by Steven Moore
Yet another Frances became the most famous romance novelist of this period. After writing and destroying a novel at age 15, 25-year-old Frances Burney (1752–1840) published her wildly popular novel Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778). Like others on that theme, it dramatizes the clash in class and manners when a timid virgin from the provinces visits intimidating London for the first time, but Burney inverts the formula in several interesting ways. First, she draws upon a wider range of influences: in her preface, she names Rousseau, Johnson, Marivaux, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett as exemplary novelists, and though it’s not surprising that she takes her epistolary form from Richardson and plot elements from Marianne, it is surprising to see an uproarious Smollettic sea captain here, pulling the kind of rowdy pranks rarely seen in women’s fiction. Fielding’s comic spirit hovers over this frequently hilarious novel as Burney puts her provincial protagonist into as many ludicrous, embarrassing situations as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones. Burney also departs from the norm of women’s romance by portraying courtship and marriage not as an emotionally exciting roller-coaster ride that ends joyously, but as an emotionally humiliating and sometimes violent ordeal for women. Evelina is lucky enough to meet and eventually marry an ideal, Sir Charles Grandison-type named Lord Orville—she must be a real hottie, for she has zero personality—but she is harassed throughout by fops and rakes, browbeaten by a ridiculous grandmother, satirized by an older female companion, and imposed upon by her brazenly bourgeois relatives. The novel opens with the story of how her mother was forced into a marriage, abandoned by her husband, and died in childbirth—warning us of the dangers Evelina faces—nor is there a single happily married couple in the book. The first line of the novel asks, “Can anything, my good Sir, be more painful to a friendly mind than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence?” and the disagreeable intelligence Evelina communicates is how badly it sucked to be a woman in 18th-century England. Even though Evelina is flattered at Lord Orville’s attention, she is forced to marry him much sooner than she would have wished, compromising the traditional happy ending. On her wedding day, she plans to return home to Berry Hill and the true love of her life, the elderly clergyman who reared her after her mother’s death, and Burney saves her last twist on the romance formula for the novel’s final line: “the chaise now awaits which is to conduct me to dear Berry Hill, and to the arms of the best of men,” Evelina writes the old gent, leaving it ambiguous whether she means him or her new husband. Earlier, she had twice pictured Lord Orville as an old man, “when time had wintered o’er his locks,” when he would “resemble him whom I love and honour.”285 Evelina hasn’t progressed at all: having entered the world, she doesn’t like what she sees and returns home seven months later, as naïve as she left, except with a new guardian. “I hardly know myself to whom I most belong,” she says near the end (3.15), and the tragedy of this romantic comedy is that Evelina never belongs to herself.
Like Sheridan and other novelists following in Richardson’s footsteps, Burney realized how unrealistic his epistolary mode is—at one point she self-consciously has her protagonist offer the lame excuse that even though a character related her account of a visit “in a hasty manner, yet I believe I can recollect every word” (3.16)—and consequently abandoned it for third-person narrative for her two other major novels, Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796). The former concerns a 21-year-old heiress who will inherit a fortune only if she marries a man willing to take her surname, the patriarchal legacy of Cecilia Beverley’s uncle, who dies at the beginning of the 900-page novel. Until she reaches her majority, she is under the control of her guardians, three ludicrous examples of pride and prejudice:286 the socially self-conscious spendthrift Mr. Harrel; the vulgar, tightfisted Mr. Briggs; and the haughty aristocrat Mr. Delvile, whose son Mortimer falls in love with Cecilia and who, after hundreds of pages of complications and misunderstandings, eventually marries her.287 But the novel departs from the romance genre in several key ways: above average in intelligence and benevolence, Cecilia is more concerned with finding a vocation than a husband, and settles on charity work, with the encouragement of a strange character named Albany, who speaks like an Old Testament prophet. Cecilia is surrounded by upper-class socialites who fritter away their lives and middle-class merchants obsessed with making money, the butts of Burney’s satire. Aside from Cecilia and Albany, only a young man named Delfield attempts to find a sensible alternative to upper-class frivolity and middle-class money-grubbing, and fails in the attempt; appropriately enough, at a masquerade early in the novel where we meet many of the novel’s characters, he dresses up as Don Quixote.
