1 ‘White Lies’: Amelia Opie, Fiction, and the Quakers Submitted by Isabelle Marie Cosgrave to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in November 2014. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (Signature) ……………………………………………………………………………… 2 Abstract This thesis offers a reconsideration of Amelia Opie’s career as a novelist in the light of her developing religious allegiances over the period 1814-1825 in particular. In twentieth-century scholarship, Opie (1769-1853) was often treated primarily as the author of Adeline Mowbray (1805) and discussed in terms of that novel’s relationship with the ideas of Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Recent scholarship (Clive Jones, Roxanne Eberle, Shelley King and John B. Pierce) has begun a fuller assessment of her significance, but there is still a need for a thorough discussion of the relationship between her long journey towards the Quakers and her commitment to the novel as a moral and entertaining medium. Many scholars (Gary Kelly, Patricia Michaelson, Anne McWhir and others), following Opie’s first biographer Cecilia Lucy Brightwell (1854), have represented Opie as giving up her glittering literary career and relinquishing fiction-writing completely: this relinquishment has been linked to Quaker prohibitions of fiction as lying. My thesis shows that Quaker attitudes to fiction were more complicated, and that the relationship between Opie’s religious and literary life is, in turn, more complex than has been thought. This project brings evidence from a number of sources which have been overlooked or under-utilised, including a large, under- examined archive of Opie correspondence at the Huntington Library, Opie’s last novel Much to Blame (1824), given critical analysis here for the first time, and the republications which Opie undertook in the 1840s. These sources show that Opie never abandoned her commitment to fiction; that her move to the Quakers was a long and fraught process, but that she retained a place in the fashionable world in spite of her conversion. My Introduction gives a nuanced understanding of Quaker attitudes to fiction, and the first chapter exposes the ‘white lies’ of Opie’s first biographer, Brightwell, and their legacy. I then move on to examine Opie’s early works – Dangers of Coquetry (1790), “The Nun” (1795) and The Father and Daughter (1801) – as she flirts with radicalism in the 1790s, and Adeline Mowbray is explored through a Quaker lens in chapter 3. I juxtapose Opie’s correspondence with her Quaker mentor Joseph John Gurney and the celebrated writer William Hayley with her developing use of the moral-evangelical novel – Temper (1812), Valentine’s Eve (1816) and Madeline (1822) – as Opie was increasingly attracted to the Quakers. Chapter 5 3 analyses Opie’s anonymous novels – The Only Child (1821) and Much to Blame (1824) – alongside her Quaker works (especially Detraction Displayed (1828)) around the time of her official acceptance to the Quakers (1825). The final chapter investigates how Opie balanced her Quaker belonging with her ongoing commitment to fiction, exemplified in her 1840s republications, which I present in the context of her correspondence with publisher friends Josiah Fletcher and Simon Wilkin, and with Gurney. Opie’s ‘white lies’ of social negotiation reveal her difficulties in maintaining a literary career from the 1790s to the 1840s, but her concerted effort to do so in spite of such struggles provides a highly significant insight into the changing religious and literary climates of this long period. 4 Acknowledgements My thanks go, first of all, to Jane Spencer, for being an indefatigable, enthusiastic, realistic and compassionate supervisor. Your direction has been invaluable, and always helped me sharpen my arguments. Thanks also to Robert L. Mack, who introduced me to some very useful material on the Quakers. A version of Chapter 1 of this project was published by Ashgate in 2013: “Unworthy Reproductions and Doctored Archives: Undoing the Sins of a Victorian Biographer,” The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (Farnham and Burlington (VT): Ashgate, 2013) 61-74. Thank you to the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University; the Huntington Library; the Norfolk Record Office, the Library of the Society of Friends, and Paula R. Feldman for granting permission to use material from their archives. Thank you to the Huntington Library, for awarding me a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship in 2009, which allowed me to form much of this project. Thank you to the following academics who offered help, information and support: David Chandler; Penelope J. Corfield; Roxanne Eberle; Paula R. Feldman; Betty Hagglund; Shelley King and John B. Pierce; Ben Pink Dandelion; John Seed, and Gillian Thomas. Thank you for the help