| 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. Spoilers abound in my discussion of these forgotten novels, and I discuss 18th-century attitudes which I do not necessarily endorse. |
CMP#215 Eversfield Abbey (1806), or, Agnes, the Uninvited Houseguest
Clandestine marriage, Bing AI image In the last post, I explained that I am reading my way through the novels attributed to Mrs. E.M. Foster and Mrs. E.G. Bayfield, who as far as I know were two different people, although they have been credited with many of the same titles, such as Eversfield Abbey.
Eversfield Abbey is not a gothic novel, although the heroine, Agnes Eversfield, does venture out alone to the family chapel when she notices candles burning there in the middle of the night. She encounters no mad monks or ghosts but, hiding behind her mother’s memorial urn, she is shocked to see her widowed father marrying a French émigré in a secret midnight ceremony. Mr. Eversfield has been inveigled into the match by the connivance of Father St. Quintin and she feels powerless to interfere.
Agnes is the only child and is therefore the heir to the Eversfield estates--unless of course, another little Eversfield comes along. Dad wants to see her marry her cousin, Sir Barnard. However, just like Mr. Eversfield, Sir Barnard is a Catholic. Our heroine is a Protestant because her late mother was a Protestant. In other words, this novel takes up the issue of mixed marriages which would have been much more controversial at this time. Before her death, Agnes’s mother urged her husband to not pressure Agnes into marrying a Catholic, not even their beloved nephew, without Agnes’ full consent. Agnes loves her cousin like a brother, while he greatly admires her beauty and intelligence and does intend to marry her when they are both older. Fate intervenes...
Eversfield Abbey is not a gothic novel, although the heroine, Agnes Eversfield, does venture out alone to the family chapel when she notices candles burning there in the middle of the night. She encounters no mad monks or ghosts but, hiding behind her mother’s memorial urn, she is shocked to see her widowed father marrying a French émigré in a secret midnight ceremony. Mr. Eversfield has been inveigled into the match by the connivance of Father St. Quintin and she feels powerless to interfere.
Agnes is the only child and is therefore the heir to the Eversfield estates--unless of course, another little Eversfield comes along. Dad wants to see her marry her cousin, Sir Barnard. However, just like Mr. Eversfield, Sir Barnard is a Catholic. Our heroine is a Protestant because her late mother was a Protestant. In other words, this novel takes up the issue of mixed marriages which would have been much more controversial at this time. Before her death, Agnes’s mother urged her husband to not pressure Agnes into marrying a Catholic, not even their beloved nephew, without Agnes’ full consent. Agnes loves her cousin like a brother, while he greatly admires her beauty and intelligence and does intend to marry her when they are both older. Fate intervenes...
French émigrés
The previous Foster novel I read featured three characters from the West Indies. This novel features three émigrés fleeing the French Revolution. Agnes’s father is a kindly but weak man and when his lifelong spiritual advisor and mentor, Father Netherex, exits the story to look after an ailing brother in Scotland, he welcomes a stranger as a substitute. The insinuating St. Quintin introduces a widowed mother and daughter, who claim to be exiled French aristocrats. From there, Agnes must contend with a cascade of unfortunate events.
Mme. Villeroy, as we saw, soon marries Mr. Everfield in a hasty midnight ceremony and her pretty daughter Julie captivates Sir Barnard. Agnes watches all this happen with much dismay but her respectful duty to her father prevents her from protesting. Her one consolation is the mutual admiration that grows between herself and Sir Barnard’s friend Hampden Carlisle. Hampden is brusque but highly principled. He spends most of the novel convinced that Agnes is in love with her cousin, and god forbid Agnes should openly and plainly tell him that no, she doesn’t love her cousin in that way. “To time then she trusted for an éclaircissement, for it was impossible for her to take any steps toward it.” Just impossible!
The subplot involves another cousin—the witty, headstrong Mary Hotham who rebelliously elopes with a tradesman’s son. Mr. Eversfield generously buys him a lieutenant’s commission to set up the young couple in respectable circumstances. At the request of Mary's mother, Agnes goes to visit them. Hoping for the best, she is disappointed and then repulsed by Lt. Benson’s vulgarity and profligacy.
Hampden Carlisle’s older brother just happens to be Benson's superior officer, and this older brother is a rake who sets his sights on the newlywed Mary. Mary, meanwhile, quickly realizes she married a boorish idiot, but she is too proud to admit it or to go back to her mother to beg for forgiveness.
