John Marchmont's Legacy,
The Clever Woman of the Family,
Braddon's book is tremendous fun because she has a really wonderful villainess. One of the great pleasures I get from Victorian and Edwardian novels is a particular degree of character development, comfortably between playing out the social 'station to which God was pleased to call' a character, and playing out the completely internal but equally deterministic torments of the psychological worldviews after Freud. 's Cousin Henry makes me perfectly happy in this regard.
John Marchmont's legacy doesn't directly affect Olivia, a woman fit for greatness but consigned to a tiny life. By the time something interesting happens, she's cripplingly cramped by having tried to be good in a way she wasn't good at, but she remains so balanced between her worse instincts and her better intentions that she's a lot more interesting than either the romantic leads or the undiluted villain. Also, she gets a lot of riproaring purple prose:
When this girl and I are equals - when she, like me, stands alone upon a barren rock, far out amid the waste of waters, with not one memory to hold her to the past, with not one hope to lure her onward to the future, with nothing but the black sky above and the black waters around -- then we may grow fond of each other.
The rest of the plot is inheritance-and-true-love melodrama, not totally unlike East Lynne, though not quite as sensationalist.
The Clever Woman of the Family has a much more realistic plot, but recognizes some of the same difficulties for intelligent Victorian women too well-brought-up to do anything with their talents. Yonge expects that a successful upbringing will always put a stronger male mind in charge of the flailing female one, but the novel doesn't seem to believe that this is likely or easy. Not Middlemarch, but not just polemic.
So wrote clew in Book comparisons. , Fiction (19th c.).