The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliff, the queen of Gothic novels, is one of the two books which Harriet Smith recommended to Robert Martin in Emma, the other being The Children of the Abbey. Emma Woodhouse makes a fanciful connection between Harriet, a girl of illegitimate parentage, and a typically friendless and dispossessed novel heroine such as Adeline of The Romance of the Forest. It is this connection which causes Emma to fantasize that Harriet must be from genteel stock and should marry accordingly--which means she shouldn't marry Robert Martin.
   However, the Gothic plot of The Romance of the Forest (abandoned abbey, a chest with a skeleton in it, a bloody dagger, secret passages) bears no resemblance to the prosaic doings of the little village of Highbury.  Susan Allen Ford points out that Donwell Abbey, set in the English countryside under a sun bright, without being oppressive, bears no resemblance to a half-ruined abbey in a Gothic novel. The heroine Adeline is a beautiful, virtuous, and accomplished girl who shows more resolution and courage when faced with danger than Harriet did in her encounter with the gypsies.
​    But I want to discuss a minor character in Radcliffe's novel named Annette... a very minor character...

    In the novel Emma, the subject of novels comes up when Emma Woodhouse asks Harriet Smith about Robert Martin's reading habits. Emma thinks the young farmer is not good enough for her friend Harriet. She asks Harriet, “Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business? He does not read?" Note that Emma phrases the question in the negative. She's expecting to have her prejudices confirmed.
   There's a bit of subtle humour too, because surely Emma is asking about serious reading--politics and philosophy and history--but Harriet thinks only of novels and the Elegant Extracts (a sort of Readers Digest Condensed Books of the day). She mentions two potboilers: ​"He never read The Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey.  He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can.”
    We never learn if Robert Martin ever get a copy of Regina Maria Roche’s lengthy gothic romance novel, The Children of the Abbey, but it was a best-seller. A synopsis published one hundred years after its publication, describes it thus: "The motherless Amanda is the heroine; and she encounters all the vicissitudes befitting the heroine of the three-volume novel. These include the necessity of living under an assumed name, of becoming the innocent victim of slander, of losing a will [that is, the will hidden from her by her evil stepmother], refusing the hands of dukes and earls, and finally, with her brother, overcoming her enemies, and living happy in the highest society forever after. The six hundred pages, with the high-flown gallantry, the emotional excesses, and the reasonless catastrophes of the eighteenth-century novel, fainting heroines, lovelorn heroes, oppressed innocence and abortive schemes of black-hearted villainy, form a fitting accompaniment to the powdered hair, muslin gowns, stage-coaches, postilions, and other picturesque accessories.”
      It’s a long book with a lot of twists and turns, so I'll stick to the highlights and some recurring themes and tropes. The villains "are completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them," to use Jane Austen's words, and the heroine sheds a lot of tears along the way...

    Imagine that you have written your first novel and it’s been accepted by Minerva Press, which is, let’s be honest, not a prestigious publisher but still, your novel will be published! And then it gets published and there’s…. the wrong author’s name on the title page? I don’t know how this happened, but in later years, an authoress named Amelia Beauclerc claimed authorship of this novel, not Emma De Lisle. And why is the book called Eva of Cambria? The character Eva is absent from most of the book and she lives in France and Spain, not Wales. 
    We don't meet Eva and there is no mention of her until 185 pages into the story. We start with the history of another family; an older man named Percy Eddington, who never married because he was disfigured in a carriage accident. He lives with his spinster sister Helena, and --crash! What was that?
    That was another carriage accident. This one brings a distressed widow and a lovely young lady to their door. Laura becomes Percy’s bride, in a May/September pairing. The Eddingtons are happy, devout, and kind to their tenants--good-hearted Welsh people who like to drink to excess whenever Mrs. Eddington presents her husband with a child. They have three children: Julius, Horatio, and Helen. Synopsis and spoilers follow...

​CMP#176       Elfrida, or, Paternal Ambition (1786), a novel in two volumes by a Lady

​    Elfrida, or, Paternal Ambition might be a candidate for academic analysis as a female-written story which quietly subverts the patriarchy, because while the heroine displays conventional heroine behaviour, at times she and other female characters rebel against their restrictive gender roles. We also have an interesting and nuanced (for the times) portrayal of a villain. But otherwise, this story was a disappointment. It began in a sprightly, almost comic fashion, but devolved into a weird, boring melodrama with characters moving from here and there with nothing resolved. At the end of this post, I'll share my evidence for why I think Jane Austen read or at least knew about this novel.
   Elfrida starts with the courtship of Elfrida's parents. Her mother Ella Cluwyd is a lovely girl who falls for the dashing, handsome, but poor Lieutenant Overbury. The lieutenant is such a dish that Ella’s two spinster aunts, who want to thwart the match, get a crush on him, and one of them actually proposes to him. This section is comic, in its quaint way. 
​  On the eve of Ella's father’s wedding to his second wife, Lieutenant Overbury discovers a plot hatched by his valet to rob the family and kidnap the lovely Ella for the fate worse than death. Overbury foils the plot. ​​​Even this heroism does not win him the hand of Ella, especially not when a local baronet makes an offer for her...