In a previous post, I began a synopsis of the complicated plot of The Revealer of Secrets, or, The House That Jack Built, a novel that might have been written by the same authoress who gave us the 1809 novel The Woman of Colour. 
     The Revealer of Secrets is narrated in the first person by a house, but this is not a sprawling multi-generational saga, it is a story involving five different sets of occupants over the course of several years, as well as some of the local villagers. By the third volume, the author develops a few links between the different tenants. The kept mistress in the first volume turns out to be the sister of the impoverished poet in the third volume, but no-one knows where she has gone. Will the impecunious poet Mr. Hammond ever find his fallen sister and snatch her from vice? (Yes, he does).
    Our main heroine is the virtuous and put-upon Agnes Carey who has transformed The House That Jack Built into an abode of peace and harmony. The house-narrator admires her very much. Anyway, even though the house is the narrator, we now switch to Cheltenham, where Agnes and some previous tenants of the house all come together, including the narcissistic bluestocking Mrs. Desmond and Mr. Prune the glutton. Plus, the author adds a host of new, disagreeably vain and stupid people who gossip and backstab all day...

    The Revealer of Secrets is the last-published title in the long list of novels attributed to the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour (1809). It is the story of a house, narrated by the house. 
​   Whoever wrote this novel, I'm going to declare that it was not the author of the first novels in the chain, such as The Duke of Clarence (1795) or Rebecca (1799). The difference in detail and narrative complexity between the early novels and the later novels is striking. It’s hard to imagine any writer maturing and improving her style to such a degree over the years. It’s like when one of your students hands in some homework that they clearly didn’t write themselves—you just know.
   On the other hand, I initially thought the style of this novel didn't match the later novels such as The Splendour of Adversity (1814) either, because I was well into the first chapter and there was no mention of God, Heaven, or salvation. The story begins with an unrelated prologue consisting of two old men standing in front of the house and debating how old it might be. However, once we get into the actual narrative, the moralizing strain arises...

​    Substance and Shadow opens with a genteel lady watching a storm blow in to the shore at Brighton, then a fashionable watering place patronized by the Prince of Wales. Mrs. Elwyn is amused by the rhapsodies of another young lady gamboling along on the beach, exclaiming over the tremendous crashing of the waves. We have here the same dichotomy Jane Austen used in Sense and Sensibility. Clara Elwyn “knew that romance and enthusiasm were the leading features of the day, and that those feelings were nurtured and indulged, at the hazard of running counter to all the forms and usages of society, and the good old way in which she had been taught to walk.”
    But Mrs. Elwyn is concerned because she knows that a fisherman and his wife had gone out to sea that morning, and have not returned. The following morning brings the sad news that they are drowned, and Mrs. Elwyn benevolently visits the humble cottage where their twin infant daughters are being cared for by a neighbor woman. The babies will now become the responsibility of the parish and their prospects are bleak. Suddenly, the excitable young lady, also drawn to the news of the catastrophe, swoops in and carries off one of the babies. Mrs. Elwyn decides to give a home to the other. It will give her someone to care for, since she is childless and her husband is polite but remote and often absent...

   I was doing some research into how the reception of Mansfield Park has changed since it was first published. It is now generally regarded as her least popular novel, and some say, her least successful novel artistically. It's a favourite of mine, obviously, since I wrote an Austenesque trilogy based on it. In my own books, I had to come to terms with the slave trade and the fact that Sir Thomas owns a plantation (called an "estate" in the book) in Antigua. The issue of slavery was not an issue for a critic writing 100 years ago, even though they were not as far removed from the time of slavery.
​   I also had to deal with the widespread perception of the heroine Fanny Price as a prim little prig, or a timid little mouse. The anonymous author of this 1927 review, reproduced below, doesn't like Fanny, Edmund, or the book, but his opinions and the way he phrased them amused me. I think other Janeites would like this too, even Mansfield Park fans. But if you haven't read Mansfield Park, be advised, this review contains spoilers.

​MANSFIELD PARK—JANE AUSTEN’S WORST NOVEL
  Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Jan. 20, 1927
    When new books fail to charm—and there comes a time when they do, and when all one’s favourite modern authors seem to be writing tiresome rubbish—there is no cure so good for the soul as to re-read old ones. We suspect that advancing age has much to do with this failure to find a new book to our taste.
   To anyone suffering from this sad fate, whatever his age and literary preferences, we unhesitatingly recommend a course of Disraeli novels or those of Jane Austen.
    To write of Jane Austen in general is like trying to find something new to say about the weather… Yet there remains, we think, something to be said of Mansfield Park. Perhaps it was because we read it last of all, of perhaps because it really is not so good as the others, that we must admit to finding it a very mediocre performance. Compared with the charming simplicity of Catherine Morland, the robust sense of Elinor Dashwood, the quiet intelligence of Anne Eliot or the satirical wit of Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price is a dull and extraordinarily priggish heroine. As for Edmund Bertram, he is a prince of prigs indeed.