and support I received as I consulted various archives at the Bodleian Library (especially Bruce Barker-Benfield); the Huntington Library (especially Sue Hodson and Gayle Richardson); the Library of the Society of Friends, London (especially David Blake and Jennifer Milligan); the Fitzwilliam Museum and Trinity College, Cambridge University; the Norfolk Record Office; the Norwich Friends Meeting House and Octagon Chapel. Thank you to the many people who offered me accommodation whilst I did my research in various places: the Cox / Cosgrave family; Bob Hurd and Pia Moriarty; the Quinn family; Lindsey and Adam Rottenberg; Ruth Schuldiner; James Sheehan and Jessica Smeaton; the Tomlinson family; the White family, and the Wilson family. Thank you to former PhD students Sarah Fanning and Andy McInnes, who studied with me and continued to give me support; to current office companions Peter Knowles and Anna-Marie Linnell; to Silvester Luis and all my friends who have put up with me! Thank you to the extended Cosgrave families, especially Cathy and Tom McKinlay, who helped me to source obscure Opie materials before the internet caught up! But most especially to my parents, whose love and support have been ‘above and beyond’… 5 Contents Introduction 7 Chapter 1: Brightwell’s ‘white lies’ 31 Chapter 2: Opie’s Early Works: Flirting with Radicalism 63 Dangers of Coquetry (1790); “The Nun” (1795), and The Father and Daughter (1801). Chapter 3: Adeline Mowbray: A Quaker response to the “reformist continuum” 103 Chapter 4: A surge in fiction writing; a surge in spiritual enquiry 131 Temper (1812); Valentine’s Eve (1816); Madeline (1822) Chapter 5: 1821–1828: Deliberation and Experimentation 185 The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden (1821); Much to Blame (1824); Detraction Displayed (1828) Chapter 6: The Public Face of Opie; Republications, and more White Lies… 227 Conclusion 269 Appendix A: Amelia Opie’s Long Literary Career 279 Appendix B: The Amelia Opie Archives 281 Appendix C: Amelia Opie’s Earnings from Longman’s (in five-year segments) 285 Appendix D: Amelia Opie’s Earnings (categorised by individual work) 287 Appendix E: Images of Opie’s ‘defence of fiction’ 1844 letter to Gurney 289 General Bibliography Archival Material 297 Primary Texts by Amelia Opie 303 Primary Texts 306 Secondary Texts 315 6 7 ‘White Lies: Amelia Opie, Fiction, and the Quakers’ Introduction In 2008, the Norwich Castle Museum acquired Pierre-Jean David d’Angers’ 1836 marble bust of Amelia Opie (1769-1853), a popular daughter of Norwich. The caption that accompanies the bust focuses on a particular facet of Opie’s life - her commitment to the Abolition movement - and stresses the wealth of anti-slavery rhetoric in her works.1 An article announcing the Museum’s purchase of the bust expands on this facet of Opie’s character to provide a more thorough introduction to the person of Opie: As well as being one of the most respected female fiction writers of her time, Amelia Opie was also deeply committed to the abolitionist cause and represented Norwich at the national anti-slavery convention. She had strong political interests and was a reformer and philanthropist, in addition to being a renowned figure in the cultural life of Norwich. She was also well acquainted with the artists of the Norwich School and was able to introduce her husband, the Cornish painter John Opie, to the Norwich art scene.2 This article explains how the bust shows Opie ‘wearing the Quaker bonnet she had started to wear after her religious conversion some years earlier’ (12 Nov. 2008), but no further mention is made to this aspect of Opie’s life, which had a large impact on her writing career and which is one of my main focuses here. The decision to place the bust of Opie in a showcase which concentrates on the theme of slavery and abolition is one example of how much a simple categorisation of Opie has been desired. The attempt to provide a further simple categorisation – often ‘Jacobin or anti-Jacobin?’ – has fuelled most critical work on Opie since the 1970s, but criticism remains inconclusive. Her most famous work now 1 Norwich Castle Museum. Jean-Pierre [sic.] David d’Angers, Bust of Amelia Opie. Norwich. 24 July 2009. 2 “Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery acquires marble bust of Amelia Opie.” 12 November 2008. 8 – Adeline Mowbray (1805) – continues to be claimed for either side, sympathetic or damning of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, on whose lives the work seems to be based.3 With criticism having focussed for so long on a single work of Opie’s, there has been very little treatment of her literary career as a whole, the strains on her publication choices that a decision to join the Quakers provoked, and the comparisons that can therefore be made between her earlier and later works.