Subtitle: or, Female Difficulties
During the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre, and in the dead of night, braving the cold, the darkness and the damps of December, some English passengers, in a small vessel, were preparing to glide silently from the coast of France, when a voice of keen distress resounded from the shore, imploring, in the French language, pity and admission.
Despite the grand drama of this opening, I can't recommend this novel as a pastime; by modern standards the story is too prolonged, the heroine too stuffy, the language too unintentionally funny. It is interesting for its compromises, between admiration for the early principles of the new French republic and horror at its violence; between the didactic novel and the thriller; between the Romantic document and the argument for self-control. Fanny Burney d'Arblay steered some narrow compromises in her own life.
The best thing in her story is the counter-heroine Miss Elinor Joddrell, who isn't actually a Villainess but like villainesses gets to act towards her own positive ends; those ends, alas, lead her to attempt suicide to prove her rigorous belief in romantic love and atheism. The second-best characters are a string of gruff older men with conscientously avuncular feelings toward the heroine; they make a set of English eccentrics. The third best thing is a trot through evocative parts of the English countryside, including an excellent scene at Stonehenge and some frightening nights in the forest.
The most annoying thing, alas, is the heroine's extremely negative virtue; she won't sing for money, she won't accept money from a stranger, she won't keep her mouth shut to keep a position as companion to a shrew. These acts are variously attributed to her unbowed honesty, her aristocratic pride, or her sense of the traps laid for any unprotected woman; given the subtitle I will assume that everything but her leaving the shrew was required to preserve her virtue, and therefore her person. It is repeatedly her difficulty that a solitary woman with money is assumed to have earned it immorally, and a poor woman with no family is considered anyone's prey.
I can't give a URL because I can't find a copy of this online, although I downloaded it from somewhere... I would serve up my copy of the text, but what if the cold hand of copyright law is reaching forward from 1814? On the other hand, it has been reprinted with scholarly apparatus, ISBN: 0192837583.
So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.). | TrackBack