In an earlier post, I shared some strong feminist characters I had saved up from various novels to present all at once. This week, it's time for homosexuals to step up. Yes, they feature in some old novels. 
   The thing is, they didn't have a word for it back then, not in polite society, anyway. Yes, if you consult a Georgian slang dictionary, they had words for everything, but no words a well-bred lady or gentleman would use in company or even in print. The act, between men, was referred to as "the abominable vice" or the "unspeakable vice." 
    My aim is to give you some examples of how homosexuality was depicted in novels read by young ladies, as compared to the inferences being drawn by modern scholars. Frankly, some 18th-century habits and expressions strike us differently today and I think some people are misinterpreting behaviour that was normal between the sexes back then. Mr. Elton walks arm-in-arm with Mr. Cole in Emma, and Sir Walter walked arm in arm with his heir, W.W. Elliot, in Persuasion. One modern scholar looks at the affectionate loyalty Emma has toward Miss Taylor/Mrs. Weston and concludes their relationship had a sexual component. As for Harriet, "her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired" and this is enough for some moderns to conclude that there's an erotic attraction there--Emma likes girls. How was Emma supposed to react to a pretty girl? With jealousy? Is that the only natural and authentic reaction they think girls have toward another beautiful girl? I mean, what are the options here?

    Very often, when reading old novels, I come across some striking passage when the author or authoress, or one of their characters, delivers their strong views about something, such as slavery or empire or women's rights.  I've long since realized that Jane Austen was not outspoken about any of these issues, compared to her peers. I conclude that people who think she was outspoken or radical have not read enough of the popular literature of the time to have a basis for comparison. 
    But if I bang on that drum every time I review an old novel, I'll sound like a broken record. (ooh, mixed metaphors).  So I've  excerpted these three examples about feminism from novels I've recently read, to present them together. The first two are examples of feminists--okay, tragic, doomed, feminists, but they are given the chance to have their say. The third is a speech from a "mixed character," someone presented as flawed, but essentially good.
    The feminist message is delivered not by the heroine, but by a side character. Then it is made clear to us that this side character may be sympathetic, but is not entirely admirable.
​     The word "subversive" is widely used in academia these days, often when arguing that the author has a message which she barely hints at, but i think introducing feminism in this way is truly subversive...

​     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...