable coincidences, Catherine wins the lawsuit, thanks to some timely help from Mr. Winterdale. The money will stay in the family, though, because she is marrying the son of the long-lost relative. Emily marries Henry Winterdale and the miser becomes less miserly.

Other features of interest
East and West Indies
    There is almost no mention of empire in this book. Catherine's mother touches on slavery when she expresses her belief that you have to rule or be ruled, because the freedom to be despotic creates despots: “Few are the human beings who will not abuse power; and many a planter in the West Indies has become a brute, that, in England would have made a good master.”
​Love scene scrubbed
   This book includes some extended conversations between the young people. Catherine’s lover attempts to persuade her to elope with him, but she refuses, still deploying her trademark wit even as her heart is breaking. However, like Austen, the love scenes are elided: “I shall not now trouble you with what passed between Montgomery and myself; which, though one of the most interesting to the parties concerned, would, probably, be one of the least so to you. It is sufficient to say that it was serious and tender… the result was gratitude to the Supreme Disposer of Events.”
Real-life Miss Havisham
   Was there a real-life prototype of Dickens’ Miss Havisham in Great Expectations? The heroine tells her friend, “There was a lady in London, an aunt of the celebrated John Wilkes [a radical British politician], who having met with a disappointment in love, in her early youth, whether from the death or infidelity of its object, I now forget, vowed never more to see the sun. She shut herself up in her bedchamber, which she did not quit, till she was carried out in her coffin. A lady, a friend of ours, who is now about sixty years of age, was once admitted into her apartment, when a child… she perfectly remembers seeing her; in a light, drab-coloured camblet manteau, with cuffs and robings of crimson sattin…”
Gossip
   Austen teaches us that it is vulgar to gossip with your servants. Our heroine several times acknowledges that it is low-bred to listen to their gossip, but she says there is nothing else to do in the neighbourhood.

​About the author
    Charlotte Hutton (1756-1846) was the daughter of then-prominent scholar William Hutton, an historian of Birmingham. She was a friend of Sarah Harriet Burney, half-sister to Frances Burney who was the author of the much-derided (by me and Jane Austen) novel Clarentine. Both Charlotte Hutton and Sarah Burney read and admired Austen’s novels, without, of course, knowing who she was until her authorship was announced by the family after her death in 1817. Unlike Austen, Hutton had the advantage, through her father, of knowing a number of prominent political and literary figures, such as the author Robert Bage.
​   The Huttons were dissenters and progressive in their politics. Their home was attacked during the anti-Catholic Gordon riots and burned down, an event she describes in her letters. After her death, her letters were published by her niece as Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century.

Contemporary Reviews
   ​The Monthly Review called the novel “a promising first attempt. The dialogues are natural, and each letter is characteristic of its supposed writer.” Like me, they found the letters from the servants—or as the reviewer put it, the “inferior characters” —hard to struggle though: the letters “might have been more intelligible and amusing, if every word in them had not been so studiously mis-spelt.”
    Another reviewer praised the book for giving “a picture of human nature as we find it,” in contrast to the outlandish gothic novel.

My review: This story has lively characters but is limited by the artificiality of the epistolary style. We never meet Catherine’s correspondent, she is just a plot device. Our heroine never asks her supposed good friend, “so, what’s new with you?” But I enjoyed the story and especially the battle of wills between the miser and his wife. The heroine is intelligent and lively and the author has the good sense to send her heroes off stage when she has nothing for them to do. I think that the author is not dogmatic in her morality—people are not all good or all evil, and finding the right path in life is not always easy.

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     The pseudonymous authoress Mrs. Martha Homely knew that the first unrelentingly weepy and overwrought volume of Maids As They Are is notably different from the livelier scandal-ridden subsequent volumes, and in her foreword she “entreats those who are fatigued at the melancholy of her first volume” to hang in there. Volume Two introduces Lady Lucy and her two sisters, more wickedly captivating than her heroine. Of course they are only there to be held up as a bad example. Of course!
    The story centers around our beautiful and virtuous heroine Theodora Cameron. Actually, the first chapter traces the family line back to the time of good Queen Anne, but the family tree collapses as the authoress dispatches Theodora’s aunt, then her uncle the baronet, then Theodora’s mother, then her father. We’re left with Theodora and her cousin Evelin Cameron, the only remaining male heir to the baronetcy. They are in fact double first cousins, because their fathers are twin brothers (the one who popped out first was the baronet) who married sisters. Their parents intended them for each other from their cradles. No genetic counselors in this little Welsh village, evidently...

