IN HER HANDS: WOMEN’S TEXTUAL AND NARRATIVE POWER

IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

by

SARAH PAIGE ELLISOR-CATOE

(Under the Direction of Roxanne Eberle)

ABSTRACT

This project examines the hybridity of the Romantic novel through the twin lenses of feminist and corporeal narratology. Romantic women novelists, in particular, manipulate narrative forms; these innovations often place a woman editor at the heart of the narratives and plots of novels, a role that reflects the increasing status of actual women editors during the period. To this end, Romantic women novelists emphasize the real and tangible nature of embedded texts and often put these embedded texts in women’s hands, a convention that I argue stresses women’s textual and narrative power.

I survey how the embedded text legislates power for these women editor figures throughout the sub-genres of the Gothic, historical, and epistolary novels. Though my project is specifically a study of the narrative structure of the Romantic novel, I examine the long-ranging influence of these narrative experiments in the genre by linking these novels to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

INDEX WORDS: Romantic novel, Editor, Narrative structure, Embedded text,

Corporeal narratology, Feminist narratology

IN HER HANDS: WOMEN’S TEXTUAL AND NARRATIVE POWER

IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

by

SARAH PAIGE ELLISOR-CATOE

B.A., Presbyterian College, 2003

M.A., University of Georgia, 2005

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2012

© 2012

Sarah Paige Ellisor-Catoe

All Rights Reserved

IN HER HANDS: WOMEN’S TEXTUAL AND NARRATIVE POWER

IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

by

SARAH PAIGE ELLISOR-CATOE

Major Professor: Roxanne Eberle

Committee: Tricia Lootens Richard Menke

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School University of Georgia 2012 iv

DEDICATION

I dedicate this dissertation to my Mina. I look forward to seeing her narrative unfold.

v

Acknowledgements

I want to thank my family for providing great love and support as I have completed my graduate schooling. I especially want to thank my mother for first introducing me to strong heroines during our weekly library trips together. Ramona

Quimby, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Nancy Drew led me here, and I am grateful.

My friends have provided inspiration, humor, and a helpful hand along this journey. I especially treasure the times I have spent with Lisa Ward Bolding and Sara

Steger—two of the greatest cheerleaders, colleagues, and friends a girl could have.

My committee members have provided valuable help throughout this project. I appreciate their willingness to help me be a better writer, scholar, and teacher.

Finally, I want to thank my husband, John Catoe. He has endured countless sacrifices so that I could complete my graduate school work. He has often taken up the slack so that I could finish reading for my classes, check hundreds of books off my comps lists, and complete the seemingly never-ending process of writing and revising a dissertation. I look forward to spending more quality time with him; our precious daughter, Mina; and our loving dog, Athena.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v

Introduction: “This New Species”...……………..………………………………………..1

Chapter

One Women Editors: Factual and Fictional………………………………….26

Two The Corporeal “Female Gothic”: Narrative Spaces and Found

Documents……………………………………………………………….60

Three Textual Possession: The Generic and Formal Innovation of Sophia Lee’s

The Recess……………………………………………………………..…89

Four Collecting Letters: The Embedded Texts of the Epistolary Novel….…116

Conclusion: The Influence of the Romantic Novel……...... ………………………….142

Works Cited…..……………………………………………………………………..….160 1

Introduction: “This New Species”

The Critical Review’s anonymous review of Charlotte Smith’s first novel,

Emmeline (1788), opens with praise: “As we have lately been able to fix a new aera [sic] in novel-writing, we are happy at being able to point out another example of this new species, which reflects so much credit on its author” (477). The Romantic novel, the product of this “new aera,” was a successful venture; for example, the initial print run of

Emmeline sold out almost instantaneously and gave rise to second and third editions

(Fletcher 9). Yet the reviewer’s characterization of the novel as a “new species” foreshadows the many ways in which Romantic novelists’ choices in form would complicate the reception of the genre for years to come.

