by Steven Moore
Most of the two dozen other fictions Haywood published in the 1720s are either too short to be called novels—some of the more notables ones, such as Fantomina (1725) and The City Jilt (1726), are only 30–40 pages long142—or too derivative to merit discussion.143 For example, in 1725 Haywood published an imitation of Manley’s Atalantis entitled Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia in which Cupid takes a “noble youth” on a visit to an enchanted well that represents London society, essentially 290 pages of scandalous gossip. It’s more gamy than Manley’s novel—a lewd woman named Marthalia is cursed by some lovers for using perfumes “which hindered them from discovering those scents that would have been infallible warnings of what they might expect in [her] polluted sheets” (13)—and looks pretty trashy. (I’ll admit I merely flipped through it.) Of course it was a huge success, so Haywood wrote a similar one called The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727), which has more of a plot: a thinly disguised account of the love lives of George II, his queen, and others attached to the court in the 1720s. In her introduction to a modern reprint, Josephine Grieder feels “Mrs. Haywood’s attempt to introduce some degree of literary sophistication into the scandal chronicle should certainly be given credit” (11), but they are remembered today only because Alexander Pope was so incensed by Haywood’s insulting references to his friend Martha Blount (the stinky Marthalia) in the Kingdom of Utopia and to his neighbor Henrietta Howard in Caramania that he made some coarse remarks about her in his Dunciad (1728), which damaged her reputation.144 At that point Haywood returned to the theater—she had previously been an actress, and now was writing plays—but she resumed writing fiction in later years, so we’ll meet her again.
Like Haywood, Penelope Aubin (1679–1731) spices the half-dozen short novels she published in the 1720s with numerous near-rapes, though in her case rapists are cock-blocked by God, not mortals. A pious Catholic, she sought “to reclaim our giddy youth” to “virtue, by methods where delight and instruction may go together,” as she announced in the preface to her first novel, The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family (1721).145 Her methods of delight and instruction involve placing virtuous Christian teenagers in sexual danger in exotic locales (Turkey, Barbary, Russia, the Americas) where dark-skinned heathens utter commands like “Slaves! go, search the chambers, and bring her naked from her bed that I may ravish her before [her father’s] face, and then send his soul to hell” (chap. 2 of Count de Vinevil, the “her” in this case being his beautiful 14-year-old daughter). “Providence,” like a protective father, is an active, omnipresent character in these religiose fictions who tests Christians’ faith and virtue by putting them in sexual situations and even tempting them to commit suicide in some desperate circumstances, only to reassure them of his reliability by saving them, again and again. Providence is a prophylactic that protects the true believer, or so Aubin would have her giddy readers believe. Enormously popular in the 18th-century and influential on Samuel Richardson, who allegedly wrote the preface to an 1739 edition of Aubin’s works,146 these corny novels have only camp value today. Recently, critic Chris Mounsey, warning us against “heteronormative” reading, has tried to out them as queer texts; his essay is unconvincing, but at least it’s interesting to read, which I can’t say for Aubin’s novels.147 In 1729 she gave up writing fiction to become a preacher.
Rescuing amatory fiction from insipid sensationalism, Jane Barker returned to the publishing scene in 1723 with what Josephine Donovan correctly identifies as “one of the most important, if most ignored, works in women’s literary history” (19), a delightfully eccentric novel whose full title is A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies; or, Love and Virtue Recommended in a Collection of Instructive Novels, Related after a Manner Entirely New, and Interspersed with Rural Poems Describing the Innocence of a Country Life. On the simplest level, this is a sequel to Love Intrigues; picking up where it left off, Galesia relates the next seven years of her life, from around age 18 to 25. Still smarting from Bosvil’s rejection, she continues writing poetry and studying medicine; becomes pen pals with some college boys; moves to London, a country girl out of place in the big city; endures deaths in the family (brother, father) and her mother’s increasing pressure to marry; begins to doubt her poetic vocation and books in general; and ends on a low note as her mother dies and Galesia suffers a crisis of religious faith.
