| This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here. My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. |
CMP#178 The Children of the Abbey (1796) by Regina Maria Roche
Alistair Petrie and Samantha Morton as Harriet Smith and Robert Martin in the 1996 Emma In the novel Emma, the subject of novels comes up when Emma Woodhouse asks Harriet Smith about Robert Martin's reading habits. Emma thinks the young farmer is not good enough for her friend Harriet. She asks Harriet, “Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business? He does not read?" Note that Emma phrases the question in the negative. She's expecting to have her prejudices confirmed.
There's a bit of subtle humour too, because surely Emma is asking about serious reading--politics and philosophy and history--but Harriet thinks only of novels and the Elegant Extracts (a sort of Readers Digest Condensed Books of the day). She mentions two potboilers: "He never read The Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey. He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can.”
We never learn if Robert Martin ever get a copy of Regina Maria Roche’s lengthy gothic romance novel, The Children of the Abbey, but it was a best-seller. A synopsis published one hundred years after its publication, describes it thus: "The motherless Amanda is the heroine; and she encounters all the vicissitudes befitting the heroine of the three-volume novel. These include the necessity of living under an assumed name, of becoming the innocent victim of slander, of losing a will [that is, the will hidden from her by her evil stepmother], refusing the hands of dukes and earls, and finally, with her brother, overcoming her enemies, and living happy in the highest society forever after. The six hundred pages, with the high-flown gallantry, the emotional excesses, and the reasonless catastrophes of the eighteenth-century novel, fainting heroines, lovelorn heroes, oppressed innocence and abortive schemes of black-hearted villainy, form a fitting accompaniment to the powdered hair, muslin gowns, stage-coaches, postilions, and other picturesque accessories.”
It’s a long book with a lot of twists and turns, so I'll stick to the highlights and some recurring themes and tropes. The villains "are completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them," to use Jane Austen's words, and the heroine sheds a lot of tears along the way...
There's a bit of subtle humour too, because surely Emma is asking about serious reading--politics and philosophy and history--but Harriet thinks only of novels and the Elegant Extracts (a sort of Readers Digest Condensed Books of the day). She mentions two potboilers: "He never read The Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey. He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can.”
We never learn if Robert Martin ever get a copy of Regina Maria Roche’s lengthy gothic romance novel, The Children of the Abbey, but it was a best-seller. A synopsis published one hundred years after its publication, describes it thus: "The motherless Amanda is the heroine; and she encounters all the vicissitudes befitting the heroine of the three-volume novel. These include the necessity of living under an assumed name, of becoming the innocent victim of slander, of losing a will [that is, the will hidden from her by her evil stepmother], refusing the hands of dukes and earls, and finally, with her brother, overcoming her enemies, and living happy in the highest society forever after. The six hundred pages, with the high-flown gallantry, the emotional excesses, and the reasonless catastrophes of the eighteenth-century novel, fainting heroines, lovelorn heroes, oppressed innocence and abortive schemes of black-hearted villainy, form a fitting accompaniment to the powdered hair, muslin gowns, stage-coaches, postilions, and other picturesque accessories.”
It’s a long book with a lot of twists and turns, so I'll stick to the highlights and some recurring themes and tropes. The villains "are completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them," to use Jane Austen's words, and the heroine sheds a lot of tears along the way...
Amanda mourns her mother Our story begins....
Regina Maria Roche’s best-seller starts with a teaser chapter—we meet Amanda Fitzalan (she’s in tears, of course) as she arrives in Wales to live in the humble cottage of some retired family servants. All we know is that she is worried about her father and she is in hiding.
After the teaser chapter, we fill in with some backstory. Amanda’s father Mr. Fitzalan is the ‘’descendent of an ancient Irish family.’’ When he was a young army officer, he eloped with the oldest daughter of the Earl of Dunreath. The lovely Malvina had been neglected, even hated, by her stepmother, who had managed to turn her father against her, in favor of her younger stepsister Lady Augusta. Malvina had every reason to run away, but in these novels, good fortune seldom pursues girls who elope in defiance of parental authority. Malvina and Fitzalan lived in poverty and their attempts to reconcile with her father all failed. Malvina gave her husband a son (Oscar) and a daughter (our main heroine Amanda), before expiring.