The writer’s conclusion of the review suggests just how distinctive this new type of novel was. After praising the characters, story, and scenic description, the reviewer states, “We will not mutilate these pleasing volumes by taking one line from the story:

Mrs. Smith will excuse us for transcribing one of the sonnets […] Even fetters may be made to hang with grace, and add to beauty, though our fair author does not always put on the chains which so strictly bind the Italian sonneteer” (478). The review ends by quoting in full “I love thee, mournful, sober suited night,” one of two sonnets and an ode that are included in the novel. Smith sets these poems off from the rest of the prose of

Emmeline and demarcates them with titles, if only that of “Sonnet.” However simple such a title is, it also recalls Smith’s prior publication, the immensely successful Elegiac

Sonnets (1784). These poems, though tied to the main plot of the novel, also function as 2 independent texts unto themselves. In fact, in addition to the Critical Review, both the

European Magazine and the Monthly Review include the full text of a sonnet in their reviews of the novel. Furthermore, Smith included both sonnets in the fifth edition of

Elegiac Sonnets, published in 1789.

Though the inclusion of such works highlights the poetic natures of her characters, it also displays one of the most fundamental characteristics of the Romantic novel, which the reviewer suggests in his characterization of the novel as a “new species”: its innovative hybridity. Marshall Brown names Charlotte Smith as “the earliest regular practitioner of the ‘Romantic novel’” because her novels feature verse within them (112). And, as the initial reviewer notes, even Smith’s sonnets are experimental, for they break from the standard Petrarchan form. While Brown’s pronouncement reflects the importance of poetry as the dominant genre of the period, it also invokes the multi-faceted nature of the Romantic novel, a critical experiment in form, as a defining feature. Whether they damn or celebrate the formal innovations of

Romantic fiction, most scholars agree that textual and generic interplay is a foundational element of the Romantic novel. Generic mixing and overlapping has been celebrated in

Romantic poetry, where poets such as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy

Shelley have been revered for their experiments in hybrid works; however, the novel has not enjoyed the same level of praise.1

1 In his landmark study, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, Stuart Curran discusses the success of hybrid works, including Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Byron’s Don Juan, and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Curran argues that these poems are “the most daring and sophisticated formal experiments in British Romantic poetry” (204). 3

Noting that the Romantic novel has long been rejected in favor of the more

“successful” genre of the period, poetry, Robert Miles points out the absurdity of such an exclusion: “It is surely very strange that Romanticism, alone of our conventional periodizations, customarily includes the texts of a single genre in its list of canonized works” (182). The Romantic novel is missing from many key studies of the novel, such as Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957); Watt’s neglect of the Romantic texts certainly contributes to the wide-ranging dismissal of the novel. More and more contemporary critics, however, recognize the value of Romantic fiction in the development of the genre.

Women novelists of the period have also become a new focus of critical analysis.

Many non-canonical writers, though popular and respected in their day, are just now benefitting from more serious study. Critics in the last few decades—such as Anne

Mellor, Eleanor Ty, and Adriana Craciun—have worked hard to bring the likes of Mary

Hays, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley—to mention just a few—into critical conversations. The historical tendency has been to suggest that the genre, often considered to have been in its infancy during the Romantic period, was an apt choice for women writers struggling to find an accessible form for their voices. Jane Tomkins, for example, cites inexperience as the motivating force for women novelists to choose the genre: “Here, as they apprehended it, was a new and unexacting literary form, hedged round by no learned traditions, based on no formal technique, a go-as-you-please narrative” (119). Tomkins, author of The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (1932), stresses the ease with which novice women writers could navigate such a new terrain.

Moving on from her slightly condescending view, I instead champion the sense of formal experimentation that women writers inculcated in the developing genre. Through this 4 study on women novelists and the narrative form of the Romantic novel, I seek to join the ranks of the critics listed above—those who have broadened our understanding of

Romantic women writers beyond Tomkins’s historical short-sightedness.

Thus, rather than the hybridity inherent in the Romantic novel making it a fit territory for inexperienced women writers, I suggest that women novelists deliberately invoke multi-layered narratives in their works. The compound nature of these works does not bear the mark of a juvenile foray into a new land; instead it demonstrates the intentional innovation of their formal choices in the genre. The generic hybridity of the

Romantic novel frequently results in multiple levels of narrative, among them, embedded narratives. Such narratives may take the form of a flashback or a monologue, but they can also more specifically be an embedded text—a device that introduces the narratives included within letters, memoirs, and other documents. This study investigates how

Romantic hybridity often manifests itself through embedded texts in novels, which puts a new focus on the role of texts and the power inherent within the possession and manipulation of them.