But rather than relate all this during a walk in a garden (as in Love Intrigues), Barker invented a distinctly feminine form for her feminine content. A much older Galesia loses her way during a stagecoach journey, falls into a river, and wanders sopping wet onto the estate of an aristocratic lady, who takes her into her home and shows her a huge patchwork screen on which she and her maids have been working. “A typical patch-work screen of the day,” Barker’s modern editor explains, “. . . was a large decorative piece of several panels, each measuring perhaps 9 × 2 feet. . . . Screens often displayed the skill of the needleworker and the status of her family, and could take years to finish. The patches or cloth pieces for the screen were appliquéd to the surface first, not sewn together first and then applied to a background, as some commonly think of patchwork quilts today” (xxxix–xl). Invited by her hostess to contribute to the screen (perhaps a metaphor for the muses calling Barker back to writing fiction after a decade), Galesia accepts and they send for her trunk “hoping that therein they might find some bits of one thing or other that might be useful to place in the Screen. But when the trunks and boxes came and were opened, alas! they found nothing but pieces of romances, poems, love letters, and the like. At which the good lady smiled, saying she would not have her fancy balked, and therefore resolved to have these ranged and mixed in due order, and thereof compose a Screen.”148
As Galesia proceeds to narrate her story in four “leafs,” she decorates it with “bits of one thing or other”: lots of poetry, mini-essays, recipes (in verse), and some gritty London anecdotes whose protagonists are incongruously given pastoral-literary names (Belinda, Lysander). Weaving back and forth from the past to the present, whimsically disregarding male linearity for female circularity, the novel’s form is as unconventional as she is. In no hurry to marry, Galesia’s swatches of fiction expose the reverse side of the romance narrative young women are not supposed to see: her parents recommend one guy to her whom she suspects of a “loose way of living,” and sure enough he commits a robbery and is executed; in London, a neighborhood girl is seduced and infected with syphilis; she talks with a woman who deferred to her parents’ choice of a husband rather than her own and was ruined as a result; hears of an “unaccountable” wife who lets her servant sleep with her husband and control their lives; and tells the antiromance of a luckless Londoner she calls Lysander whose kept mistress drives him to suicide—another suitor Galesia’s mother picked out for her! But Galesia’s attempts to create a counternarrative is frustrated: after a while her medical studies strike her as futile, and though she eventually acquires a room of her own in which to write, she turns against her poetic vocation and books in general—the literary equivalent of the “refusal of the call” in Joseph Campbell’s mythic-hero paradigm.
There’s a superb scene in which Galesia takes the stairs from her garret to the roof of her mother’s house and surveys London: “Here it was that I wished sometimes to be of Don Quixote’s sentiments, that I might take the tops of chimneys for bodies of trees, and the rising smoke for branches; the gutters of houses for terrace-walks; and the roofs for stupendous rocks and mountains” (124). But “she could not beguile my fancy thus,” for her view of Parliament, Westminster Hall, and Westminster Abbey only reminds her of the abuses of politics, the law, and religion, respectively; dejected, she returns to her garret and pens a poem “To My Friends, Against Poetry.” Soon, she is writing such poems as “On the Difficulties of Religion.” But as Galesia’s hostess reassuringly adds each of these dark patches to the communal screen, the reader is assured
that Galesia’s unconventional life will someday be redeemed by an unconventional work of art.
Three years later, Barker published the final panel of her triptych, The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen, Designed for the Farther Entertainment of the Ladies (1726). Taking leave of her hostess, Galesia travels to London for the winter, but instead of resuming the story of her younger self where the Screen left off, the older woman listens to more than a dozen tales and anecdotes from various visitors and friends, which form a kind of Reader’s Digest of all the popular fiction genres of the time, from sordid stories of seduced virgins to supernatural tales of monsters and witches. Every story ends with a moral proverb, as in Aesop’s Fables and in Oswald Dykes’s didactic compilations, one of which is quoted at one point.149 But Galesia’s unhealthy diet of pop fiction takes its toll, for near the end she falls asleep and has a nightmare of “robbers rifling, ladies affronted, maids deluded by false lovers, insolvent debtors dragged to jails by rude surly bailiffs, wives misused, husbands abused, whores slanting, honest women despised, girls trappaned by bawds, boys misled by drunkards, jilts and thieves . . .” (274)—all the tropes and plots of the best-sellers of her day. Galesia goes on to dream of visiting Parnassus and witnessing “some of the diversions of the annual coronation of Orinda,” her girlhood idol Katherine Philips (275). Arriving a little late—which, Jane Spencer speculates, “perhaps expresses Barker’s feelings, late in her life, that she has survived into a new and uncongenial age, when the tributes to the poet she admires are over” (69)—Galesia sits in a corner, where she is spotted by the queen of the fairies: “And whether she was angry to see a mortal in that assembly, or that she was excited by charity, is unknown, but she took a handful of gold out of her pocket, and gave to one of her gentleman-waiters, bidding him carry it to that mortal and command her away from thence” (277). This can be read two ways: Barker is getting paid to leave in punishment for selling out her girlhood hopes of attaining Parnassus via poetry and settling instead for cash from a commercial London publisher, which Barker may have felt guilty about; or the gold is encouragement from her muse to approach Parnassus from an alternate route.
