​I am interrupting my examination of the works of Eliza Kirkham Mathews, for which I interrupted my examination of the authorship of The Woman of Colour, to clutch my pearls so hard that my knuckles whiten over a recent headline in the British newspaper The Telegraph. ‘Don’t change books to be more PC--that’s like cutting Jane Austen’s buggery joke.”
   In this article, Paula Byrne, an eminent and telegenic Austen scholar, once again asserts that Mary Crawford’s dinner-party quip about “rears and vices” in Mansfield Park is a pun about sodomy. She, and millions of other Austen fans, evidently take enormous pleasure in repeating this. In fact, I have the impression that it is now received wisdom. So by protesting, I mark myself as a pedantic killjoy, and I’m throwing myself open to accusations of being a homophobic prude. Even if I’m right, a lot of people want to believe it anyway. It’s a prime exhibit in the gallery that proves Jane Austen was a rule-breaker, a gal after our own hearts and our own enlightened principles.
   Despite knowing how invested so many of my fellow Janeites are in this ribald notion, I am going to reiterate why I think it just can’t be true...

    ​Well, I’ve read over a hundred novels of the long 18th century, and I think I’d put Rosella, or Modern Occurrences at the top of the list for readability because of author Mary Charlton's humorous and knowing voice. I’ll be making more than one comparison to Austen here—Charlton is not quite in the same tier as Austen, but she combines a traditional marriage-plot novel with plenty of wry humour. This is because Rosella, at least in some aspects, is a parody. Yes, she pokes a lot of fun at Gothic novels along the way, but we still have a satisfying love match between a likeable hero and heroine, a love story which takes place in the real world, not in the elevated sentimental world of the 18th century novel. Her views of society and morality are the conventional views, but the story is energetic and fresh and often funny. 
      Rosella was such a revelation to me that I'll be posting multiple posts and quoting liberally from it, to give you a flavour of Charlton's writing. 
     Rosella is the titular heroine of this four volume novel, but first I want to look at the prologue contained in the opening chapters of the novel. It is this story which sets up the parodic pattern and also the basic premise—Rosella the heroine must contend, often unknowingly, with the efforts of two deluded older women who try to mold her into a Gothic heroine and who throw her into heroine-like situations which only create difficulties for her...

​    The Woman of Colour, first published in 1809, has drawn a lot of interest in academic circles because the heroine is a mixed-race woman of colour. It was certainly an unusual and perhaps daring choice to have a main character who is a sympathetic, intelligent, educated woman of colour who can quote Shakespeare, Cowper and Milton, The novel is remarkable in that sense, and it is a little bit unusual because it does not end with a marriage, but it is not, as we will see, remarkable for its literary quality. It is a typical sentimental and didactic novel of the long 18th century.
    Olivia is the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved woman and a plantation-owner. This sounds like a pretty serious bar to admittance in "good" society. But she is also heiress to 60 thousand pounds, three times more than Mary Crawford had in Mansfield Park, and ten thousand more than Miss Grey had in Sense and Sensibility. Further, we should not be surprised to learn that Olivia’s mother was “majestic,” beautiful,” “sprung from a race of native kings and heroes,” and a convert to Christianity.
    Once you know Olivia’s mother was descended from African royalty and that she was an artless and confiding Christian girl in love with a white man, and if you know your 18th century tropes, you will know she's dead: “In giving birth to me she paid the debt of nature and went down to that grave, where the captive is made free!”
   This is an epistolary novel, so the voice you hear is Olivia Fairfield, writing to her “earliest and best friend," her governess Mrs. Milbanke. Let's hope the ship she's sailing on has fewer holes in its hull than this book has plot-holes, the first one being: If Mrs. Milbanke is a governess, why doesn't Olivia just pay for her to come along on the voyage? She really does need a respectable older escort in a situation like this.​ But of course Mrs. Milbanke is a device for exposition, not a character in the novel.

   Dear Readers:
​   I recently received a flurry of emails from a well-known (if controversial) Jane Austen researcher asking to rebut my "completely misguided" comments about Jane Austen's novel Emma. He said I was "blissfully unaware" of the real reason that Emma Woodhouse prevented Harriet Smith from marrying Robert Martin. His theory is that Emma contains several hidden plots, all of which indicate Austen's truly radical beliefs.
   In a gesture of good faith, I have agreed to share his theory that a dramatic “subterranean story” (one of many) lurks beneath the placid surface of Emma. What follows are his insights, not mine: