The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliff, the queen of Gothic novels, is one of the two books which Harriet Smith recommended to Robert Martin in Emma, the other being The Children of the Abbey. Emma Woodhouse makes a fanciful connection between Harriet, a girl of illegitimate parentage, and a typically friendless and dispossessed novel heroine such as Adeline of The Romance of the Forest. It is this connection which causes Emma to fantasize that Harriet must be from genteel stock and should marry accordingly--which means she shouldn't marry Robert Martin.
   However, the Gothic plot of The Romance of the Forest (abandoned abbey, a chest with a skeleton in it, a bloody dagger, secret passages) bears no resemblance to the prosaic doings of the little village of Highbury.  Susan Allen Ford points out that Donwell Abbey, set in the English countryside under a sun bright, without being oppressive, bears no resemblance to a half-ruined abbey in a Gothic novel. The heroine Adeline is a beautiful, virtuous, and accomplished girl who shows more resolution and courage when faced with danger than Harriet did in her encounter with the gypsies.
​    But I want to discuss a minor character in Radcliffe's novel named Annette... a very minor character...

    In the novel Emma, the subject of novels comes up when Emma Woodhouse asks Harriet Smith about Robert Martin's reading habits. Emma thinks the young farmer is not good enough for her friend Harriet. She asks Harriet, “Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business? He does not read?" Note that Emma phrases the question in the negative. She's expecting to have her prejudices confirmed.
   There's a bit of subtle humour too, because surely Emma is asking about serious reading--politics and philosophy and history--but Harriet thinks only of novels and the Elegant Extracts (a sort of Readers Digest Condensed Books of the day). She mentions two potboilers: ​"He never read The Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey.  He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can.”
    We never learn if Robert Martin ever get a copy of Regina Maria Roche’s lengthy gothic romance novel, The Children of the Abbey, but it was a best-seller. A synopsis published one hundred years after its publication, describes it thus: "The motherless Amanda is the heroine; and she encounters all the vicissitudes befitting the heroine of the three-volume novel. These include the necessity of living under an assumed name, of becoming the innocent victim of slander, of losing a will [that is, the will hidden from her by her evil stepmother], refusing the hands of dukes and earls, and finally, with her brother, overcoming her enemies, and living happy in the highest society forever after. The six hundred pages, with the high-flown gallantry, the emotional excesses, and the reasonless catastrophes of the eighteenth-century novel, fainting heroines, lovelorn heroes, oppressed innocence and abortive schemes of black-hearted villainy, form a fitting accompaniment to the powdered hair, muslin gowns, stage-coaches, postilions, and other picturesque accessories.”
      It’s a long book with a lot of twists and turns, so I'll stick to the highlights and some recurring themes and tropes. The villains "are completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them," to use Jane Austen's words, and the heroine sheds a lot of tears along the way...

    In previous blog posts, I discussed a sub-genre of novel called the “season” novel. This genre was invented by Thomas Skinner Surr in his A Winter in London (1806), which was such a huge mega-hit with its thinly-disguised portraits of real aristocrats and London celebrities, that many imitators followed, such as A Summer at Weymouth (1808) and A Season at Harrowgate (1817). This post is about A Winter in Bath, by an anonymous author, but I didn’t read this 1807 novel because it’s a “season” novel. A Winter in Bath deserves attention for a few other reasons:

• Adriana, the heroine, is troubled by the unwanted attentions of young Mr. Dawson, who is very much a John Thorpe (Northanger Abbey) type of character.
• The publisher, Benjamin Crosby, threatened to sue another publisher who brought out a book called A Winter at Bath at the same time, a dispute which spilled over to the newspapers and the review columns.
• A Winter in Bath is tied to the mystery over the authorship of The Woman of Colour, the unusual 1803 novel which features a “mulatto” heiress as its main character. More about that later.
• There is an Emma-like reference which might be interesting to Janeites. Mrs. Elton, the daughter of a Bristol trader in Emma, boasts that she has “resources within herself” which enable her to live in obscurity in the small village of Highbury. In A Winter in Bath, we have a minor character, Mr. Oakley. He was a prosperous Bristol trader who retires and moves to live like a gentleman in the country. But he misses his old life because he’s not interested in hunting or field sports and intellectually, he is: “[d]estitute of resources, with no taste for any intellectual or refined amusement….”
• This novel features a lesbian couple as minor characters. Have we got your attention now, modern academy?

    I've read almost one hundred novels of the long 18th century, I'd place this one higher on the list than many others... 

      When I finished Volume One of A Modern Incident, I was half-way through the novel and I still had absolutely no idea what was going on. No idea. So far we just had:
    Page after page of characters stammering out incoherent remarks (dashes and dots in the original):

• “Thy looks! –I feel them, --they will d---n me yet!”)
• “I cannot pray! –I will not—no—Hell is but reprobation—that is mine already—or will be soon --- ---- ---- --- --- Yet, --but him [Mr. Winstanley, that is] I now hate—I know him,--he knows not me,---no, nor my deeds.—One effort yet, to cool this burning fever, to ease this secret torture, --this---this—Oh, Mortimore! –Mortimore!—Thee!—this—and if I fail! –be they blasted in all hope, --and I!—dark perdition cover me for ever—ever--!”
• “Why Mrs. Courtney uttered such a frantic shriek, or what caused such violent emotion, the reader is left to imagine…”

    Page after page of characters harboring a secret:

• “the secrets of another are not my own.”
• "I have already told you... that I never mean to marry."

    And characters turning pale and rushing from the room:

• "With these incoherent and inexplicable words, he rushed with frantic impetuousity from their presence.”

    Perhaps a gothic novel aficionado would be familiar with the tropes and plot devices that baffled me and would figure out the Big Secret before it was revealed in the penultimate chapter, but I only persisted with the book because it was a quick read; a two-volume novel which had not been reviewed when it came out.
    And holy snapping turtles, this had some lurid stuff; at least, lurid compared to the decorous voice of Jane Austen. This has several same-sex teases, and an incest tease, and a ghost-who-turns-out-to-be not a ghost, adultery and seduction, along with forged letters and other skullduggery. Get your smelling salts out for this one.