We’re told Galesia wakes on the next page, but she’s obviously still dreaming when she uses her “fairy treasure” to purchase some “female virtues” from a merchant and to sell them at a profit to the ladies of London, another metaphor for Barker’s virtuous but commercial fiction enterprise. But the ladies have no use for sincerity, chastity, humility, and such goods—except for one ex-whore, who buys “a pretty quantity” of piety and repentance. Just as Galesia prepares to leave London and try her luck in the country, she receives an invitation from her hostess in the Screen to return to her estate in the spring, and there the novel ends, with no indication whether or not Galesia is still dreaming.
It’s a puzzling conclusion to a puzzling novel. Offered to readers as a lining, or background, to the unconventional patches of fiction Galesia contributed earlier to the Screen, the conventional tales that make up the Lining could be interpreted as Galesia’s apprentice-work as she abandons her dream of becoming a poet like Katherine Philips and learns to write fiction like Aphra Behn, whose novellas inspired a few of the tales in the Lining. One of her college friends in the Screen once asked her “If I liked Mrs. Philips or Mrs. Behn best? To whom I replied with a blunt indignation, that they ought not to be named together” (108). Years later, needing money, Galesia/Barker reluctantly studies and imitates Behn, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Defoe (named in her preface to the Screen), and her sisters in “amatory fiction.” Barker apparently held her nose while doing so, for after one unsavory tale, Galesia reflects on it and
also on those other stories she had heard amongst the ladies: she began to think the world was made up with extravagant adventures. Amongst the old romances, said she to herself, we find strange and improbable performances, very surprising turns and re-encounters; yet still all tended to virtuous ends and the abhorrence of vice. But here is the quintessence of wickedness designed and practiced, in a special manner, in the story of Jack Merchant, who sold both his lawful and natural son and murdered his concubine because she did not starve her child.
Those honorable romances of old Arcadia, Cleopatra, Cassandra, &c. discover a genius of virtue and honor which reigned in the time of those heroes and heroines, as well as in the authors that report them. But the stories of our times are so black that the authors can hardly escape being smutted or defiled in touching such pitch. (251–52)
Throughout the Lining the narrator expresses her contempt for “the stories of our time” as she imitates them; of one young lady who runs off to join some Gypsies, Galesia says “surely she had been reading some ridiculous romance or novel that inspired her with such a vile undertaking” (237), and the protagonist of the next tale blames her troubles on the fact “I had read plays, novels, and romances till I began to think of myself a heroine of the first rate” (239). Barker often becomes impatient with the clichés of fiction: “I need not tell you what arguments he used to persuade her to be his bedfellow that night; we will suppose they were such as is common on those occasions” (264). A friend tells a story that, as editor Wilson notes, “closely resembles Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun,” but when Galesia later meets a sad girl raised in a convent and asks if she has any similar tales to tell, she says no: that kind of stuff happens only in novels. As in the Screen, Galesia gives incongruously pastoral names to the fops and whores of the stories she hears in the Lining, goofily so near the end with such names as Malhurissa (the sad convent girl) and Succubella (a witch—and available to any budding drag-queen needing a stage-name). But the mention of “spring” and “morning” on the final page indicate she has worked through the nightmare winter of her apprenticeship (reading and writing commercial fiction) and is prepared for personal and artistic rejuvenation: resuming her writing career and composing something new out of all those old scraps of stories, which of course is the novel novel we’ve been reading.
