​“'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...

​    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... 

CMP#142  More (Unfounded) Theories about Hidden Stories in Austen

    In an earlier post, I discussed some theories about Austen's plots which struck me as being rather far-fetched. This post and the following post is a longer response to one of those theories.
    Last year, I attended a talk by Robert Morrison, a prominent expert on Austen and the Regency. (His book, The Regency Years, is an informative and entertaining survey of the Regency period.) I was quite surprised when he floated the theory that Marianne got pregnant in Sense and Sensibility. Further, he didn't claim that this interpretation was his own take on the novel, in which case I wouldn’t raise an objection. He attributes the idea to Jane Austen--he thinks Austen hinted that Marianne got pregnant.
     [Update: When I wrote this series of posts, I was only aware of Dr. Morrison's lecture, and was not aware of an article which makes the same arguments, authored by Rachel Feder and her students. This article gives the case for Marianne being pregnant, a case which I rebut on textual and other grounds here andin the next post.]
​    If it was worth Professor Morrison's time to devote a full lecture to this idea, it's worth my time to lay out the reasons why I disagree. And I am glad that mulling over his ideas gave me a good reason to re-read Sense and Sensibility, because I noticed things I hadn't paid any attention to before. That's mostly for my next post. Briefly, my rebuttal is: 

• The text doesn’t support the theory that Marianne got pregnant, but rather contradicts it. 
• The tenor of the times wouldn’t allow for such a book to be published, because you can't have a girl of good family have sex outside of marriage without also being explicit about the consequences which would befall her.

     The longer rebuttal is below. But first, let's look at the textual evidence in favor of the theory. The timeline of the novel doesn’t contradict the possibility that Marianne had a bun in the oven...

   Ann WIngrove's The Spinster’s Tale (1801) caught my eye because of the title. It received no reviews when it was published, so here is another of my better-late-than-never book reviews. 
    The Spinster’s Tale is jam-packed with numerous plot-lines, backstories, and weddings. Plus a separate short gothic novel is stuck in the middle. There are so many characters, it’s difficult to remember them all.
    Have you seen people in social media point out that Regency romances are unrealistic because there weren’t that many eligible young dukes and earls in Regency England? Well, that was the case from the get-go; the novels written at the time featured handsome, eligible lords by the bushel. There are half-a-dozen titled men running around in this novel, all of them in want of a wife, and they all marry girls of humbler birth.
    One thing that sets this novel apart is that two of the major protagonists, and one minor, are older ladies. The titular spinster, Mrs. Caroline Herbert, ("Mrs." denotes an older lady, not necessarily a married one) is approaching 50. The kind and charitable Dowager Lady Brumpton has a fun back story where she dresses herself in boy’s clothes and climbs out a window after she’s abducted by a libertine. The minor character Miss Woodley is the impoverished authoress of the novel-within-a-novel Langbridge Fort. “Romance is not my forte,” she tells one of the young heroines, “but I had been told nothing would sell now, but the horrible, the wonderful, and the improbable.”
​      In addition to centering older females, The Spinster's Tale has other features which might be of interest to academics...