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. 

     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.

    Mary Ann Hanway, a contemporary of Jane Austen, made her feelings clear about English involvement in the slave trade in her novel Andrew Stuart, the Northern Wanderer (1800), which I reviewed here. As I read and review the forgotten novels of the long eighteenth century, I always flag any mentions of slavery or the slave trade for the convenience of other researchers or readers who may be interested. The numerous examples I've found put paid to the notion that novelists such as Jane Austen couldn't touch on controversial topics. Specifically, it was not controversial to openly express abolitionist sentiments in your novel. 
    If it had been controversial for a female to speak up against the slave trade, you would think that the critics who reviewed these novels would have said so. I have yet to find a single example of this. Andrew Stuart was praised and well received in its day and the editorial against the slave trade is not mentioned in the reviews--because it was not at all unusual or objectionable. The European Review singled out “the very affecting story of Amantha” in Andrew Stuart for particular notice in its lengthy review, but did not mention the editorial against slavery embedded in that subplot.
    The excerpt below is from the backstory of the fair but unfortunate Amantha, who is asking for help from a wealthy noblewoman, and is relating the full story of her parents' marriage and her childhood. In her narrative, we learn that Amantha's father, wishing to provide for his family, takes a position serving on a ship deployed to Africa. 

   I am reading novels which mention Mary Wollstonecraft, which means I will be reading novels by authors who can be broadly defined as conservative. Wollstonecraft is cited in these novels as an example to be avoided.
   Mary Anne Hanway’s huge four volume novel has got me thinking about which opinions and attitudes held by educated people of Austen’s day were coded as conservative or liberal. For example, you might assume conservatives were pro-slavery and progressives were abolitionist. It’s not that simple. Hanway champions many causes we would think of as progressive, but in this novel she clearly aligns herself with the establishment against the Jacobins. I’ll expand on that later. For now, let’s try and grapple with the many plots and characters of the sprawling epic that is Andrew Stuart, the Northern Wanderer. This is a long synopsis, but even so I haven’t fully shown how all the different plots end up tying together.
   ​   Andrew starts his life as a poor crofter’s son, herding sheep in the Scottish highlands. His grandfather was a Jacobite (not to be confused with a Jacobin), a follower of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and hence the family’s fortunes have suffered for backing the wrong political horse. So our hero is not of peasant stock, but still, Andrew (and the other main characters in this novel) start from the humblest of beginnings. He runs away from home at nine years old, eager to see the world beyond his little patch of the Highlands. Hanway notes that the Scottish peasantry willingly share their scanty meals with the boy in his travels, but once he reaches the great city, he’s in danger of starving to death. This is one of many occasions in the book when she praises common folk and excoriates the wealthy and privileged.