The pseudonymous authoress Mrs. Martha Homely knew that the first unrelentingly weepy and overwrought volume of Maids As They Are is notably different from the livelier scandal-ridden subsequent volumes, and in her foreword she “entreats those who are fatigued at the melancholy of her first volume” to hang in there. Volume Two introduces Lady Lucy and her two sisters, more wickedly captivating than her heroine. Of course they are only there to be held up as a bad example. Of course!
    The story centers around our beautiful and virtuous heroine Theodora Cameron. Actually, the first chapter traces the family line back to the time of good Queen Anne, but the family tree collapses as the authoress dispatches Theodora’s aunt, then her uncle the baronet, then Theodora’s mother, then her father. We’re left with Theodora and her cousin Evelin Cameron, the only remaining male heir to the baronetcy. They are in fact double first cousins, because their fathers are twin brothers (the one who popped out first was the baronet) who married sisters. Their parents intended them for each other from their cradles. No genetic counselors in this little Welsh village, evidently...

     Imagine that you have extricated yourself from a relationship with an intelligent but intensely passionate woman, and she writes to you to request the return of her letters—because she is planning to write a novel.
     William Frend, faced with his situation in 1796, chose to “grey rock” her--as the kids say. He never returned the letters, so far as we know. Frend, an intelligent, principled, but rather didactic sort of a guy, was involved with radical circles in London during the heady times of the French Revolution. I discuss him in this previous blog post.
     Hays’ fixation over Frend formed the basis of her 1796 epistolary novel, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, in which she retraces their one-sided relationship. If Emma Courtney is a self-portrait, then Hays was an intelligent, articulate, but very self-absorbed woman, an impression reinforced for me by her letters. I should imagine her friends sighed inwardly when one of her lengthy epistles was handed over by the postman. I’m sure they were always advising her to just get out and go for a long walk. 
    “I can’t make you love me if you don’t,” as the Bonnie Raitt song says. This is a sad lesson that many young people must learn. But now that I check the dates, Mary Hays was 39 years old at the time that she was pursuing Frend.

​     This is my fifth blog post about Mary Ann Hanway’s Andrew Stuart, or the Northern Wanderer (1800). I wanted to share an interesting episode in this forgotten novel because it echoes an event in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley and it ties into the War of Ideas which raged in England the 1790s after the French Revolution.
     First, to understand the context: in those days, students and tutors at Cambridge and Oxford had to be Protestant Christians (No Jews or Catholics, thanks) and they had to explicitly subscribe to the 39 Articles, a list of doctrines of the Anglican Church.
    I previously discussed the 39 Articles a few years ago, when discussing whether Jane Austen was critiquing the Anglican Church with her portrait of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice.
   All right. In the story, our hero Andrew is listening to the extended backstory of his new friend, John Carter, who was enrolled in Cambridge intending to become a clergyman. Carter is the son of a poor but virtuous clergyman and as such, he’s looked down upon by the more posh and wealthy students, such as Lord Buford.  I've trimmed this excerpt down because John Carter is pretty long-winded. Mind you, if you're on a six-months long voyage to India, I suppose it doesn't matter how long it takes to tell a backstory. Take it away, John!...

     In my two-part synopsis of Andrew Stuart (1800), I mentioned that the heroine Isabella improbably gets into a debate about whether novels were good or bad for society--while she is being kidnapped by the burly henchman working for a venal nobleman. In case you were not aware, many people, especially religious or conservative people, mistrusted novels, as I discussed in an earlier series of posts. There was a sort of moral panic around the dangers of novels. Well, this authoress has her characters discuss the dangers of novel-reading in an extended sequence which begins when the burly captor has to rest the horses and get some food at an inn. (He's been instructed to convey Isabella from London all the way to Wales). How will he prevent her for screaming for help when they stop the carriage?