​     Concealment is an epistolary novel, consisting entirely of letters from the heroine, Matilda Harrison, to her friend Elizabeth who is somewhere far away. While this kind of contrivance is artificial, and downright silly when it requires Matilda to reiterate events that Elizabeth, whoever she is, already knows about, it has one advantage. It restricts the story to Matilda’s limited point of view. As is typical with plots that rely upon misunderstanding, the resolution depends upon coincidence, and boy, we have some humdingers here.
   What really struck me, though, was the dark, humorless tone of this novel. There are servants, but they are not comic or garrulous. There is no gallery of fools. In fact, the entire first volume is a catalog of the misery visited upon womankind because of incompetent fathers, foppish suitors, cads and liars. The authoress does not hold back in her opinion of the tyrant man. In other circumstances, academics would regard Concealment as a feminist novel, like Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Women.
   We begin with the heroine’s precipitate flight to Wales, then we backtrack to the tragedies that led her there.

    ​Many historical novels put fictional characters at the forefront of real historical events but Jaquelina of Hainault (1798) is loosely based on the life of a real medieval European princess. Jacquelina (not Jaquelina) was the heiress to her father’s lands in what is now Holland. The real Jacquelina unsuccessfully struggled to retain sovereignty over her territories in a male-dominated world. She had four husbands and was briefly the Dauphine of France. Her third husband was English, a royal duke. This marriage is elevated into a love story for the novel, even though the known facts suggest that Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, married Jacquelina out of ambition and divorced her when his campaign to establish his own kingdom in Europe ran into opposition from France and Burgundy.
   I plodded through Jaquelina, finding it boring and the “ingenuous” heroine quite uninteresting and weak. She’s so “ingenuous” that at first she doesn’t realize she’s in love with Humphrey, or understand why she feels jealous of any other beauty he admires: “’No doubt some of those ladies whom he extols so highly for their beauty makes him weary of Hainault, and anxious to return to England!’ This thought gave her a disagreeable sensation she could in now way account for, and her attendants for the first time had reason to think the princess difficult to please.” 
     By the third time she accidentally gets herself into a compromising situation with Humphrey which hurts her reputation, I was pretty sure she wasn’t intelligent enough to manage a medieval kingdom.   ​

      The plot of Frederic & Caroline depends upon misunderstanding. There are two main couples: Caroline Vincent and Frederic Godfrey, and Frederic's sister Emma Godfrey and their neighbour George Edwin. Both Frederic and George [called by his last name, Edwin, in the novel] become convinced that Caroline and Emma have been unchaste and unfaithful, and they repudiate them. Then the misunderstandings are cleared up, the girls forgive and they reconcile. 
​   Also, the plot relies upon incredible coincidence after incredible coincidence. Frederic keeps running into Caroline wherever he goes, and when he does, he always sees her in a compromising situation, though she is guilty of nothing more than filial obedience to a selfish mother. We also luckily meet up with a long-lost uncle, a long-lost stepmother, a long-lost best friend, two long-lost twin brothers, a long-lost sister, and a long-lost errant wife, each of whom has to tell us their tragic backstory. Thud! As revelations come to light, the women and sometimes the men sink senseless or lifeless to the ground...

    In a previous post, I began a synopsis of the complicated plot of The Revealer of Secrets, or, The House That Jack Built, a novel that might have been written by the same authoress who gave us the 1809 novel The Woman of Colour. 
     The Revealer of Secrets is narrated in the first person by a house, but this is not a sprawling multi-generational saga, it is a story involving five different sets of occupants over the course of several years, as well as some of the local villagers. By the third volume, the author develops a few links between the different tenants. The kept mistress in the first volume turns out to be the sister of the impoverished poet in the third volume, but no-one knows where she has gone. Will the impecunious poet Mr. Hammond ever find his fallen sister and snatch her from vice? (Yes, he does).
    Our main heroine is the virtuous and put-upon Agnes Carey who has transformed The House That Jack Built into an abode of peace and harmony. The house-narrator admires her very much. Anyway, even though the house is the narrator, we now switch to Cheltenham, where Agnes and some previous tenants of the house all come together, including the narcissistic bluestocking Mrs. Desmond and Mr. Prune the glutton. Plus, the author adds a host of new, disagreeably vain and stupid people who gossip and backstab all day...