This novel is a moral tale, written to persuade, or rather frighten, young people away from having sex out of wedlock. Sort of a “Reefer Madness,” but for adultery. Summersett's jeremiad is a suitable book to cap off my lengthy series on how novels of the era focused on female virtue--not that I'll be able to stay away from the topic in future book reviews, because so many novels revolve around female virtue.
    Our story begins with a female voice pleading for help, heard outside the humble cottage of Gabriel and Mary Feller. Mary used to be a servant in a posh household, and the daughter of that household was seduced by one Captain Berringer. She flees to Mary to hide her shame and to go insane after she delivers an infant boy. She then drowns herself in the river.
     Baby William is passed off by Gabriel and Mary as their nephew, but strangely, the mother gave him the surname of her seducer, who, everyone agrees, is a loathsome reptile. The rest of volume One is taken up with William’s boyhood, and meeting the girl he marries…

   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...

    Well, lately we’ve had novel after novel which focusses on heroines guarding their chastity at all costs.  There were some other implicit values for female behaviour, and they feature in the following two novels, one of which Austen read, and another she might have read. These strictures are: (1) never complain about your husband and (2) never, ever confess your love to a man before he's said he loves you.
    Susan, a novel, author unknown, was published in 1809 by J. Booth. Scholars surmise that the appearance of this novel spurred Jane Austen to write the publisher Benjamin Crosby, who had purchased the manuscript of her novel Susan to ask him, when was he going to publish her novel? He, or rather his son Richard, replied that they owned the manuscript, they were under no obligation to publish it, and she could have the rights back by refunding the ten pounds she'd received for the manuscript. The matter rested for a few years more until Henry Austen, Jane's brother, paid the ten pounds and then informed Crosby that the manuscript he had spurned was by the author of the well-received novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.
​   So we might expect that Jane Austen at least looked at the novel Susan. She also changed the name of her heroine from Susan to Catherine. But her novel was not published until after her death, as Northanger Abbey.
    But first, let's look at a novel which we're pretty sure Austen read, because she joked about it in another one of her letters: Margiana, or Widdrington Tower (1808), by Mrs. Sykes.

   ​“'More domestic scenes? More village anecdotes? More fireside conversations?'” To these questions we will answer in the affirmative…."
    This is how Mrs. E.G. Bayfield opens her novel The Splendour of Adversity, a domestic novel and it’s why I picked it to read. I wanted to see another example of a domestic novel, set in a country village, like Jane Austen's Emma. Austen's novel is famous; this one, published two years earlier, is forgotten, but they both represent a conscious move away from melodramatic "sentimental" novels with their abductions, forged wills, and mislaid foundlings, in favour of situations that were, as Austen would say, “probable” and close to real life.
      Splendour opens with a chat around a whist-table in a quiet village, as some local widows and spinsters talk over the late rector of their village and the arrival of the new one. His name is not "Knightly," as one lady had announced, but Knightwell. And it turns out that Jane Colyer, a quiet spinster who has been living in Hazlebury for a few years, already knows him.
     We then flash back to the reason why Knightwell and Jane were unable to marry. Rev. Knightwell was on the point of proposing, but his brother died and he had to take care of his widow and four children, so he couldn't afford to begin a family of his own. Now that he's moved to Hazlebury, Mr. Knightwell and Miss Colyer reunite as friends “and thus did the estimable pair emulate and encourage one another in the exercise of superior virtue.” She helps educate the children, especially the oldest girl, Albinia. Their mother the widow is “destitute of any internal resources," unlike Mrs. Elton in Emma, who is blessed with them. The Widow Knightwell wants to enjoy the social life at some seaside resort instead of living quietly at the rectory. If I tell you she rouges her cheeks (!) then I've told you everything you need to know about the artful hussy...