| 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. This post is one in a continuing series in which I look at the novels which were possibly written by the same author who wrote The Woman of Colour (1808). See a list of all the novels in the authorial attribution chain here. |
CMP#243 Fedaretta (1795) and Emily of Lucerne (1800)
Fedaretta, like The Duke of Clarence, was published in 1795, making them the earliest titles in the attribution chain. Fedaretta was published by the more prestigious publisher Crosby, while The Duke of Clarence was published by [ahem] Minerva. No copies of Fedaretta survive in any libraries, except for an undigitized 1803 French translation which is preserved in France. Fedaretta received a review in French, which Google translates thusly:
| Written with a carelessness all the more remarkable because it displays a great air of pretension. On every line, words are in italics, and one doesn't know why. It seems that this book is full of subtlety and mysterious allusions, and yet one cannot guess a single one; this is all in addition to a very weak style that the author could have improved with the effort he puts into making it bizarre. The characters of Fedaretta, Lady Coddrington, and Brown are not bad. The quotations in verse and prose that the author places at the beginning of the chapters are not badly chosen. There is in this novel a strong, sustained interest, though very little lively, which makes it read without haste, and yet without boredom, sometimes even with pleasure. |
So much for Fedaretta, unless a surviving copy of the original English version comes to hand.
Emily of Lucerne
Emily of Lucerne (1800) is an outlier in the 21 titles which make up the tangled attribution chain of works possibly written by the author of The Woman of Colour (1809). It is a strange pastiche of a novel of manners, set in London, with a jarringly different gothic interlude set in a castle in Europe, complete with fake ghost. My guess is that the author, who signs herself as "EMF," had an old half-finished draft novel about London society, then she grafted in a gothic short story she also happened to have lying around, to stretch the tale out to two volumes. As she had been lucky enough to place several of her manuscripts with Minerva that year, she must have quickly prepared this one and sold it to them as well, on the strength of the others.
We start with a heroine raised in Switzerland and brought back to London after her parents die (reminder--most sentimental heroines are orphans). Having no living relatives, she is briefly under the guardianship of a wise older woman who was her father’s first love.
When I was reading Volume One, I felt that it was completely different from the humourless and heavy-handed moralizing of other early titles which have been attributed to “Mrs. Foster,” ( Miriam, Judith, Rebecca, Caroline & Frederic, and Concealment). For example, in Emily of Lucerne there are no references to the “Great Disposer of Events” or “The Almighty”, whom the narrator and the virtuous characters frequently reference in those novels. No admonitions to submit ourselves to the will of an inscrutable Providence. Instead we have: “For the improvement which [Emily’s] natural taste had received, she was indebted to the good St. Aubin... But the good priest [also] endeavoured to implant early in her heart a deep reverence for her Creator, under whatsoever form she chose to worship him”
Under whatsoever form she chose to worship him? What kind of apostasy is that?
Emily of Lucerne (1800) is an outlier in the 21 titles which make up the tangled attribution chain of works possibly written by the author of The Woman of Colour (1809). It is a strange pastiche of a novel of manners, set in London, with a jarringly different gothic interlude set in a castle in Europe, complete with fake ghost. My guess is that the author, who signs herself as "EMF," had an old half-finished draft novel about London society, then she grafted in a gothic short story she also happened to have lying around, to stretch the tale out to two volumes. As she had been lucky enough to place several of her manuscripts with Minerva that year, she must have quickly prepared this one and sold it to them as well, on the strength of the others.
We start with a heroine raised in Switzerland and brought back to London after her parents die (reminder--most sentimental heroines are orphans). Having no living relatives, she is briefly under the guardianship of a wise older woman who was her father’s first love.