Regina Maria Roche’s best-seller starts with a teaser chapter—we meet Amanda Fitzalan (she’s in tears, of course) as she arrives in Wales to live in the humble cottage of some retired family servants. All we know is that she is worried about her father and she is in hiding.
After the teaser chapter, we fill in with some backstory. Amanda’s father Mr. Fitzalan is the ‘’descendent of an ancient Irish family.’’ When he was a young army officer, he eloped with the oldest daughter of the Earl of Dunreath. The lovely Malvina had been neglected, even hated, by her stepmother, who had managed to turn her father against her, in favor of her younger stepsister Lady Augusta. Malvina had every reason to run away, but in these novels, good fortune seldom pursues girls who elope in defiance of parental authority. Malvina and Fitzalan lived in poverty and their attempts to reconcile with her father all failed. Malvina gave her husband a son (Oscar) and a daughter (our main heroine Amanda), before expiring.
The travails of Amanda
Back to Amanda, now grown, living in seclusion in Wales under an assumed name. Wales, like Scotland, is a ‘’back of beyond’’ location in eighteenth-century novels, filled with quaint, rustic folk who speak in dialect.
Amanda is poor but genteel, which means there is no expectation that she would help out with the milking or the sweeping. But what to do with herself? You can’t just ramble around the forest glen wearing a plain but becoming muslin gown, sketching the sublime scenes of Nature and occasionally weeping in ‘’the calm solitude of the evening’’ day after day. Luckily, Amanda’s former servants live close to a nobleman’s house, which is empty most of the year. Amanda is given permission by the housekeeper to use the library and play the pianoforte.
The young and handsome scion of the family, Lord Mortimer, shows up unexpectedly and doesn’t waste time falling in love with Amanda, despite the mystery of her background. So does the local vicar, Mr. Howell (how can he help himself), but it’s Lord Mortimer that Amanda loves in return, though she is of course suitably diffident about it.
Back to Amanda, now grown, living in seclusion in Wales under an assumed name. Wales, like Scotland, is a ‘’back of beyond’’ location in eighteenth-century novels, filled with quaint, rustic folk who speak in dialect.
Amanda is poor but genteel, which means there is no expectation that she would help out with the milking or the sweeping. But what to do with herself? You can’t just ramble around the forest glen wearing a plain but becoming muslin gown, sketching the sublime scenes of Nature and occasionally weeping in ‘’the calm solitude of the evening’’ day after day. Luckily, Amanda’s former servants live close to a nobleman’s house, which is empty most of the year. Amanda is given permission by the housekeeper to use the library and play the pianoforte.
The young and handsome scion of the family, Lord Mortimer, shows up unexpectedly and doesn’t waste time falling in love with Amanda, despite the mystery of her background. So does the local vicar, Mr. Howell (how can he help himself), but it’s Lord Mortimer that Amanda loves in return, though she is of course suitably diffident about it.
| The travails of Oscar.... and spoilers.... Meanwhile, Amanda’s brother Oscar, a fine young officer, is in Ireland, and he falls in love with Adela Honeywood, the sprightly daughter of a general. Now enter, stage left, (hissssssss) the villain, Colonel Belgrave. This lecherous goat is the reason Amanda is hiding in Wales, and he sets out to destroy Oscar’s life too, by thwarting his romance with Adela through lies and chicanery and marrying her himself. By the way, the "evil-lecher-uses-his-money-and-power-to-threaten-the-father’s-finances,-the-son’s-army-career,-and-the-daughter’s-virtue” was used by Susannah Rowson for the parents of her heroine in Charlotte Temple, published five years earlier. More travails for Amanda A remark by the mother of Amanda’s host family, that Amanda "is not the first poty [body] who has met with a bad man," causes Lord Mortimer to instantly assume that Amanda is a Fallen Woman who is hiding out in Wales from shame, when in fact she’s fled to Wales to avoid the bad man. Boom, he drops her, (or as the kids say today, he ghosts her), for the first but not the last time in this novel. This is the suspenseful point which keeps us turning the pages: OMG, can Lord Mortimer be persuaded that Amanda is faithful and chaste? There is more villainy, both from Colonel Belgrave and from Amanda’s malicious Scottish relatives, mostly in the form of compromising Amanda’s reputation. Occasionally, Mortimer investigates the accusations made against her, but events conspire to raise his doubts again. And again. They finally reconcile and are engaged to be married. Then his own father, Lord Cherbury, throws a spanner in the works when he entreats Amanda to break off the match. He, Lord Cherbury needs his son to marry a wealthy heiress to pay off his, Lord Cherbury’s, gaming debts, so could Amanda please just disappear on the eve of her wedding without explaining why? With many tears, Amanda consents (for Lord Cherbury swears he will kill himself if she doesn’t) even though once again it blasts her ‘fair and spotless fame.’ | Cheered by the unexpected light, [Amanda] advanced into the room… she found herself not by a picture, but by the real form of a woman, with a death-like countenance!... “Protect me, Heaven!” she exclaimed, and at the moment felt an icy hand upon hers! Her senses instantly receded, and she sunk to the floor. When she recovered from her insensibility … the apparition, with a rapidity equal to her own, glided before her, and with a hollow voice, as she waved an emaciated hand, exclaimed, “Forbear to go… lose your superstitious fears, and in me behold not an airy inhabitant of the other world, but a sinful, sorrowing, and repentant woman… In me,” she continued, “you behold the guilty but contrite widow of the Earl of Dunreath.”  Scooby-Doo plot twists, image generated by Bing AI |
Amanda is constrained by events to move from place to place, hiding out in a convent, in a remote schoolhouse in the Hebrides, and finally, through some twists of fate, back to the old family castle, working as a governess, her identity a secret.