My study, which builds upon the reclamation of both the Romantic novel and women novelists of the period, investigates the many ways in which women novelists employ embedded texts. Though scholarship of the Romantic novel is often divided among lines of sub-genre, I explore the use of this formal device throughout the Gothic, historical, and epistolary novel, arguing that this formal choice also invokes the role of the female editor, a figure that was becoming more popular in the publishing realm during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The hybridity of the Romantic 5 novel thus often highlights the increasing textual and narrative power of women—both in fiction and in the professional world.

I begin this project by chronicling the rise of women editors, whose work drove the production of periodicals, special series, and book volumes during the Romantic period. One of these well-known editors, Mary Shelley, also portrays the practice of editing in her fictional prose works, including her well-known Frankenstein (1818), as well as Matilda (composed 1819-20; published in 1959) and The Last Man (1826).

Shelley’s formal choices in these works, which privilege the multi-faceted nature of the

Romantic novel, suggest the importance of the editor figure in the midst of such hybridity. This opening discussion of Mary Shelley’s editing—in reference to both her editorial enterprises and her depiction of women editors—allows me to turn to examples of the ways in which other women novelists include women editor figures in their novels.

I continue in the following chapters to discuss how embedded texts in several sub-genres of the Romantic novel—the Gothic, the historical, and the epistolary—are a formal means of establishing novel heroines as editors with textual and narrative power. Finally,

I consider how the form of the Romantic novel influences the late Victorian novel

Dracula (1897) and the editorial prowess of heroine Mina Harker. The breadth and range of this study illustrate the Romantic novel’s pivotal place in the history of the genre and how novelists manipulated experiments in form to emphasize the textual and narrative power of their heroines.

6

Critical Contexts

Most of the past scholarship of the Romantic novel has focused on attempts to categorize and define the shape-shifting genre, with different generations of scholars clashing in their judgment of the relative success of these hybrid works. Though Robert

Kiely’s The Romantic Novel in England (1972) is a landmark work for embracing the genre of the period as worthy of a book-length study, Kiely’s ambivalence undercuts many of his assertions. In his attempt to laud the pioneering form of many Romantic novels, his focus on destruction—even in the spirit of creation—is a far more powerful critique than source of praise. Kiely declares, “[F]or although romantic novels do have structural patterns, character types, and situations in common, their primary tendency is to destroy (or, at the very least, undermine) particular narrative conventions. Romantic novels thrive like parasites on structures whose ruin is the source of their life” (2).

Alluding to Frankenstein’s creature, Kiely invokes Victor’s disappointment with his creation to condemn the narrative innovations of the Romantic novel:

Sometimes such a patchwork method or repudiation of method serves to

point up the sterility of the fragmented conventions and the ineptitude of

the artist. Sometimes it produces the literary counterpart of Frankenstein’s

monster, a phenomenon not without interest but particularly grotesque

when measured against the intention of its creator. (3)

He continues, “But sometimes there are glimpses of life—and with it, a new idea of art— which the older conventions in the separate contexts did not convey” (3). Though his condemnation acts as a prelude for his argument, his references to “patchwork” and 7

Frankenstein’s creature suggest that the hybrid nature of the Romantic novels’ narratives is the greatest failure of the genre.

Kiely’s survey of twelve Romantic novels is varied as he discusses a plethora of themes and devices in novels ranging from Horacle Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto

(1764) to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). He defends his method:

In looking at specific works, one is tempted to focus upon split character

types or contradictory ideologies; that is, to bring order to the problem by

tracing a single pattern of disjunction. However useful this may be, it

raises difficulties. In focusing too narrowly, one risks misrepresenting the

breadth and depth of the division and sacrificing rich, though imperfect,

texts to abstractions. (26)

Though his goal is noble, Kiely’s wide focus yields a disparate collection of arguments specific to each of the chosen novels. In contrast, my own study will identify a narrative trend—the use of embedded texts—that runs throughout a large corpus of Romantic novels. The popularity of the embedded text in the Romantic novel prompts a re- examination of the definition of the genre and the ways in which novelists deploy the device.

A more comprehensive survey, Gary Kelly’s English Fiction of the Romantic

Period (1989) explores the various forms, themes, and effects of the Romantic novel.