A word on 19th century visiting etiquette; it seems a little odd that Agnes goes to visit Mary and her husband without even sending a line in advance. She stays with them for weeks, disapprovingly watching and sometimes remonstrating as they burn through Mary’s five hundred pound inheritance. So just as in Light and Shade and Black Rock House, the reader is entertained (yawn) with scenes featuring the drunken and self-indulgent antics of British army officers as they go from the ballroom to the playhouse to the gaming tables.
The previous Foster novel I read featured three characters from the West Indies. This novel features three émigrés fleeing the French Revolution. Agnes’s father is a kindly but weak man and when his lifelong spiritual advisor and mentor, Father Netherex, exits the story to look after an ailing brother in Scotland, he welcomes a stranger as a substitute. The insinuating St. Quintin introduces a widowed mother and daughter, who claim to be exiled French aristocrats. From there, Agnes must contend with a cascade of unfortunate events.
Mme. Villeroy, as we saw, soon marries Mr. Everfield in a hasty midnight ceremony and her pretty daughter Julie captivates Sir Barnard. Agnes watches all this happen with much dismay but her respectful duty to her father prevents her from protesting. Her one consolation is the mutual admiration that grows between herself and Sir Barnard’s friend Hampden Carlisle. Hampden is brusque but highly principled. He spends most of the novel convinced that Agnes is in love with her cousin, and god forbid Agnes should openly and plainly tell him that no, she doesn’t love her cousin in that way. “To time then she trusted for an éclaircissement, for it was impossible for her to take any steps toward it.” Just impossible!
The subplot involves another cousin—the witty, headstrong Mary Hotham who rebelliously elopes with a tradesman’s son. Mr. Eversfield generously buys him a lieutenant’s commission to set up the young couple in respectable circumstances. At the request of Mary's mother, Agnes goes to visit them. Hoping for the best, she is disappointed and then repulsed by Lt. Benson’s vulgarity and profligacy.
Hampden Carlisle’s older brother just happens to be Benson's superior officer, and this older brother is a rake who sets his sights on the newlywed Mary. Mary, meanwhile, quickly realizes she married a boorish idiot, but she is too proud to admit it or to go back to her mother to beg for forgiveness.
A word on 19th century visiting etiquette; it seems a little odd that Agnes goes to visit Mary and her husband without even sending a line in advance. She stays with them for weeks, disapprovingly watching and sometimes remonstrating as they burn through Mary’s five hundred pound inheritance. So just as in Light and Shade and Black Rock House, the reader is entertained (yawn) with scenes featuring the drunken and self-indulgent antics of British army officers as they go from the ballroom to the playhouse to the gaming tables.
Class snobbery
The author is not subtle about mocking the boorish manners of the lower classes, as in the case of Mrs. Jenkins, a pushy and vulgar Bristol cheesemonger’s wife, the sister of Lt. Benson. “The ignorant confidence of Mrs. Jenkins disgusted our heroine…the manners of this woman were of a description to which Agnes had hitherto been an utter stranger. –She had often visited the huts of the ignorant and the poor; she had heard their coarse language, and witnessed their uncouth manners, but humility, a consciousness of inferiority, and a wish of obliging, had in general marked their deportment; and the disgust with which she recoiled from Mrs. Jenkins, she had never yet experienced towards the poorest peasant, or any human being.”
“The wife of a cheesemonger may be a very respectable and estimable woman,” [Agnes tells herself] “and ill should I have profited by the good counsels of my [dead mother] if I could not look with satisfaction and pleasure on the sons and daughters of industry! The profession of a soldier, though it has given [Mary’s husband] Benson a red coat, cannot give him either the ideas or the manners of a gentleman; he is still fitted only to move in the sphere of his sister, and that sister would always have disgusted me...” Mrs. Jenkins is also fat, with a “waddling figure” and “short fat arm[s].”
The author is not subtle about mocking the boorish manners of the lower classes, as in the case of Mrs. Jenkins, a pushy and vulgar Bristol cheesemonger’s wife, the sister of Lt. Benson. “The ignorant confidence of Mrs. Jenkins disgusted our heroine…the manners of this woman were of a description to which Agnes had hitherto been an utter stranger. –She had often visited the huts of the ignorant and the poor; she had heard their coarse language, and witnessed their uncouth manners, but humility, a consciousness of inferiority, and a wish of obliging, had in general marked their deportment; and the disgust with which she recoiled from Mrs. Jenkins, she had never yet experienced towards the poorest peasant, or any human being.”
“The wife of a cheesemonger may be a very respectable and estimable woman,” [Agnes tells herself] “and ill should I have profited by the good counsels of my [dead mother] if I could not look with satisfaction and pleasure on the sons and daughters of industry! The profession of a soldier, though it has given [Mary’s husband] Benson a red coat, cannot give him either the ideas or the manners of a gentleman; he is still fitted only to move in the sphere of his sister, and that sister would always have disgusted me...” Mrs. Jenkins is also fat, with a “waddling figure” and “short fat arm[s].”
Style: Long sentences and lots of italics French gold-diggers
Meanwhile, Agnes’s new French stepmother drops her mask of refined piety and plunges into a vortex of dissipation in Bath where she parties and gambles all night. Sir Barnard marries young Julie and immediately regrets it when she also shows herself in her true colours. What a mess. The stress causes the roses to flee from Agnes’ cheeks (as with most novels of this era, much attention is paid to the heroine’s complexion, whether it be forlorn and pale or “celestial ruby red.”) At one point, Hampden undiplomatically tells her: “Your appearance tells me that you have to thank me for a sleepless night.”
Mr. Eversfield, despairing, returns to Eversfield Abbey, leaving his heartless wife in Bath. Agnes rushes back to his side. In her haste, she decides to travel alone and unprotected. She stays overnight at an inn in Bristol where Sir Barnard just happens to be passing through and where Hampden Carlise just happens to drop in. He catches Agnes and Sir Barnard holding hands as they console one another. As she leaves, Hampden berates Agnes: “I beseech you, Agnes Eversfield, tempt not your fate—by the pity, the reverence which I once felt for you… I then beheld you as a suffering angel—but now—to pursue—to follow a man who is become the husband of another!”
Falsely accused, Agnes is too upset and insulted to explain herself. Luckily Sir Barnard and other witnesses clear her name. Hampden sends her a letter of apology. I will say that unlike many other heroes, Hampden is a man of action, always showing up in moments of crisis.
Meanwhile, Agnes’s new French stepmother drops her mask of refined piety and plunges into a vortex of dissipation in Bath where she parties and gambles all night. Sir Barnard marries young Julie and immediately regrets it when she also shows herself in her true colours. What a mess. The stress causes the roses to flee from Agnes’ cheeks (as with most novels of this era, much attention is paid to the heroine’s complexion, whether it be forlorn and pale or “celestial ruby red.”) At one point, Hampden undiplomatically tells her: “Your appearance tells me that you have to thank me for a sleepless night.”
Mr. Eversfield, despairing, returns to Eversfield Abbey, leaving his heartless wife in Bath. Agnes rushes back to his side. In her haste, she decides to travel alone and unprotected. She stays overnight at an inn in Bristol where Sir Barnard just happens to be passing through and where Hampden Carlise just happens to drop in. He catches Agnes and Sir Barnard holding hands as they console one another. As she leaves, Hampden berates Agnes: “I beseech you, Agnes Eversfield, tempt not your fate—by the pity, the reverence which I once felt for you… I then beheld you as a suffering angel—but now—to pursue—to follow a man who is become the husband of another!”
Falsely accused, Agnes is too upset and insulted to explain herself. Luckily Sir Barnard and other witnesses clear her name. Hampden sends her a letter of apology. I will say that unlike many other heroes, Hampden is a man of action, always showing up in moments of crisis.
Sir Barnard despairs but is rescued by Father Netherex Villainy unmasked
Lt. Benson, having spent all of Mary’s money, abandons her. She is about to become Captain Carlisle’s mistress when Hampden shows up and pleads with his brother and with Mary to back away from the fateful step. Overcome with shame for her filial disobedience, her spendthrift folly and her brush with adultery, Mary runs away. She hides her identity and works briefly as a housemaid in a remote farmhouse, where she swiftly dies of consumption and remorse.
Mr. Eversfield has a stroke and lies dying as word comes that St. Quintin has been unmasked as an imposter—he’s not a priest at all, but a dissolute French aristocrat. The three French emigres flee with all the money and jewelry they can lay their hands on. The mother was in fact an Italian opera singer, the mistress of St. Quintin, and Julie was her daughter by a German fiddler. “[T]he daughter of a fiddler and a singer-–and my wife!” Sir Barnard exclaims. “Does such a creature bear my name! Heavenly powers! I cannot live to bear it!”
