​Many historical novels put fictional characters at the forefront of real historical events but Jaquelina of Hainault (1798) is loosely based on the life of a real medieval European princess. Jacquelina (not Jaquelina) was the heiress to her father’s lands in what is now Holland. The real Jacquelina unsuccessfully struggled to retain sovereignty over her territories in a male-dominated world. She had four husbands and was briefly the Dauphine of France. Her third husband was English, a royal duke. This marriage is elevated into a love story for the novel, even though the known facts suggest that Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, married Jacquelina out of ambition and divorced her when his campaign to establish his own kingdom in Europe ran into opposition from France and Burgundy.
   I plodded through Jaquelina, finding it boring and the “ingenuous” heroine quite uninteresting and weak. She’s so “ingenuous” that at first she doesn’t realize she’s in love with Humphrey, or understand why she feels jealous of any other beauty he admires: “’No doubt some of those ladies whom he extols so highly for their beauty makes him weary of Hainault, and anxious to return to England!’ This thought gave her a disagreeable sensation she could in now way account for, and her attendants for the first time had reason to think the princess difficult to please.” 
     By the third time she accidentally gets herself into a compromising situation with Humphrey which hurts her reputation, I was pretty sure she wasn’t intelligent enough to manage a medieval kingdom.   ​

      The plot of Frederic & Caroline depends upon misunderstanding. There are two main couples: Caroline Vincent and Frederic Godfrey, and Frederic's sister Emma Godfrey and their neighbour George Edwin. Both Frederic and George [called by his last name, Edwin, in the novel] become convinced that Caroline and Emma have been unchaste and unfaithful, and they repudiate them. Then the misunderstandings are cleared up, the girls forgive and they reconcile. 
​   Also, the plot relies upon incredible coincidence after incredible coincidence. Frederic keeps running into Caroline wherever he goes, and when he does, he always sees her in a compromising situation, though she is guilty of nothing more than filial obedience to a selfish mother. We also luckily meet up with a long-lost uncle, a long-lost stepmother, a long-lost best friend, two long-lost twin brothers, a long-lost sister, and a long-lost errant wife, each of whom has to tell us their tragic backstory. Thud! As revelations come to light, the women and sometimes the men sink senseless or lifeless to the ground...

    In a previous post, I began a synopsis of the complicated plot of The Revealer of Secrets, or, The House That Jack Built, a novel that might have been written by the same authoress who gave us the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour. See a list of all the novels in the authorial attribution chain here.
     The Revealer of Secrets is narrated in the first person by a house, but this is not a sprawling multi-generational saga, it is a story involving five different sets of occupants over the course of several years, as well as some of the local villagers. By the third volume, the author develops a few links between the different tenants. The kept mistress in the first volume turns out to be the sister of the impoverished poet in the third volume, but no-one knows where she has gone. Will the impecunious poet Mr. Hammond ever find his fallen sister and snatch her from vice? (Yes, he does).
    Our main heroine is the virtuous and put-upon Agnes Carey who has transformed The House That Jack Built into an abode of peace and harmony. The house-narrator admires her very much. Anyway, even though the house is the narrator, we now switch to Cheltenham, where Agnes and some previous tenants of the house all come together, including the narcissistic bluestocking Mrs. Desmond and Mr. Prune the glutton. Plus, the author adds a host of new, disagreeably vain and stupid people who gossip and backstab all day...

       My article about Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius is now live at the History Reclaimed website. It's an honour to have my contribution to the debate about the BBC shared at a site founded by so many eminent historians and academics. Below is additional material that I did not include in my article for reasons of length. 
  In an earlier post, I  decried a BBC documentary on Shakespeare that astonished me for the amount of misinformation it conveyed. Now it's time to clutch my pearls over the same treatment meted out to Jane Austen.  ​I didn’t see this documentary when it aired in the UK in May, but I recently found it on an online streaming service
     If you are in need of another eye-opening lecture on slavery, colonialism, empire, class prejudice and economic injustice, set to a soundtrack of driving violins, this is the program you've been looking for. If, however, you assumed a program called "Rise of a Genius" would offer an explication of Austen’s wit and her unique talents, you will be disappointed. You can get a sample of the mood of this program by viewing this preview here. 
   The BBC has given us many shows on Jane Austen over the years, on both radio and television, and if you stack these older programs up against this one, you will see  how respect for serious scholarship has been replaced with—whatever this is. If this is the best that the BBC could muster for Austen’s 250th birthday, then the BBC is a hollowed-out shell, a travesty of a mockery of a sham...