When I was reading Volume One, I felt that it was completely different from the humourless and heavy-handed moralizing of other early titles which have been attributed to “Mrs. Foster,” ( Miriam, Judith, Rebecca, Caroline & Frederic, and Concealment). For example, in Emily of Lucerne there are no references to the “Great Disposer of Events” or “The Almighty”, whom the narrator and the virtuous characters frequently reference in those novels. No admonitions to submit ourselves to the will of an inscrutable Providence. Instead we have: “For the improvement which [Emily’s] natural taste had received, she was indebted to the good St. Aubin... But the good priest [also] endeavoured to implant early in her heart a deep reverence for her Creator, under whatsoever form she chose to worship him”
Under whatsoever form she chose to worship him? What kind of apostasy is that?
"A lady at a card party who does not play" Courtesy British Museum Into the vortex!
Apart from the gothic sub-plot, there isn’t much plot and what there is does not involve Emily, who is an observer of events around her. The story opens as Mrs. Bentinck, an older Englishwoman, arrives at the idyllic home of the Rev. St. Aubin, a Swiss clergyman. She is there to scoop up the newly-orphaned Emily Fitzosborne, whose father was an English general who married a Swiss woman. St. Aubin’s son Antoine and the spinster aunt all bid Emily a tearful farewell as she is whisked back to England. Antoine especially is crestfallen as he and Emily grew up together and he is in love with her. You imagine that that he will be the hero of the story—perhaps he will turn out to be of noble birth or something—but although he does visit London, he does not end up marrying the heroine. Antoine slips into the vortex for a time, then repents and returns to Switzerland to be reconciled with his father.
Emily, in the manner of all self-respecting sentimental heroines, doesn’t much care for London and quickly grows tired of its amusements and the vortex of dissipation. We meet fools and fops and people who ruin their lives at the gaming table. As always, Jewish money-lenders come in for a passing slur. Everybody is fake and phony, everyone stays up too late, and she pines for the Swiss hillsides. She’d just as soon skip the late-night card parties and stay home and read Ossian or practise her Mozart. She is appalled by the reckless behaviour of the beautiful Lady Helen Bentick, who is the worldly daughter of an earl. Lady Helen laughs when Emily says that wives should look up to their husbands and confide in them: “But I want to know how far you would partake of those pleasures that your fortune allowed you? –You would not ever mope yourself in studying and amusing this cara sposa of yours, you would sometimes enter the world surely?” (Shout out to Mrs. Elton for Emma fans).
When Lady Helen’s husband begs her to leave London with him and return to their country seat, her friend Mrs. St. John urges her to resist: “What, to quit London at the most delightful of all seasons! --She was far, very far, from being one of those who preach disobedience to a husband.—Heaven was a witness she had been the most duteous of wives herself; yet she could always distinguish between a reasonable and unreasonable proposal; and no authority could ever make her give up a point which her reason did not approve."
At first I assumed that the character of Lady Helen was written in imitation of Lady Delacour in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, but Belinda came out a year after Emily of Lucerne. This just goes to show that when we read a famous author, we might think that the features of her novel were original to her when in fact she is working within a well-established genre, it's just that the other examples are forgotten and we only know about Edgeworth's Belinda and Burney's Evelina.
Apart from the gothic sub-plot, there isn’t much plot and what there is does not involve Emily, who is an observer of events around her. The story opens as Mrs. Bentinck, an older Englishwoman, arrives at the idyllic home of the Rev. St. Aubin, a Swiss clergyman. She is there to scoop up the newly-orphaned Emily Fitzosborne, whose father was an English general who married a Swiss woman. St. Aubin’s son Antoine and the spinster aunt all bid Emily a tearful farewell as she is whisked back to England. Antoine especially is crestfallen as he and Emily grew up together and he is in love with her. You imagine that that he will be the hero of the story—perhaps he will turn out to be of noble birth or something—but although he does visit London, he does not end up marrying the heroine. Antoine slips into the vortex for a time, then repents and returns to Switzerland to be reconciled with his father.
