​     Apart from a brief note at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, and unlike other novelists of her era, Austen did not write prefaces for her novels. Author Mary Ann Hanway came out swinging against the gothic novel in her preface to  Ellinor, “having been long convinced that the most baneful consequences must result to the rising generation, from reading the monstrous productions that for some years past have issued from the press [involving} 'valorous knights,' 'goblins dire,' 'charnel-houses.'" She promised that her novel would reflect “nature as it is," that is, she advocated for a more probable and realistic novel plots. Let's see how she succeeds!
    Ellinor is a “picture of perfection” heroine but not an obnoxious one. She faces malicious slanders but holds on to her dignity and always hopes for better days. Janeites might spot some interesting similarities in the synopsis…
    ​​Ellinor opens with our heroine sitting in a carriage, on the final leg of her journey back from a convent in Paris. She has no idea who her parents are. Every now and then a forbiddingly cold woman visits her, and on this occasion, since Ellinor has refused to convert from Catholicism and take the veil, the mysterious woman sends her to be a companion to a young lady in the home of the gentlemanly Sir James Lavington.
      Sitting in the carriage with Elinor is Mr. Howard, an older man—we’re talking an Emma/Mr. Knightley age gap here. She tells him her backstory. He is absolutely smitten and can’t stop thinking about her, but he is not rich, and his gouty old uncle will never let him marry a portionless girl of unknown background.

CMP#193    The "novel-reading miss": Ellen and Julia (1793)  
​   The next few books, I think, all mention novel-reading, if only in passing. In her famous defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey, Austen wrote of the novelists who disparage novels in the pages of their own novels, "joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust."
    Here is a prime example: Sensible Julia “selected such books only as could improve, and admired no characters, but such as placed virtue in its most amiable light, and was equally free from the absurdities of romance, or the pernicious follies delineated in modern Novels." Her sister Ellen grows up reading novels and wants to be a romantic heroine.
    That's a big reason why I am reading and sharing information about these forgotten books--the fun of connecting them to Austen and placing Austen's works in the context of the time they were written. Scholar Susan Allen Ford, speaking on the Jane Austen Society podcast, speaks of the pleasure of finding relevant items in other novels: "I was always making little discoveries... They certainly give you an insight into Austen's playful mind... You can read Austen forever without knowing any of this, but once you do, it just adds these extra layers of complexity but also extra layers of pleasure."
    Ellen and Julia is a novel full of unrealistic coincidences and several incredibly fortunate inheritances, but the message of the novel is supposedly: beware of the insidious effects of novel-reading, or you’ll end up like Ellen!
      The novel is typical in that a slender narrative is stretched out with unconnected and lengthy backstories--in this case, the backstories of fairly minor characters. (This technique is known as the "inset narrative, more about that below).   
​     These backstories have a moral purpose because they illustrate some fault or vice and the miserable consequences thereof...

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?

1. When the man she loves pressures her to elope with him.
2. When her husband leaves the ballroom with a beautiful woman, leaving her behind, seven months' pregnant.
3. When she realizes that her husband is having an affair.
4. When her husband threatens to blacken her name so he can divorce her.
5. When she hears her husband has killed a man in a duel.
6. 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... 

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....