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. 

    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...

     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...

     Imagine that you have extricated yourself from a relationship with an intelligent but intensely passionate woman, and she writes to you to request the return of her letters—because she is planning to write a novel.
     William Frend, faced with his situation in 1796, chose to “grey rock” her--as the kids say. He never returned the letters, so far as we know. Frend, an intelligent, principled, but rather didactic sort of a guy, was involved with radical circles in London during the heady times of the French Revolution. I discuss him in this previous blog post.
     Hays’ fixation over Frend formed the basis of her 1796 epistolary novel, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, in which she retraces their one-sided relationship. If Emma Courtney is a self-portrait, then Hays was an intelligent, articulate, but very self-absorbed woman, an impression reinforced for me by her letters. I should imagine her friends sighed inwardly when one of her lengthy epistles was handed over by the postman. I’m sure they were always advising her to just get out and go for a long walk. 
    “I can’t make you love me if you don’t,” as the Bonnie Raitt song says. This is a sad lesson that many young people must learn. But now that I check the dates, Mary Hays was 39 years old at the time that she was pursuing Frend.