Madame de Fleury

Maria Edgeworth's Madame de Fleury (1805) is a pretty standard anti-Jacobin text. Madame de Fleury is an exemplary woman. She is clever, benevolent, wise, patient, and good. The action is centred around a school for impoverished girls that she is inspired to open when she meets three poor children who are forced to spend their days locked in a room while their mother looks for work. Given Edgeworth's interest in education, there is a lot of detail about how exemplary the school is in every way - the girls are educated by example, and the emphasis is on practical education, rather than the acquisition of accomplishments. There is a strong class bias inherent in the school, which I found distasteful from a modern perspective, but was obviously intended as a good thing: despite the fact that the girls show signs of high achievement in areas such as writing and dancing, they are not encouraged to develop these talents due to their lower-class status. Such accomplishments might encourage them to climb the social ladder, you see. They must be perfectly content to suppress their talents and work as shop assistants, ladies maids, and governesses.

Anyway, along comes the French Revolution to put a damper on this whole more-perfect-than-perfect school. Madame de Fleury is forced into exile, and the school is forcibly disbanded. Victorie, the most perfect of these perfect students, is the center of the student's attempts to salvage Madame de Fleury and her property. At one point, Victorie confronts the revolutionaries head on, and her perfection is enough to make them reconsider destroying Madame de Fleury's chateau. Oh, to be so perfect!

If you think I'm sounding a little cynical, it's because I am. I think Maria Edgeworth's tendency to didactism works for her sometimes, and sometimes it does not. This is one of the cases where it does not. I didn't feel like any of the characters were real, and the story lacks the wit and insight of her other novels. For all Maria Edgeworth's morality, I think she is much better at writing "bad" characters than good - her good characters are too good to be believable, while her "bad" characters all seem like real people to me (see Lady Delacour in Belinda, for example). All of Maria Edgeworth's novels are moralistic and educative, but this one is moralistic and educative and nothing else.

Letters for Literary Ladies

I thought it was time to include a post about this, since it gives my blog its name! Letters for Literary Ladies, by Maria Edgeworth, is basically a collection of letters between two women, Julia and Caroline. However, one woman, Julia, only writes one letter. To put things very simply, Julia might stand for "sensibility", while Caroline stands for "sense". So, of course, Julia runs into all sorts of relationship disasters, while Caroline's judgment is vindicated and she leads a virtuous life. It's only a short work, and most of the letters are merely lectures by Caroline to Julia about the decisions she is making or has made. It's not as boring as it sounds, however, and it's a pretty interesting glimpse of the kinds of concerns that Maria Edgeworth would revisit in her later fiction. While Julia is treated harshly, she is allowed to repent at the end of the novel, in typical eighteenth-century fashion.

However, I enjoyed the Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification a lot more. It's basically a satirical essay instructing women on various ways to manipulate their husbands. While it's supposed to be an indictment of those kinds of women, and that way of thinking, it's actually quite hilarious.

As Letters for Literary Ladies is short and obviously didactic, I doubt it has much contemporary appeal, but it's a must for anybody at all interested in Maria Edgeworth. Although definitely not as fun as Belinda.

The Life of Harriot Stuart

Charlotte Lennox's The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself (1750) is a Richardsonesque novel about a young woman's process of maturation. However, unlike Richardson's "angelic" victims, Harriot is a fiesty, fiery woman with a lot of flaws. She likes attention rather too much. She gets herself into all kinds of scrapes. She refuses to succumb to the eighteenth-century seduction plot (she actually stabs the man who is trying to rape her, which is awesome). She falls in love with one man, but admits to enjoying flirting with other men. Above all, Harriot is an intelligent heroine who never lets circumstances control her. I was surprised by how much agency Lennox gives her - she never has to "learn" as much as Arabella from The Female Quixote does, and her judgment and actions are almost always vindicated.

This novel has additional historical interest, as it is partly set in mid eighteenth-century America. While Lennox never actually names New York and Albany (calling them N- and A- respectively), it's pretty clear that she is talking about them. Lennox provides an interesting glimpse of American society, based on her own experiences. Harriot has dealings with the native Americans, makes various observations on the nature of the American landscape, and at one point wanders through American wildlife by herself.

While I still think that Lennox's The Female Quixote is a stronger novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart is a very enjoyable novel, especially if you want to get something vaguely Richardsonesque, with a proto-feminist twist.

Waldorf

Sophia King's Waldorf; Or, The Dangers of Philosophy (1798) is basically a very conservative little book about how the logical endpoint of all radical philosophy is death. Death, death, and more death. And I hated it.

This book is badly plotted, ridiculously melodramatic, unbelievable, and eye-roll worthy in its 'down with the radicals' ideologies. Basically, Waldorf is a young man who falls in with Lok, a radical philosopher along the lines of William Godwin. And because he has adopted Lok's radical philosophies, Waldorf suffers a litany of misfortunes. These are just a few of them: he causes two women to die because of their trauma over his atheism (somehow?), he ends up killing the two brothers of one of the women, his lover runs away because she has been all fired up by his radicalism (?), his infant son is murdered, he is the cause of an innocent man's execution, and finally his lover dies and he commits suicide over her body. And we are somehow led to believe that if only he didn't listen to Lok, all of this would be avoided! Somehow.