Happy, noble and rich
There are other details I haven’t mentioned, such as the love-rival Sir Charles Bingley, a nice young man, and we should take note of the gothic aspects of Amanda’s return to the ancestral seat of the Dunreaths. While exploring the ghostly passages of half-ruined Dunreath Abbey on her own (as one does), Amanda comes across a specter! No, it’s not a ghost, it’s a female prisoner—none other than Lady Dunreath, the stepmother who so long ago made life miserable for Amanda’s mother Malvina. Lady Dunreath was locked up by her son-in-law and her evil, ungrateful daughter, to keep her from remarrying and from spilling the beans about the forged last will and testament which deprived Oscar and Amanda of their just inheritance.
Colonel Belgrave, the industriously busy seducer (he goes after several girls in this book), dies of drinking, fever and remorse in France, and Adela is free to marry Oscar.
This brings us another reminder that the theological conventions of this era bring a Reckoning at the Judgement Seat, as well as demonstrations of the highest standards of Christian forgiveness. ‘’But oh,’’ exclaims the father of one of the girls Belgrave seduced and abandoned. ‘’But oh, may he find mercy from that God! May he pardon him, as in this solemn moment I have done! My enmity lives not beyond the grave.’’ However lurid the fixation on seduction and even assault, these novels conduce to teaching a moral lesson.
There are other details I haven’t mentioned, such as the love-rival Sir Charles Bingley, a nice young man, and we should take note of the gothic aspects of Amanda’s return to the ancestral seat of the Dunreaths. While exploring the ghostly passages of half-ruined Dunreath Abbey on her own (as one does), Amanda comes across a specter! No, it’s not a ghost, it’s a female prisoner—none other than Lady Dunreath, the stepmother who so long ago made life miserable for Amanda’s mother Malvina. Lady Dunreath was locked up by her son-in-law and her evil, ungrateful daughter, to keep her from remarrying and from spilling the beans about the forged last will and testament which deprived Oscar and Amanda of their just inheritance.
Colonel Belgrave, the industriously busy seducer (he goes after several girls in this book), dies of drinking, fever and remorse in France, and Adela is free to marry Oscar.
This brings us another reminder that the theological conventions of this era bring a Reckoning at the Judgement Seat, as well as demonstrations of the highest standards of Christian forgiveness. ‘’But oh,’’ exclaims the father of one of the girls Belgrave seduced and abandoned. ‘’But oh, may he find mercy from that God! May he pardon him, as in this solemn moment I have done! My enmity lives not beyond the grave.’’ However lurid the fixation on seduction and even assault, these novels conduce to teaching a moral lesson.