Emily, in the manner of all self-respecting sentimental heroines, doesn’t much care for London and quickly grows tired of its amusements and the vortex of dissipation. We meet fools and fops and people who ruin their lives at the gaming table. As always, Jewish money-lenders come in for a passing slur. Everybody is fake and phony, everyone stays up too late, and she pines for the Swiss hillsides. She’d just as soon skip the late-night card parties and stay home and read Ossian or practise her Mozart. She is appalled by the reckless behaviour of the beautiful Lady Helen Bentick, who is the worldly daughter of an earl. Lady Helen laughs when Emily says that wives should look up to their husbands and confide in them: “But I want to know how far you would partake of those pleasures that your fortune allowed you? –You would not ever mope yourself in studying and amusing this cara sposa of yours, you would sometimes enter the world surely?” (Shout out to Mrs. Elton for Emma fans).
When Lady Helen’s husband begs her to leave London with him and return to their country seat, her friend Mrs. St. John urges her to resist: “What, to quit London at the most delightful of all seasons! --She was far, very far, from being one of those who preach disobedience to a husband.—Heaven was a witness she had been the most duteous of wives herself; yet she could always distinguish between a reasonable and unreasonable proposal; and no authority could ever make her give up a point which her reason did not approve."
At first I assumed that the character of Lady Helen was written in imitation of Lady Delacour in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, but Belinda came out a year after Emily of Lucerne. This just goes to show that when we read a famous author, we might think that the features of her novel were original to her when in fact she is working within a well-established genre, it's just that the other examples are forgotten and we only know about Edgeworth's Belinda and Burney's Evelina.
Mythical bard Going Gothic
In Volume II, George Bentick, frustrated with his wife’s refusal to give up her immoral society friends, takes out articles of separation from her and goes wandering on the Continent. There, he stumbles into a castle and into a gothic sub-plot with an immured father, a swapped foundling, and an evil nobleman. Whut! Well, unlike the London-based parts of the novel, this section bears some similarity to The Duke of Clarence, which is an historical gothic. But the two genres in one book is quite awkward. One is all sparkling dialogue and descriptions of vortexing behaviour and name-dropping, the other is the kind of material that Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey. After Bentick is escorted to his bedroom in a remote part of the castle: “Having secured the door, and placed the light in one corner of the chimney, without undressing himself, he was stepping into bed, when a small door, which before had escaped his observation, now caught his eye,” etc. etc.
His exploration leads to the discovery of a prisoner, which leads to a sword fight, which leads to a lengthy dying backstory/confession from the evil Count. None of this has anything to do with the main plot. Bentinck doesn't even have an extremely improbable coincidental reunion with anybody. He never met any of these people before.
At any rate, Emily comes to respect George Bentick, whom she first thought was cold and haughty, and unwittingly develops a crush on him. Realizing that she has fallen in love with a married man, she is horrified with herself. She makes amends for her error by giving her hand to an older man, Edmund Howard, who has served as the moral arbiter, a Mr. Knightley figure, in the story. The author gives us a very low-key proposal scene Like Marianne in Sense & Sensibility, Emily feels no stronger emotion than gratitude and esteem, and she tells him so. Howard responds: “sincerely as I love you, mine is not one of those romantic passions that nothing but death can dissolve. All I at present ask is, that you do not feel a repugnance to the idea of being mine; and I will trust to the generosity of your nature, which tells me that it will be impossible for you to return with indifference the love of a man whose study will be your happiness.”
Emily of Lucerne received no reviews when it was first published. Further, it was never referenced again by a publisher; that is, apart from The Duke of Clarence, no subsequent novels were advertised as being “by the author of Emily of Lucerne,” which suggests that Emily of Lucerne was a dud at the circulating library.
Well, if the same author who wrote this also wrote The Duke of Clarence and wrote Miriam, Judith, and Rebecca, it implies that she was a versatile (if not extraordinarily talented) author who could switch from novel of manners to gothic to evangelical, presumably to appeal to the perceived market.