In this final panel of Barker’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, she dramatizes how she learned to write conventional fiction, but she didn’t stop there, and certainly did not sell out, despite what the fairy queen might think. Instead of merely imitating the conventional novels of her time, Barker devised an unconventional form that critiques them and reconfigures their sensational, often immoral plots into cautionary fables with a moral purpose. In place of dumb virgins who keep falling for the same tricks, she offers a sensible young lady who learns Latin, medicine, and farm management (in Love Intrigues), prefers writing to flirting, and is willing to remain single rather than marry badly. Barker wants to ween female readers away from what one critic calls “Realist comfort-food” to more intellectually nourishing and morally uplifting fiction.150 The title pages of the Screen and the Lining announce her work is intended only “for the ladies,” and to avoid scaring them away from her nontraditional fiction, Barker introduces a metaphoric structure based on traditional female group activities like patchwork, sewing, and embroidery, not to mention the “stitch ’n bitch” sharing of stories.151 “By asserting continuities between traditional feminine activities and those of the new print culture,” Barker’s biographer Kathryn King proposes, “text-textile analogies such as that which organizes A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies may have played a part in promoting a female reading community” (82). Barker also suggests, in the playfully complex address “To the Reader” at the beginning of the Screen, that her communal patchwork metaphor has political and even scientific implications: “whenever one sees a set of ladies together, their sentiments are as differently mixed as the patches in their work, to wit: Whigs and Tories, High Church and Low Church, Jacobites and Williamites, and many more distinctions, which they divide and subdivide till at last they make this dis-union meet in a harmonious tea-table entertainment.”152 Pushing her textile metaphor to the limit, Barker boldly equates literary creation with the creation of the universe: “This p
uts me in mind of what I have heard some philosophers assert about the clashing of atoms, which at last united to compose this glorious fabric of the Universe” (52).
Fulfilling her promise on the title page of the Screen that her novel would be narrated “after a manner entirely new,” Barker in The Galesia Trilogy created one of the most innovative novels of the 18th century, a worthy female companion of A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy. “The pleasure these stories provide acknowledges invention, manipulation, ground-shifting, and the wide possibilities of the reader’s role,” Patricia Meyer Spacks writes in admiration of the trilogy (37–38), but apparently too few of Barker’s readers appreciated those possibilities, for her work was not reprinted and Barker was largely forgotten until she was rediscovered by female critics in the 1980s and The Galesia Trilogy reprinted in a fine scholarly edition in 1997. Jane Barker remains an asterisked footnote in most histories of the English novel, but she’s a star in the history of alternative fiction.
Female readers of the 1720s preferred to stick with Haywood’s bodice-rippers, Aubin’s R-rated Sunday-school lessons, and novels with titles like The Reformed Coquette and The Accomplished Rake. These two, both written by Mary Davys (1674–1732) while managing a Cambridge coffeehouse, are actually better than they sound. Like Haywood’s Idalia, The Reformed Coquette (1724) concerns a “self-willed, headstrong lady who resolved to follow [her] own inventions” (60), but it is staged as comedy rather than tragedy. Flirty, 15, and financially independent, flighty Amoranda thrives on flattery and welcomes any fop who fans her vanity—“Her heart was like a great inn, which finds room for all that come” (18)—so her distant uncle sends her a priggish older man named Formator to be her guardian. First thing he does is to bounce two beaus named Callid and Froth, who planned to abduct Amoranda and force her to choose between them; next Formator steers her away from sleazy Lord Lofty, and bedtricks him into marrying a woman he had seduced earlier. (The names, the plot, and the witty dialogue are reminiscent of Restoration comedy; Davys wrote two plays a decade earlier.) Finally, Formator rescues Amoranda from an attempted rape by a man disguised as a woman; then Formator reveals that he too has been wearing a disguise: removing his fake beard, he is transformed from an old prig into a young lover, and convinced that his moral lectures have taken root, he proposes to Amoranda and admits the whole thing was a setup by her concerned uncle.