The novel is set in 1779 and 1780, while the American Revolution was underway; and though there are no direct references to that conflict, the novel is filled with talk of independence. Delfield, who defines happiness as “labour with independence” (8.5), argues that “customs long established, and habits long indulged, assume an empire despotic” (9.3), and the novel’s characters can be divided into those who revolt against that empire, and those who support it (namely, the males who benefit from the patriarchal privileges of those long-established customs and habits) or buckle under to it (virtually all the women in the novel). Burney’s mercantile characters, the liveliest and funniest people in the novel, openly mock the pretensions and supposed superiority of aristocrats, Albany thunders against anyone who wastes money that could go to the poor, and Delvile rages against the patriarchal pressure (partly self-imposed) that prevents him from abandoning custom and taking Cecilia’s surname. As he tells his mother, “In the general commerce of the world it may be right to yield to its prejudices, but in matters of serious importance, it is weakness to be shackled by scruples so frivolous, and it is cowardly to be governed by the customs we condemn. Religion and laws of our country should then alone be consulted, and where those are neither opposed nor infringed, we should hold ourselves superior to all other considerations” (8.6). “Cowardice” and “defiance” are words that surface frequently as characters decide whether they are strong enough to follow the pursuit of happiness “in defiance of the censure of mankind,” as Mrs. Delvile puts it a few lines later. She insists the most “odious” attitude a young woman can take is “a daring defiance of the world and its opinions” (6.8), which Burney implies is actually a heroic attitude. Cecilia calls her young friend Henrietta “a heroick girl” when she learns of her willingness to defy custom (10.4), and blushes to realize she lacks that ability. It takes courage to be independent, but Cecilia is too afraid of the censure of mankind to pursue her own happiness, too obsessed with what the narrator minimizes as “merely . . . punctilious honour and delicacy” (4.7). Her family doctor, the one who coined “pride and prejudice,” encourages her to think outside the box: “Let [the Delviles] keep their prejudices, which, though different, are not worse than their neighbours, and do you retain your excellencies, and draw from them the happiness which they ought to give you. People reason and refine themselves into a thousand miseries by choosing to settle that they can only be contented one way; whereas, there are fifty ways, if they would but look about them, that would commonly do as well” (8.8). A slave to the patriarchal ideology under which she was raised, wearing Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles,” Cecilia goes temporarily insane near the end, and although she recovers, marries her man (though consummation is postponed indefinitely), and eventually replaces the fortune she lost to her spendthrift guardian, Cecilia remains troubled on the final page, convinced that the proud, aristocratic family she has married into will soon “murmur” at her earlier actions. Realizing even happy people have “some misery” to deal with, she decides to bear her “partial evil with cheerfullest resignation” (10.10), a muted conclusion that represents Burney’s own revolt against the custom of ending romance novels happily, in defiance of her male advisors. She puts things into perspective: “Compared with the general lot of human misery, Cecilia has suffered nothing” (7.7).
Cecilia was written quickly under patriarchal pressure (from her father, mentor, and publisher) and consequently is marred by too great a reliance on stock melodrama and extraordinary coincidences. Yet it anticipates the Victorian novel in its breadth and social concerns, in its variety of characters high and low and their distinctive diction—the narrator has a penchant for euphuism—and for its dramatization of how great expectations go awry at the vanity fair that is the conventional world.
Fourteen years later, Burney published Camilla (1796), another 900-page novel that, like Evelina, centers on the romantic problems of a naïve 17-year-old (and those of her friends), but even its sympathetic modern editors admit it was written to popular tastes: Burney “declined innovation,” ignored her earlier “aesthetic rule” against unrealistically happy endings, and, “torn between the demands of artistic integrity and those of profitable bookmaking,” settled for the latter (xiv–xviii). The reviews were mixed, and Burney “had to admit—if only to herself—that the book was sometimes mawkish, its melodramatic passages too many, and its moral dicta prolonged beyond narrative limits. In fact, she was forced to the humiliating confession that its language was often imprecise and ungrammatical” (xvi). Jane Austen liked it, but in her Northanger Abbey she allows a dolt to dismiss it as “the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin” (chap. 7). There’s obviously more to Camilla than that, as recent critics have argued, but the speed-dating bell is jingling and we need to move on.
Meet Miss Milner, an 18-year-old flirt who falls for a 30-year-old priest. (This should be interesting.) A Simple Story (1791) by actress/dramatist Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) is the not-so-simple story of the abuse of power. Dorriforth, an ordained but nonpracticing priest, becomes the legal guardian of a rich party girl who stays out all night, plays guitar, wears revealing clothes, and reads racy novels.288 Though disapproving, Dorriforth exerts almost no power over her, and after they both realize they’re in love with each other—and after he inherits an estate and renounces his vows—she begins abusing what she considers the rightful power a woman has over her fiancé. She goes too far and almost loses him, but just as he’s leaving they are married during one of the most surprising nuptial scenes in fiction. The second half of the novel takes places 17 years later: after four years of blissful marriage, things fall apart—he goes off on a three-year business trip to the West Indies, she resumes flirting with an old flame—and after she dies at the age of 35, Dorriforth (now Lord Elmwood) does a 180 and becomes a tyrannical abuser of power, banning his daughter from his sight in revenge against his unfaithful wife, and exacting dictatorial obedience from everyone around him. It takes a Richardsonian abduction before he realizes he has been as stern with her as he was lax with her mother. Fortunately, his daughter has been as subservient as her mother was disobedient, and the novel ends implying that people in a position of power should wield it wisely, and those who aren’t should respect and obey those who are. It’s psychologically interesting that Elmwood reunites with his daughter—the image of her mother—when she’s the same age he fell for Miss Milner: she’s the obedient, well-behaved lady he wanted his wife to be. But instead of pursuing that tricky situation, Inchbald marries her off to Elmwood’s nephew.
