Austen scholars know that Jane Austen was familiar with the 1806 novel Lady Maclairn, the victim of villany (It’s spelled ‘villany’ on the title-page), because her niece Anna recalled how she and her aunt had a good laugh over its emotional excesses. There also exists a short satirical note that Austen wrote to Anna about it.
    I wonder if Austen managed to plow through all four volumes and 700 pages. I confess to skimming and skipping the last half, when the author was gearing up to introduce a whole new raft of characters and more subplots and backstories. Austen scholar Deirdre LeFaye counted ‘a total of nearly twenty flashbacks in all,’ and I don’t know if that includes the long narrative summary which commences the novel. However, even though I didn’t manage to read Lady Maclairn cover to cover, this forgotten novel deserves another look for a number of reasons: the attitude displayed in the book toward the slave trade, the Big Family Secret storyline, the naturalistic portrayal of insanity, and the harsh portrait of a clergyman.
    It appears that Lady Maclairn did not receive a review when first published. So here goes:
    Mrs. Dawson, a wealthy widow, never forgave her son-in-law for taking her daughter away to Jamaica, where she died far from home after giving birth to little Rachel Cowley, our heroine. Mrs. Dawson’s will leaves her fortune to Rachel, but Rachel will only inherit if the father returns her to England to be raised by Mrs. Dawson's respectable friends, the Hardcastles. It is just as well for Rachel, because she is growing spoiled in Jamaica where she can lord it over the enslaved people. Her character improves in England where she grows up with gentle little Lucy Hardcastle and her older brother Horace. Rachel looks up to him and she grows into ‘’the habit of yielding up her will to Horace.’’
   ‘’The tribute of Horace’s admiration was directed to the cultivating the taste and forming the judgment of'' our heroine....’’

​    There are actually two duped guardians in this brisk two-volume tale. There are two heroines: both orphans, both heiresses, both controlled by guardians appointed by their late fathers’ wills. Both guardians want to keep the handsome inheritance and dispose of the girl quickly. There are two interlaced plots: one is all melodrama, the other is fairly comical (and in fact was "borrowed" from a comic play ).
​    Mrs. Cartwright orchestrates a story in which perils arise, and problems are resolved in a graceful and orderly fashion, like people dancing a minuet. Although there is drama, there is no great feeling of despair or tension, and this might be because the heroine, Harriot Pelham is intelligent and resourceful. She and her sidekick friend Lady Laura Antrim don't lose their heads or faint in a crisis, but rise to the occasion with female solidarity. There is a secondary heroine, Clara Aubry, a Harriet-Smith or Catherine Morland-like picture of ignorance, only fifteen years old, of whom one character says: “innocence, when it is accompanied by a naïve goodness of heart, has charms irresistible.” Given Clara's imbecility, Harriot needs an intelligent friend and confidante to write her letters to (since this is an epistolary novel), which is where Lady Laura comes in. She's the saucy sidekick of the story. They both look out for Clara. 
  ​  ​Harriot‘s guardian is her brother-in-law, Mr. Hoyle, with whom she lives, along with her older sister Caroline. Let’s plunge into the action: Thanks to a carelessly dropped letter, Harriot discovers that Mr. Hoyle is conspiring with a female panderer to abduct her, take her to a secluded mansion, rape her, and then stick her in a convent when he’s tired of her. Then he'll take her inheritance. She is determined to avoid distressing Caroline by revealing that her husband is a monster, so when she’s caught weeping, she pretends that she’s been crying over the pages of a tragedy. This brings a gentle rebuke from Caroline about indulging in “fictitious misery,” a reference to the common trope that novel-reading was harmful.
    After the initial horrible shock, Harriot pulls herself together... 

Note: I've included details  that resemble Austen, while leaving it to my clever readers to spot them.​

Synopsis
   Modern Manners, an 1817 novel by an anonymous authoress, starts with the marriages of the parents of our main characters. Amelia has the good luck to captivate Henry Fitzgerald, a “gentleman from the Indies” (aka a man with a colonial fortune) who all the “Mamma’s” of the neighbourhood are angling after. Amelia’s match means she goes off to live in London and mingle with the ton. Her sister Matilda marries Mr. Oswald, a respectable vicar with a small independent fortune. Matilda “sighed at the idea of… her sister [Amelia] being lost in the fashionable vortex of dissipation and vanity."  
   The years pass, the countrified Oswalds have a daughter and the city-dwelling Fitzgeralds have two sons and a daughter. Mr. Fitzgerald becomes an MP and then is elevated to the peerage; now, instead of being the wife of a nouveaux riche Indian nabob, Amelia is Lady Fitzgerald. An easy-going woman of no strong opinions, Amelia is more engaged with her morning visits and playing cards than paying attention to the education and moral upbringing of her daughter Julia.
​     The Fitzgeralds come to visit the Oswalds and their lovely, sensible, daughter Emma. Julia Fitzgerald is a social butterfly and an enthusiast for Rousseau, rugged scenery, and defying whatever it is her parents want her to do. We learn that the oldest son, Frederic, is not very attentive to his fiancée. She is Elvina Dorrington, an Indian heiress. Emma Oswald, our main heroine, is intelligent, principled, and sincerely devout, and the author struggles to make her as interesting as Elvina and Julia...  

    By her own account, Jane Gardiner (1758–1840) was fortunate in her employers when she went to work in her mid-teens as governess for a genteel family with six daughters. Ten years later, she started her own school so she could offer a home to her parents and her invalid sister. By the time she retired at age 78, she had taught over 600 girls and worked for more than sixty years.
     Gardiner also published some children’s books. Her 1806 book, An Excursion from London to Dover, is explained by its subtitle: “Containing some account of the Manufactures, Natural and Artificial Curiosities, History and Antiquities of the Towns and Villages. Interspersed with Historical and Biographical Anecdotes, Natural History, Poetical Extracts, and Tales. Particularly Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Youth.”
     The book is narrated by Jeanette, who is travelling with her friend Adelina and Adelina's father Mr. A____. It’s like an 1806 version of The Magic Schoolbus but without the magic.
  All of this improving information is roughly tied to something approaching a plot, in which Mr. A_____ encounters several old school-mates or acquaintances on the journey. These additional adults give  impromptu lectures to the children, speaking off-the-cuff about everything from the development of paper to to the anatomy of the snail. Adelina and Jeanette also recite poems from memory, whether the topic under discussion is the ocean, hedgehogs, spiders, war, clouds, cuckoos, etc, and Jeanette has perfect recall of the biographies of eminent rulers, scientists, and statesmen. Gardiner also works in some short moral tales and a backstory or two.
      Writing after her mother’s death, Jane Gardiner’s daughter said of An Excursion: “Though this work does not possess much originality of thought, the reviewers allowed it to evince sound judgment, great taste, and an earnest desire to promote the improvement of the rising generation.”
     “Originality of thought,” is a euphemism for the fact that most of the book was what we today would call plagiarized.