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CMP#192 Gertrude, who elopes and repents

6/18/2024

“Oh, these faintings, so often, and then again directly, will soon do her business, I warrant, poor honey!” said Mrs. O’Flarty; but “but hould, hould a bit, now she is coming to herself, and now she sighs…”
-- the Irish landlady in Black Rock House

CMP#192 Black Rock House: a psychological thriller from 1808
by Mrs. E.G. Bayfield: Synopsis with Spoilers

Pop quiz: which events in Black Rock House cause our heroine, Gertrude Wallace, to faint dead away?

When the man she loves pressures her to elope with him.
When her husband leaves the ballroom with a beautiful woman, leaving her behind, seven months' pregnant.
When she realizes that her husband is having an affair.
When her husband threatens to blacken her name so he can divorce her.
When she hears her husband has killed a man in a duel.
When she’s reunited with her father who had cast her off.

If you answered: “all of the above,” you’re right! Poor Gertrude suffers a great many travails in these three volumes—the book is punctuated with the thud of Gertrude hitting the carpet. Yet, she is a plucky girl--she does stay upright and conscious when she’s abandoned by her soldier husband and left behind, first in Bath and then in Ireland, when she’s in two storms at sea, when she’s caught in a flood, and when she's kneeling beside her husband’s “mangled corpse” after he kills himself. Many tears are shed of course...

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CMP#191 Foundling Plots & Seduction Plots

6/12/2024

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This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here. My "six simple questions for academics" post is here.

CMP#191 Two minor novels--the foundling plot and the seduction plot
Here are quick samples of two popular genres of the long eighteenth century. Both novels rely on improbable coincidence for their resolutions:

Miriam (1800) by Mrs. E.M. Foster
“Oh, for mercy’s sake turn back! You know not on what a precipice you stand—a terrible gulph yawns beneath it, and you will be swallowed up for ever!”
The young man standing on the edge of a cliff, about to jump, must be impressed at our heroine’s eloquence, because even during such a dramatic moment, she is speaking metaphorically, not literally, as she warns him of the damnation awaiting the person who commits suicide.
“Think of your merciful Creator; --for what did he send you into this world? Oh blessed, thrice blessed are those whom he chasteneth! Turn back, I conjure you turn back…”
The persuasions of this beautiful girl who has appeared out of nowhere do the trick, and our unknown young man steps back from the edge, totally smitten. But he soon disappears and Miriam only knows that his name is Henry....

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CMP#190: Eliza Kirkham Mathews and posterity

6/5/2024

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CMP#190: Down the rabbit hole with Eliza Kirkham Mathews

I often get caught up on researching whatever I can find about the authoresses I write about. Here are some miscellaneous bits of information about Eliza Kirkham Mathews, nee Strong, whose novel, What Has Been (1801), I discuss here. Eliza's tragic personal story is reflected in her novel. We know her story from the memoir of her husband, the 19th century celebrity actor Charles Mathews, written by his second wife.

Revisions on the fly?
After helping Eliza get What Has Been ready for the press, Eliza’s husband's brother wrote: “I hope to hear of her success as an author; but she must allow me to suggest, that if she wishes to be eminent, she must not write quite in such as hurry as she has been accustomed to do… let me recommend her to write every one of her productions over at least twice, and very carefully to correct the little inaccuracies which will escape even the most experienced eye... there are not more than one or two [successful writers] who ever have sent any of their productions into the world without a revisal at the least, and that not by barely reading them over, but by re-writing them."
I spotted evidence of some revisions on the fly which were not tidied up in What Has Been. While the heroine Emily is staying with the St. Ives family, Mrs. St. Ives asks some visitors if they have “observed a tall and rather handsome woman, who appears extremely melancholy, is always dressed in black, and walks frequently beneath the western cliffs?” One of the visitors declares that she is “the wife of my valued friend, Wilford Stanley,” and he offers to introduce her. It’s clear there is a backstory coming: “she is separated, perhaps for ever, from a husband whom she loves almost to adoration.” But we never hear again of Mrs. Stanley or her backstory. When we meet the woman haunting the cliffs, she is a madwoman, the discarded mistress of a Jamaican planter. Therefore, Agatha is not someone you'd introduce to respectable ladies. It looks like Mathews started a storyline, changed it, and never went back and revised this introduction of the woman on the cliff.

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CMP#189 Nautical talk = androgynous hairstyle?

5/30/2024

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CMP#189: Nautical Expressions from the Age of Sail = Androgynous Hairstyle???

William Price, midshipman, visiting at Mansfield Park

There is a new display about Mansfield Park at the Jane Austen House Museum which unfortunately takes a nautical phrase used by William Price ("in the same trim") out of context. (BTW this post is definitely for hard-core Janeites who like doing deep dives on the smallest detail of her novels.)
First, Austen's depiction of Fanny's midshipman brother and his father, the lieutenant of marines, are congruent with portrayals of sailors in the literature of Austen's time. Remember how Persuasion’s Admiral Croft says: “I wish Frederick [Wentworth] would spread a little more canvas, and bring us home one of these young ladies to Kellynch.” I assume most people would understand he wants Frederick would unfurl his sails, and put more effort into finding a bride.
The bluff British tar expressing himself with naval idioms is a staple of popular culture. I recently came across a sterling example in the third volume of Modern Characters (1808). The protagonist Charles Stanly is in Spain when he’s approached by a British woman begging for his help. She is roughly pulled away by a Spanish man, so Charles gives a passing British sailor some money to trail the couple and find out where they live.
Jack the sailor comes back to report: “he had watched the sail into the harbor, and a pretty, trim built vessel she seemed, though she was a Spaniard, but that she had hardly got in, before that great lubberly don fellow gave her such a blow on her larboard side, as made her heel, so as almost to upset her—O! d—n it,” continued the sailor, clenching his fist, “if I could have got to windward of him, I’d soon have stove in half his ribs, a cowardly rascal to strike a woman.”
Mr. Stanly asks the sailor to help him rescue the woman and get her on a ship for England.
“Will I?" [the sailor eagerly replies.] "Ay, that I will. Shiver my timbers, but if I can run foul of that Spaniard, I’ll belay his carcase, so long as I can hold a ropeyarn. I thought it cruel enough for him to hit one of his own nation, d’ye see; but a rascally Spaniard to strike a British woman—I say no more—I’m your man for anything.”
Jane Austen doesn't lay it on quite so thick, but she did use nautical expressions...

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CMP#192 Gertrude, who elopes and repents

CMP#191 Foundling Plots & Seduction Plots

CMP#190: Eliza Kirkham Mathews and posterity

CMP#189 Nautical talk = androgynous hairstyle?

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