Speaking of despising the decadence of London, scholar Victoria Barnett Woods traces the disdain-for-London schtick way back to 1746: "Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot (1746) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796)," as examples of "where an outside narrator visits London and bemoans its corruption and hostility.“ Olivia Fairfield of The Woman of Colour also gladly escape London for the purity of the countryside.
The Ossianic controversy
Ossian, whose works Emily enthuses over, was a purported Celtic bard whose poems were rediscovered and translated by a Scottish writer, James MacPherson. Or so he claimed. Turns out he basically wrote them himself and "Ossian" was an invention. Dr. Samuel Johnson loudly proclaimed MacPherson to be a fraud. The poems were hugely popular.
In Volume II, George Bentick, frustrated with his wife’s refusal to give up her immoral society friends, takes out articles of separation from her and goes wandering on the Continent. There, he stumbles into a castle and into a gothic sub-plot with an immured father, a swapped foundling, and an evil nobleman. Whut! Well, unlike the London-based parts of the novel, this section bears some similarity to The Duke of Clarence, which is an historical gothic. But the two genres in one book is quite awkward. One is all sparkling dialogue and descriptions of vortexing behaviour and name-dropping, the other is the kind of material that Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey. After Bentick is escorted to his bedroom in a remote part of the castle: “Having secured the door, and placed the light in one corner of the chimney, without undressing himself, he was stepping into bed, when a small door, which before had escaped his observation, now caught his eye,” etc. etc.
His exploration leads to the discovery of a prisoner, which leads to a sword fight, which leads to a lengthy dying backstory/confession from the evil Count. None of this has anything to do with the main plot. Bentinck doesn't even have an extremely improbable coincidental reunion with anybody. He never met any of these people before.
At any rate, Emily comes to respect George Bentick, whom she first thought was cold and haughty, and unwittingly develops a crush on him. Realizing that she has fallen in love with a married man, she is horrified with herself. She makes amends for her error by giving her hand to an older man, Edmund Howard, who has served as the moral arbiter, a Mr. Knightley figure, in the story. The author gives us a very low-key proposal scene Like Marianne in Sense & Sensibility, Emily feels no stronger emotion than gratitude and esteem, and she tells him so. Howard responds: “sincerely as I love you, mine is not one of those romantic passions that nothing but death can dissolve. All I at present ask is, that you do not feel a repugnance to the idea of being mine; and I will trust to the generosity of your nature, which tells me that it will be impossible for you to return with indifference the love of a man whose study will be your happiness.”
Emily of Lucerne received no reviews when it was first published. Further, it was never referenced again by a publisher; that is, apart from The Duke of Clarence, no subsequent novels were advertised as being “by the author of Emily of Lucerne,” which suggests that Emily of Lucerne was a dud at the circulating library.
Well, if the same author who wrote this also wrote The Duke of Clarence and wrote Miriam, Judith, and Rebecca, it implies that she was a versatile (if not extraordinarily talented) author who could switch from novel of manners to gothic to evangelical, presumably to appeal to the perceived market.
Speaking of despising the decadence of London, scholar Victoria Barnett Woods traces the disdain-for-London schtick way back to 1746: "Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot (1746) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796)," as examples of "where an outside narrator visits London and bemoans its corruption and hostility.“ Olivia Fairfield of The Woman of Colour also gladly escape London for the purity of the countryside.
The Ossianic controversy
Ossian, whose works Emily enthuses over, was a purported Celtic bard whose poems were rediscovered and translated by a Scottish writer, James MacPherson. Or so he claimed. Turns out he basically wrote them himself and "Ossian" was an invention. Dr. Samuel Johnson loudly proclaimed MacPherson to be a fraud. The poems were hugely popular.
Barnett-Woods, Victoria. "27 Anonymous, The Woman of Colour; A Tale (1808)". Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 483-498.
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