I get that conservative thinkers were extremely worried about the effect that radical philosophies would have on the fabric of society. The turn of the eighteenth-century was a time of radical change, which can often be scary. But this is a weirdly Chicken Little kind of hysterical reactionary melodrama that is just irritating. Apart from being told that Waldorf's atheism is troubling to the two women he "kills", there is no explanation as to why it's so troubling that they can't do anything but die as a consequence. And since the rest of the drama takes off with their deaths, the whole novel is built on the flimsiest of notions.

In other words, I wouldn't recommend it!

The Injur'd Husband and Lasselia

As this edition of The Injur'd Husband and Lasselia draws together two Eliza Haywood novels, so I will review them together (and also because Lasselia is really short and this would be a really short blog post if I didn't.

The Injur'd Husband; or, The Mistaken Resentment (1723): This is a sexy, naughty little novel about a very evil woman. The Baroness has about six lovers going on at once. What is amazing is that none of the men ever figure it out. Of course, she gets her comeuppance (in a rather public manner), but the real fun of this novel lies in her (mostly successful) scheming. The "heroine" of the novel is a wet blanket in comparison, until she decides to flirt with cross-dressing as a man. This isn't my favourite Haywood novel (that distinction still goes to The Adventures of Eovaai, over Betsy Thoughtless), this is a whole lot of fun. And I really appreciated it's depiction of female sexual desire - while the sexual Baroness is evil, sexual desire in women is not seen as a bad thing because she doesn't really feel genuine sexual desire for anyone. Montamour, who feels genuine sexual desire for Beauclair, is seen as the exemplar (and, some have argued, represents Haywood herself).

Lasselia; or, The Self-Abandoned (1723): This is a slighter novel, both in length and in subject manner. Lasselia falls in love with a married man, and this novel charts both their histories and their love-affairs. There is an inset narrative which is loosely connected to the main action, but seems rather shoe-horned in (although I found the story of the sisters much more interesting than the story of Lasselia). While Haywood was extraordinarily prolific (she wrote a novel every three months for most of the 1720s), most of her novels don't seem rushed. Except for this one. I have the feeling that there is a more complex novel somewhere in Lasselia, but it never comes to fruition, and the novel ends rather abruptly. As it is so short, however, it's a very easy read, despite the incoherency.

The Excursion

Frances Brooke's The Excursion (1777) is funny, sly, cheeky and very entertaining. It is very much in the vein of Fanny Burney's Evelina (but not quite as good). While I was reading this, I couldn't help but think how much I would have loved to have known Frances Brooke - she seems like she'd be a lot of fun!

The Excursion is about the "excursion" of a young lady to London. Maria, the young lady in question, has lived in the country her whole life, but starts to wish for a "coronet" (to marry a member of the nobility), so off she goes. Predictably, all sorts of wild and wonderful things happen there. She falls in love, spends way too much money, becomes briefly addicted to gambling, and has the play she has written rejected by a theater manager (a not subtle at all parody of David Garrick, who had some not very pleasant interactions with Brooke). I spent half the book being irritated with Maria for being so dumb, and feeling strangely maternal and protective towards her.

The best part of the novel is definitely Brooke's narrative voice. The narrator is like a proto-Jane Austen narrative voice - it's a bit sly, it's a bit ironic, but it's very sympathetic and wise. Brooke uses chapters very effectively to signal her way around the text, often ending a chapter by saying something along the lines of "okay, you've seen this scene. Let's look at another scene happening at the same time as this one". That could get irritating, but it really works for her.

I really enjoyed this one and will have to read more Brooke - especially The History of Emily Montague, which is considered to be the first Canadian novel.

The Fortunate Foundlings

Eliza Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings (1744) is much more obviously a "novel" than some of her earlier works: you can see by comparing her works of the 1720s to this one how the novel was developing as a form. For example, this book is divided into chapters, and follows a more or less linear structure, with much fewer inset narratives.

The Fortunate Foundlings is about twins (Horatio and Louisa) who are found abandoned under a tree by a wealthy bachelor. He brings them up, and then they go off and have their own adventures for various reasons. I found Louisa's story much more sympathetic and interesting than Horatio's, which is more predictable in its exploration of love and war. Louisa is a typical Haywood heroine - both very feminine and surprisingly strong and independent. At one point, she wanders around Italy on foot with very little money. While her stubbornness can be irritating at times, I ultimately found her extremely sympathetic and her story kept me gripped in a way that Horatio's didn't. Again, there is a certain proto-feminism inherent in the novel, as Louisa's story is very much about the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal society (and, on the flipside, the methods that women used to try and elude victimhood).

I didn't love this in the way I loved The Adventures of Eovaai (which I can't stop thinking about), but it was a fun and pretty absorbing read, especially in what it demonstrates about how the novel had developed since the time Haywood wrote Love in Excess.