Plot device: portraits
Portraits and miniatures play an important role in this story. First, Fitzalan is entranced with Malvina’s portrait, and through it, he betrays his love for Malvina. The evil Belgrave uses a miniature of Amanda to persuade Adela that Oscar has another sweetheart, (when of course she's his sister), and Amanda is mooning over a sketch she has drawn of Lord Mortimer, realizing that “delicacy” demands she destroy it because he’s about to marry Lady Euphrasia: “'Oh! how unnecessary,' she cried... 'to sketch features which are indelibly engraven on my heart.' As she spoke, a deep and long-drawn sigh reached her ear... the feelings of her heart discovered, she started with precipitation from her seat, and looked round her with a kind of wild confusion. But, gracious Heavens! who can describe the emotions of her soul when the original of the picture so fondly sketched, so hastily obliterated, met her eye.” Betrayed by her feelings, Amanda confesses her enduring love for Lord Mortimer, while he reveals he is not going to marry Lady Euphrasia.
Portraits and miniatures play an important role in this story. First, Fitzalan is entranced with Malvina’s portrait, and through it, he betrays his love for Malvina. The evil Belgrave uses a miniature of Amanda to persuade Adela that Oscar has another sweetheart, (when of course she's his sister), and Amanda is mooning over a sketch she has drawn of Lord Mortimer, realizing that “delicacy” demands she destroy it because he’s about to marry Lady Euphrasia: “'Oh! how unnecessary,' she cried... 'to sketch features which are indelibly engraven on my heart.' As she spoke, a deep and long-drawn sigh reached her ear... the feelings of her heart discovered, she started with precipitation from her seat, and looked round her with a kind of wild confusion. But, gracious Heavens! who can describe the emotions of her soul when the original of the picture so fondly sketched, so hastily obliterated, met her eye.” Betrayed by her feelings, Amanda confesses her enduring love for Lord Mortimer, while he reveals he is not going to marry Lady Euphrasia.
About the authoress:
Regina Maria Roche (1764–1845) is ranked in the second tier of Gothic novelists, after the queen, Ann Radcliffe. Roche's 1796 novel Clermont was one of the "horrid" novels recommended to Catherine Morland by Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. Many of her novels were set in Ireland, the home of her birth. The Children of the Abbey was her biggest seller, and I think any author could be proud of a book which stayed in print for more than a hundred years, and was frequently imitated and even plagiarized.
Gothic novels continued to find a readership even as they fell in critical esteem. William Brighty Rands wrote in 1865 that "[b]ooks like The Children of the Abbey, by Regina Maria Roche, have been exposed in decent [book]shop--windows within my own recollection." In 1891, an American critic wrote: "And apparently Children of the Abbey still finds a considerable sale in this country, though it is almost wholly forgotten in England."
It seems Americans had a real predilection for melodrama, given the phenomenal popularity of East Lynne (1861) by Mrs. Henry Wood and the enduring popularity of a tale first published in 1791, Charlotte Temple.
Gothic novels favored remote settings such as Wales, Scotland and farther afield in Europe. Jane Austen did not stray beyond the home counties in the settings for her novels. As she advised her niece, who was working on a novel: ‘’Let the Portmans go to Ireland; but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them.’’ Austen let the Dixons and the Campbells go to Ireland in Emma, but her readers did not go with them.
Previous post: Eva the runaway heroine Next post: No respect for Annette
Regina Maria Roche (1764–1845) is ranked in the second tier of Gothic novelists, after the queen, Ann Radcliffe. Roche's 1796 novel Clermont was one of the "horrid" novels recommended to Catherine Morland by Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. Many of her novels were set in Ireland, the home of her birth. The Children of the Abbey was her biggest seller, and I think any author could be proud of a book which stayed in print for more than a hundred years, and was frequently imitated and even plagiarized.
Gothic novels continued to find a readership even as they fell in critical esteem. William Brighty Rands wrote in 1865 that "[b]ooks like The Children of the Abbey, by Regina Maria Roche, have been exposed in decent [book]shop--windows within my own recollection." In 1891, an American critic wrote: "And apparently Children of the Abbey still finds a considerable sale in this country, though it is almost wholly forgotten in England."
It seems Americans had a real predilection for melodrama, given the phenomenal popularity of East Lynne (1861) by Mrs. Henry Wood and the enduring popularity of a tale first published in 1791, Charlotte Temple.
Gothic novels favored remote settings such as Wales, Scotland and farther afield in Europe. Jane Austen did not stray beyond the home counties in the settings for her novels. As she advised her niece, who was working on a novel: ‘’Let the Portmans go to Ireland; but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them.’’ Austen let the Dixons and the Campbells go to Ireland in Emma, but her readers did not go with them.
Previous post: Eva the runaway heroine Next post: No respect for Annette
RSS Feed