   When Evelin is away at school, he sends highly overwrought letters to Theodora about how he longs to come back and throw himself at her feet. But alas, no sooner has he finished his schooling than he is off to serve in the Napoleonic Wars. I for one would have counselled against sending the last living scion of the Cameron family to war, but nobody asked me. Word soon comes that he has died on a French battlefield. The end. 
   ​Just kidding, folks. Evelin isn’t dead after all! He writes that he is heading back to England to throw himself at Theodora’s feet. But when he hastens back to their home village after a long recuperation in France, he hears the church bells ringing, he sees Theodora entering the church, he sees the villagers celebrating a wedding, and he concludes that he’s a day too late.
     Evelin immediately marries Bernice, the nice young girl who nursed him when he was wounded in France. But-- it's all a big misunderstanding! Theodora was the maid of honour, not the bride!
     Actually, I’m giving that part away early. The only thing Theodora knows at this point is that Evelin suddenly jilted her and married someone else. When he realizes his mistake, he tries to explain, but she says it wouldn’t be proper to read a letter from a married man, so she continues in ignorance.
​     Theodora resolves to accompany her friend Aspasia Woodford to visit Aspasia’s noble relatives, the Lurewells, in Bath. That’s when the narrative leaves behind the forehead-clenching drama we’ve had so far and becomes chattier, cheerful, and  ironic, with a new cast of characters. We have the (very) typical situation of an upright and virtuous heroine surrounded by fops, fools, and decadence. At least Theodora has her friend with her; many heroines face this gauntlet of grotesques on their own.
     Lady Lucy Lurewell has snagged a lower-class but wealthy husband, (such people were referred to as a “cit”, short for citizen). They have lodgings at Laura Place. Lucy is a Mary Crawford sort of character—very worldly, witty, and well-read. She actually makes a joke about venereal disease—at least I think she does. See what you think. An army officer jokes that “Cupid, inexorable Cupid, lies perdu in the beautiful hair of Lady Lucy.”
      “I shall then, for once in my life,” exclaimed Lord Selcourt, “have an opportunity of catching his godship.”
      “You had better take care,” cried her gay ladyship, “that you catch nothing else.”​

    In a fun and somewhat Shakespearean episode, Aspasia accidentally intercepts Lucy’s letter setting up an assignation with Lord Selcourt, while Selcourt sends a love-letter to Theodora. The girls have fun with this and put Selcourt in his place.
    Another young man about town proposes to Theodora, and she does not bother with the pro forma response of being undeservedly honoured by his addresses. She just cuts him down like a lawnmower. I think she has greater license to be so brusque because she is an heiress: “do you think me so insufferably vain, as to credit the fine rhapsody you have just uttered, which, assure yourself, I consider as a kind of cant jargon, which you address to almost every woman you meet?”
    Then it’s off to Portman-Square in London where Theodora attracts Lord Morton, a nice enough young man, but she can’t get over her love for Evelin. Lord Morton wants to marry her even after her financial agent absconds with her fortune, leaving her almost penniless. “Where, in the name of wonder, George,” exclaimed [his sister] “did you get these old-fashioned notions,--gratitude, affection, generosity, duty, love and a cottage, beans, peas, and potatoes”?
    Theodora refuses his Lordship and also has to fend off additional lecherous male characters whose intentions are not so honourable. Meanwhile, Lady Lucy runs off with her latest lover, as does her weak-minded friend Mrs. Ainsworth. Their lapse from virtue is tied to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft: What can be wrong, Mrs. Ainsworth exclaims, to “throw off the unjust prejudices, the vain maxims of my sex, and assert my native energies? Can laws made by man shackle the heart?”

     ​At her lowest ebb, Theodora is rescued from poverty and isolation by Mrs. Wilmington, a wealthy single woman who knew the Cameron family. She basically adopts Theodora. Back in the home village, Evelin’s wife Bernice dies (poor Bernice, never more than a convenient plot point, what a sad little life). Evelin goes to London to find Theodora, sees her with her admirer Lord Morton, and, for the second time, assumes she is married. Idiot.
     Finally, Theodora reads Evelin's letter of explanation about the misunderstanding which led to him marrying Bernice. Propriety prevents Theodora from answering him and letting him know she's available, so Mrs. Wilmington does it for her.  Evelin writes back that he can’t wait to throw himself at her feet but alas, he has basically emoted himself into a fatal illness. He dies.
      The authoress imagines that some of her fair readers: “would long since have thrown [the story] by in disgust, could she possibly have anticipated its conclusion, could she have foreseen that I have been all this time leading her on, through some hundreds of pages, and conclude at last without a wedding; and that Theodora is destined by fate, and the author, to die an old maid!” Well, when we compare the independent life of Theodora’s friend Mrs. Wilmington to the unhappy marriages which pass in review before us in this novel, the author makes independence look pretty good.

The wrap up
        Then we have the wrap-up for the rest of the characters. ​Just as Austen dwells on Sir Thomas Bertram’s remorse for the faulty education of his daughters at the end of Mansfield Park, so Lucy Lurewell's father Lord Dormwell “recollected with remorse and anguish, his own blameable conduct towards his children; he saw that to education alone might be attributed all their errors, that no policy could ensure virtue, no advantages of rank and fortune, give dignity, or secure respect and happiness, without religion… while he had been ambitious to procure for them worldly possessions, he had neglected those which could alone have been permanent and lasting.” This is the moral of the tale--only a proper upbringing can prepare young people for the temptations and trials they will face in adult life.
      Like some other authors we’ve read, Martha Homely addresses the reader directly and sometimes imagines what they would say about her book: “Surely,” cries a fashionable belle, just out of her teens, throwing aside my book in disgust, “this work was written by the wife or daughter of some country parson, who having nothing better to do, thought to improve the morals of the rising age, with a few dry sentiments, crammed into a stupid novel.” I didn't know that the term "teens" was in use at this time.

