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....’’

    The previous forgotten book I reviewed, The Metropolis, dwelt on the seamier side of London life; the fleshpots of Covent Garden and the propensity of wealthy people to destroy their lives over a game of cards. The next novel I picked up, alas, instantly delved into the same theme, but there is a big difference between the two titles which is worth noting in light of the debates which were raging at that time over the morality and propriety of reading novels.
     The Metropolis received no reviews but if it had, I think the reviewers would have called it a book--to use their phrase--that you could not safely put into the hands of your daughter or sister. It is too detailed in its depiction of vice, and the vices and crimes committed in the book (fornication, gambling, cheating at gambling, highway robbery) are not sufficiently condemned or punished. The Decision (1811), while going over much of the same ground, and in fact including a main character who commits criminal acts, would be safe for a girl to read because it is overtly religious and didactic. A reviewer said: “We trace in these volumes a laudable endeavour to convey as much moral instruction as could be admitted into a work of fancy.” Yes, The Decision is stuffed like a plum pudding with the wholesome raisins of morality. The title refers to the heroine's decision to put her father's wishes ahead of her own, and later, to turn down a fortune in exchange for marriage.
     The Decision begins with a long and confessional letter from Charles Arundel to his old friend Mr. Beverly. Arundel married for love but becomes a gambler and a philanderer. At his dying uncle’s bedside, he sees that he’s been cut out of the will, which would lead to his ruin. He destroys the will and even poisons the uncle. He lives with his guilt until later on in life, after he is widowed, he decides to go to the West Indies and meet the young relative whose father was unknowingly cut out of the will.
    The mention of the West Indies will bring thoughts of slavery to mind for the attentive modern reader, but there is no mention of slavery or colonial exploitation as a sin or even as a cause of remorse in this book--a book which features many people who do things that they regret, such as marrying for ambition. Once again the West Indies are a plot device to remove the father from the action, so the heroine can live with the Beverly family.

   Author James Norris Brewer uses lecherous Methodists and radical freethinkers to liven up his tale of star-crossed lovers who get married in the third volume and have some more problems to sort out in the fourth volume in addition to uncovering the Big Secret that is quite obvious from the first volume. The narrator's voice is sardonic, while our hero and heroine indulge in the highest flights of exquisite sensibility. Consequently, the novel is an odd mix of overblown sentimental language, interspersed in a rather discordant way with the author’s  animadversions on  Mary Wollstonecraft, Methodists, social climbers and other bees in his bonnet, such as the drinking habits of Oxford scholars. 
    The heroine, Ellen Fitzjohn, was left in the hands of strangers as a newborn. Her mother was a soldier’s wife who died giving birth while travelling with her husband's regiment; the distraught husband was forced to march away to embark for the East Indies. (This soldier, everybody notes, has the air of a gentleman and not a common private.) Baby Ellen fortunately catches the eye of the local baronet, a lonely widower. He adopts her and raises her as his own daughter.
     Ellen grows up to be beautiful and virtuous. One day she goes to a nearby river to go fishing with an old family retainer; the bank gives way and she is swept off to certain death by drowning but luckily, a handsome youth who lives nearby leaps in and rescues her. With such an introduction, it is inevitable that Ellen and Charles Balfour fall in love...