Carefully matching form with content, the style of the first half is sprightly, witty, and sometimes lapses into present tense, as in stage directions for a play. Miss Milner (we’re never told her first name) is the sassiest character since Charlotte in Sir Charles Grandison, and as a Protestant she sometimes pokes fun at the Catholicism of her guardian and his mentor, a sour Jesuit named Sandford.289 The second half is dour and more conventional, with traces of the Gothic and sentimental modes popular at that time. Throughout, Inchbald—like Sterne—pays close attention to gestures, especially at table, and restricts herself to a small cast and a small number of rooms, which, along with the lively dialogue, gives her novel a stagelike quality. The reactionary message is disappointing—better to be an obedient doormat than an independent woman (like Inchbald herself)—and is probably the result of the author’s determination to do anything to get this novel published: “if she had to change it—if she had to extend it—if she had to construct it in a different way—if she had to add tag lines to associate it with popular views and interests,” she would and did (Jenkins, 276). Nevertheless, A Simple Story is one of the quirkiest romance novels of the period, and had it ended after the first half, would be one of the best.
Probably the quirkiest romance novel of the period is Walsingham (1797), the fifth of seven novels published in the final eight years of her life by Mary Robinson (1758–1800), who, like Inchbald, turned to writing fiction after a career in the theater. The Broadview edition gives away the plot on the back cover: “The novel follows the story of two main characters, Walsingham Ainsforth and his cousin, Sir Sidney Aubrey, a girl who is passed off as a son by her mother so that she will become the family heir. Sidney, educated in France, returns to England as an adult and persistently sabotages Walsingham’s love interests (having secretly fallen in love with him herself). Eventually Sidney reveals her identity, and she and Walsingham declare their mutual love, wed, and share the family’s estate.” Though that sounds like a recipe for a madcap, gender-confusing comedy, Robinson plays it as heavy melodrama. The victim of machinations by Mrs. Aubrey and her evil companion Judith Blagden from his birth onward, Walsingham leads a miserable life up to age 21 that involves frequent arrests, rape, murder, and thoughts of suicide. He is in love with his cousin Isabella, who loves him too but distances herself from him when she learns the secret of Sidney’s gender, winding up instead with a silly aristocrat who talks like an 18th-century Bertie Wooster. Walsingham despises Sidney for continuously ruining his life and challenges him/her to a duel at one point, yet we are to believe that after the revelation at the end, Walsingham easily forgets Isabella and eagerly marries the crossdressing bane of his life. A cynic would say Sidney has simply been softening him up for married life.
In one sense, Walsingham, like Sidney, is a gender inversion of a romance character: raised in wild Wales, he travels to London and experiences the same culture shock as the Welsh heroines of Fielding’s Ophelia and Devonshire’s Sylph. The novel also flips the courtship script as Sidney pursues Walsingham by various means (and breaks a few female hearts along the way). Walsingham is also aligned with the nature-loving suicidal hero of Goethe’s Werther, yet is a hard person to like, especially after he drunkenly rapes a woman he mistakes for Isabella, and then blames her for collusion and dismisses her as an unworthy wife because of her “frailty.” He’s not meant to be likable: at one metafictional moment, a duchess says that, were she to write a novel, her protagonist would “be a solemn pedant without an atom of knowledge, and a man of the world wholly educated in obscurity,” and then looks at Walsingham and exclaims, “My hero! methinks I see my hero!” (chap. 64). He often comes across as a Smollett antihero, lurching from one mishap to another, often the result of his own impetuosity and susceptibility to deceptive appearances. (And like Smollett, Robinson is good at various dialects.) Sidney, by contrast, is assured, genial, and charmingly cocky, though at one point her secret causes her to contemplate suicide, as though she were a closeted homosexual. It’s never adequately explained what she sees in him; then again, we get only his side of the story.
The novel takes the form of a 500-page letter Walsingham writes (in a month!) to a new female friend, in between learning of Sidney’s gender and marrying her; like “Sir” Sidney, Mary Robinson impersonates a man throughout, convincingly portraying a Cambridge-educated Romantic and implying that gender is a culturally constructed performance, not a biological imperative. (Less convincingly, she inserts over two dozen poems Walsingham writes between mishaps, poems that Robinson wrote earlier for other occasions.) Nonetheless, Walsingham is rather derivative: the gender-switch-for-inheritance ploy was used in a 1771 n
ovel called The Disguise that I’ll discuss below, and Julie Shaffer indicates a number of other borrowings from contemporary novels in her notes to the Broadview edition. Plus, Robinson relies way too often on incredible coincidences, the lazy novelist’s crutch. The bleak worldview and relentless mockery of the upper classes (and book reviewers) sours the novel, but on the other hand, Walsingham exhibits the willingness of some female novelists to expand the romance genre to include social criticism and philosophical observations, even if it meant that the traditional wedding bells at the end sound more like a death knell.