| 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. Spoilers abound in my discussion of these forgotten novels, and I discuss 18th-century attitudes which I do not necessarily endorse. This post is one in a continuing series in which I look at the novels which were possibly written by the same author who wrote The Woman of Colour (1808). See a list of all the novels in the authorial attribution chain here. |
CMP#243 Fedaretta (1795) and Emily of Lucerne (1800)
Fedaretta, like The Duke of Clarence, was published in 1795, making them the earliest titles in the attribution chain. Fedaretta was published by the more prestigious publisher Crosby, while The Duke of Clarence was published by [ahem] Minerva. No copies of Fedaretta survive in any libraries, except for an undigitized 1803 French translation which is preserved in France. Fedaretta received a review in French, which Google translates thusly:
| Written with a carelessness all the more remarkable because it displays a great air of pretension. On every line, words are in italics, and one doesn't know why. It seems that this book is full of subtlety and mysterious allusions, and yet one cannot guess a single one; this is all in addition to a very weak style that the author could have improved with the effort he puts into making it bizarre. The characters of Fedaretta, Lady Coddrington, and Brown are not bad. The quotations in verse and prose that the author places at the beginning of the chapters are not badly chosen. There is in this novel a strong, sustained interest, though very little lively, which makes it read without haste, and yet without boredom, sometimes even with pleasure. |
So much for Fedaretta, unless a surviving copy of the original English version comes to hand.
Emily of Lucerne
Emily of Lucerne (1800) is an outlier in the 21 titles which make up the tangled attribution chain of works possibly written by the author of The Woman of Colour (1809). It is a strange pastiche of a novel of manners, set in London, with a jarringly different gothic interlude set in a castle in Europe, complete with fake ghost. My guess is that the author, who signs herself as "EMF," had an old half-finished draft novel about London society, then she grafted in a gothic short story she also happened to have lying around, to stretch the tale out to two volumes. As she had been lucky enough to place several of her manuscripts with Minerva that year, she must have quickly prepared this one and sold it to them as well, on the strength of the others.
We start with a heroine raised in Switzerland and brought back to London after her parents die (reminder--most sentimental heroines are orphans). Having no living relatives, she is briefly under the guardianship of a wise older woman who was her father’s first love.
When I was reading Volume One, I felt that it was completely different from the humourless and heavy-handed moralizing of other early titles which have been attributed to “Mrs. Foster,” ( Miriam, Judith, Rebecca, Caroline & Frederic, and Concealment). For example, in Emily of Lucerne there are no references to the “Great Disposer of Events” or “The Almighty”, whom the narrator and the virtuous characters frequently reference in those novels. No admonitions to submit ourselves to the will of an inscrutable Providence. Instead we have: “For the improvement which [Emily’s] natural taste had received, she was indebted to the good St. Aubin... But the good priest [also] endeavoured to implant early in her heart a deep reverence for her Creator, under whatsoever form she chose to worship him”
Under whatsoever form she chose to worship him? What kind of apostasy is that?
Emily of Lucerne (1800) is an outlier in the 21 titles which make up the tangled attribution chain of works possibly written by the author of The Woman of Colour (1809). It is a strange pastiche of a novel of manners, set in London, with a jarringly different gothic interlude set in a castle in Europe, complete with fake ghost. My guess is that the author, who signs herself as "EMF," had an old half-finished draft novel about London society, then she grafted in a gothic short story she also happened to have lying around, to stretch the tale out to two volumes. As she had been lucky enough to place several of her manuscripts with Minerva that year, she must have quickly prepared this one and sold it to them as well, on the strength of the others.
We start with a heroine raised in Switzerland and brought back to London after her parents die (reminder--most sentimental heroines are orphans). Having no living relatives, she is briefly under the guardianship of a wise older woman who was her father’s first love.
When I was reading Volume One, I felt that it was completely different from the humourless and heavy-handed moralizing of other early titles which have been attributed to “Mrs. Foster,” ( Miriam, Judith, Rebecca, Caroline & Frederic, and Concealment). For example, in Emily of Lucerne there are no references to the “Great Disposer of Events” or “The Almighty”, whom the narrator and the virtuous characters frequently reference in those novels. No admonitions to submit ourselves to the will of an inscrutable Providence. Instead we have: “For the improvement which [Emily’s] natural taste had received, she was indebted to the good St. Aubin... But the good priest [also] endeavoured to implant early in her heart a deep reverence for her Creator, under whatsoever form she chose to worship him”
Under whatsoever form she chose to worship him? What kind of apostasy is that?
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