Fortunately, the real Catholic priest, Father Netherex, returns at last to point out that since St. Quintin was not a priest, the marriages are invalid. He also offers spiritual consolation: “We are born to suffer, for this we are sent into the world, and he that best bears the portion of human woe assigned him here, is the best prepared to enter those blessed mansions where sorrow can never come.”
Sir Barnard is a free man, but Agnes is already head over heels for Hampden Carlisle and he for her. Once she is past her mourning period for her father, they marry, and we are told that Sir Barnard might marry Hampden’s sister if she will agree to marry a Catholic.
Lt. Benson, having spent all of Mary’s money, abandons her. She is about to become Captain Carlisle’s mistress when Hampden shows up and pleads with his brother and with Mary to back away from the fateful step. Overcome with shame for her filial disobedience, her spendthrift folly and her brush with adultery, Mary runs away. She hides her identity and works briefly as a housemaid in a remote farmhouse, where she swiftly dies of consumption and remorse.
Mr. Eversfield has a stroke and lies dying as word comes that St. Quintin has been unmasked as an imposter—he’s not a priest at all, but a dissolute French aristocrat. The three French emigres flee with all the money and jewelry they can lay their hands on. The mother was in fact an Italian opera singer, the mistress of St. Quintin, and Julie was her daughter by a German fiddler. “[T]he daughter of a fiddler and a singer-–and my wife!” Sir Barnard exclaims. “Does such a creature bear my name! Heavenly powers! I cannot live to bear it!”
Fortunately, the real Catholic priest, Father Netherex, returns at last to point out that since St. Quintin was not a priest, the marriages are invalid. He also offers spiritual consolation: “We are born to suffer, for this we are sent into the world, and he that best bears the portion of human woe assigned him here, is the best prepared to enter those blessed mansions where sorrow can never come.”
Sir Barnard is a free man, but Agnes is already head over heels for Hampden Carlisle and he for her. Once she is past her mourning period for her father, they marry, and we are told that Sir Barnard might marry Hampden’s sister if she will agree to marry a Catholic.
Contemporary review of Eversfield Abbey
The Monthly Review said: “Strong colours are here employed in pourtraying the opposite characters of the heroine Agnes Eversfield, and her cousin Mary Hotham; the one is a pattern of piety, meekness, forbearance, resignation, patience, and obedience to her parents; while the other is confident, impetuous, inflexible, excentric [sic], romantic, and undutiful. In the happiness which attends the former, and the misery which overwhelms the latter, the young female reader may learn an excellent lesson to direct her through life.” You might think from this description that Agnes is an irritating milquetoast, but she is not. She is compassionate, but also rational and resolute, within the strict gender roles prescribed for her time.
The Woman of Colour's title page claims that it was written by the author of "Ebersfield [sic] Abbey," "Light and Shade," and "The Aunt and the Neice." All three novels were published anonymously.
Previous post: Review of Light and Shade Next Post: The Aunt and the Niece
The Monthly Review said: “Strong colours are here employed in pourtraying the opposite characters of the heroine Agnes Eversfield, and her cousin Mary Hotham; the one is a pattern of piety, meekness, forbearance, resignation, patience, and obedience to her parents; while the other is confident, impetuous, inflexible, excentric [sic], romantic, and undutiful. In the happiness which attends the former, and the misery which overwhelms the latter, the young female reader may learn an excellent lesson to direct her through life.” You might think from this description that Agnes is an irritating milquetoast, but she is not. She is compassionate, but also rational and resolute, within the strict gender roles prescribed for her time.
The Woman of Colour's title page claims that it was written by the author of "Ebersfield [sic] Abbey," "Light and Shade," and "The Aunt and the Neice." All three novels were published anonymously.
Previous post: Review of Light and Shade Next Post: The Aunt and the Niece
| Tom Bertram is the insouciant oldest son of the Bertram family, in Mansfield Park. In my short story about Tom in the Quill Ink anthology: Dangerous to Know: Jane Austen’s Rakes & Gentlemen Rogues, Tom falls in love with a beautiful French émigré who is not quite what she seems. More about the Quill Ink anthologies here. An earlier guest post by me about the émigrés who fled to England during the French Revolution. |  |
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