​ Other features
  Our California-based royal, Prince Harry, finds Westminster Abbey creepy because everything about it “spoke of death.” In his autobiography he goes on to list some of the famous people amongst the three thousand laid to rest there but I’m sure all that detail was added by his ghostwriter since Harry has no knowledge of, or interest in, the history of his country. However, I was reminded of that remark because Lady Lucy feels the same: “when I’m in church, and that’s one reason why I never go there; who, for mercy’s sake, that has the least spirit, can bear to sit moping in a kind of human charnel house, where the accumulated dust and ashes of many centuries, are piled up together?”
    There are several subplots. One involves Theodora giving assistance to the destitute widow of a soldier. Her backstory provides an insight into the restricted life of the poor in Austen’s England. Mary and her friend Anne are apprenticed as children by the parish to a cruel farm couple as indentured servants. They are beaten, scolded, and half-starved. Anne dies under the brutal treatment. Mary runs away but she is “taken before a magistrate to give an account of myself; the truth then came out, I was sent home to my parish; choice was given me either to go back to my master, or serve out my time in the house of correction. I chose the latter.” After serving her time, she marries but she and her husband fall on hard times. He enlists and she follows him to the continent where he dies.  “[T]he officers were very good, made a subscription for me, and I embarked on a merchant-man bound for Great Britain.” She arrived penniless and was freezing and starving with her two children in a ditch when Theodora finds her. Theodora provides immediate assistance, then writes to her late husband’s officers to confirm the truth of her story, before giving her the money to set up her own little shop in Minehead. That takes us to another aspect of the novel, the upbraiding of the nobility and the wealthy. The narrator editorializes: “O weak and misguided children of affluence! Ye who sacrifice your health, your fortune, and your fame [i.e. reputation], in the overwhelming vortex of dissipation, ye can never experience a delight equal to that now felt by our heroine!”
     Although she condemns adultery, of course, the author also takes a benign view toward a former kept woman who becomes respectable once she is married:  “[S]he looks up to her husband as a superior being, manages his family, darns the stocking, breaks up sugar, scolds the servants, and now and then takes a friendly cup of tea with a gossiping neighbour… and they generally agree in their condemnation of all the unfortunates of their own sex, who have in any respect swerved from the severest rules of female decorum.”
     I do not think these viewpoints indicate a radical or Jacobin outlook. The author exhorts people to fulfill the roles into which they were born and set a better example to the lower orders: “many of our nobility exhibit a pattern, which every class in society might do well to imitate; yet where the vicious are tolerated and supported, or at least, not sufficiently discouraged—where high birth is considered an excuse for great vices—and where riches ensure respect, it can scarcely admit of a wonder, that men and women will run every risk to gain the latter, and assume the appearance, and enjoy the privileges. Of the former. Lady Caroline, Lady Elizabeth, Lady Anne, elope from their husbands (nothing upon earth more common!) a divorce is obtained, the lady marries her seducer—sometimes any one else; an act of oblivion is passed; and as if she had changed her nature with her name, she is again admitted into the society of the virtuous and respectable, even of her own sex. ‘O tempora! O mores!’”

About the Author
    According to Peter Garside, a pre-eminent scholar of the early novel, “Mrs. Martha Homely” is the pseudonym of Elizabeth Thomas, who also wrote under the name of Bridget Bluemantle. We know nothing about Elizabeth Thomas, but I think she is a female writer, as her female characters are better delineated than her male characters. She imagines the reader trying to picture the author: “but vain are their endeavours, the author will not unveil herself even at the end of the work. Whether I am young, handsome, fashionable, gay, and smart in my appearance, or old, ugly, and grave, they will, I hope, never know. She does refer to herself as “old and homely.” As well: “I may be old and unmarried, and almost entirely devoted to household and culinary occupations, such a supposition would ruin this work at once, for how can a woman who makes puddings and pies, darns stockings, mends linen, and scolds her servants, ever be able to give a true account of men and women of fashion, and without fashion, what is a novel!”
    But this homely old maid stuff could be an assumed persona, as with fellow-novelist Jane West’s alter ego Prudentia Homespun. Thomas says she has “legitimate children” but perhaps she is speaking metaphorically. “I have ‘TWO COUNSELLORS’ on the road, my own legitimate children, who will plead for “Theodora,” and for the author, and who, in the cause of virtue, shall clamour loud, hoping for your applause.”
    Maids As They Are received no reviews when it was first published, and I have found no critical commentary on it since. It is far from the worst novel I’ve read from this period. As usual, the wicked females are more interesting than the prudish heroine, but this is a problem faced by many an author.

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