Departing from Kiely’s negative tone, Kelly declares that “Romantic fiction [is] a product, or rather articulation of major social and cultural issues and changes of the

Romantic period” (xi). He claims that class changes during the period “initiated, produced, or perfected many of our major social and cultural institutions and myths,” 8 including “the novel as it was known throughout the nineteenth century and as it is still known to the majority of novel readers” (xi). Kelly organizes his study chronologically, highlighting key events and their effect on the development of Romantic fiction.

In his discussion of “the social function of fiction,” Kelly suggests that many novelists attempt to establish “literariness” in the hopes of attaining “full literary status”

(17). The methods he outlines illustrate the hybridity of the Romantic novel. He claims that the English Jacobins “used quotation and allusion, as well as names of characters, to draw parallels from classic English literature and history to support their fictional arguments” (17). Citing novels such as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and

Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, he details how Romantic fiction often relies on layers of editorial apparatus, such as “footnotes, appendices, and glossaries” (18). He also discusses Jane Austen’s deployment of intertextuality, especially in Northanger Abbey, to elevate the status of the modern novel (18-20). Kelly’s work is important in providing a more positive alternative to Kiely’s study: he consistently recognizes and chronicles the successes of formal risks. Whereas Kelly argues that novelists, particularly women novelists, often relied upon the aforementioned methods to establish literariness, and thus, greater literary status, I will suggest, however, that such hybrid elements also have the potential to emphasize particular characters’ textual and narrative power. The embedded text becomes the site for many Romantic heroines to showcase their roles as editorial figures.

Mary Favret, in her 1994 essay “Telling Tales About Genre: Poetry in the

Romantic Novel,” counters Kelly’s argument concerning women novelists’ attempts to establish literariness. Discussing the hybrid nature of novels by Charlotte Smith, Ann 9

Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and Mary Robinson, she instead argues that novels are more than the setting for poetry but rather teach readers to value “virtues of the ‘real,’ the true, and the natural” inherent in the novel (283). She declares, “What happens to poetry in these works, in other words, helps the novel write a story about itself” (283). Discussing Ann

Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), Favret maintains that rather than the included poems being integral to the novel, they often function as adornment: “The elision between the novel’s work and the work of the lyric, meanwhile, renders the poems themselves parenthetical—a detachable extra added ‘for the reader’s benefit,’ but not requisite to the novel” (291). Favret thus argues that rather than poetry validating the novel, the novel often validates itself—over and against Romantic lyric poetry. Favret’s argument, contrary to the general thought that automatically privileges Romantic poetry over Romantic fiction, demonstrates that the inclusion of poetry does not legitimate prose fiction, though she implies that the resulting hybridity is key to understanding the novel.

My study extends this consideration as I focus on the multiple narrative layers of

Romantic novels, which women novelists often employ to underscore women’s growing textual and narrative power.

Likewise, Robert Miles asserts that generic hybridity is the answer to his title question, “What Is a Romantic Novel?” in the opening essay of a 2001 special issue of

Novel: A Forum on Fiction dedicated to the Romantic novel. Echoing Kiely, Miles claims that “the salient feature of the Romantic novel appears to be its failure to conform to and remain within accustomed boundaries” (181). He ultimately argues that the

Romantic novel is a “philosophical romance” (198), a hybrid form that finds its roots in the romance and the epic (191). He discusses the theatricality and the purposeful 10 ideological motives inherent in the genre, citing both William Godwin’s Caleb Williams

(1794) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as influential examples (193). Miles dates the downfall of this hybrid form to the growing popularity of novels of manners, especially by Jane Austen, and the increasing spirit of nationalism popular in Sir Walter Scott’s novels (196-7).

Miles self-consciously avoids the urge to read the historical dismissal of the

Romantic novel in terms of gender. He notes, “[T]he reception of the Romantic-era novel is studded with glaring examples of male critics dismissing the form on account of a feminine inability to respect appropriate boundaries,” and he asks his readers to see the history of the genre as more nuanced than the conventional gender trajectory (181). He returns to the question of gender only in the final paragraph of the article:

I began this essay by alluding to, and then resisting, a view implicit in

some of our assumptions about the Romantic-era novel, that issues of

gender are substantially involved in its historical marginalization. […] I

have resisted this view because I think it is misleading to the degree that it

reinforces a stereotype of women writers colonizing the romance while

male writers got on with the masculine tradition of the novel inherited

from Richardson and Fielding. (198)

Indeed, aligning women with the romance element only of Miles’s definition of the hybrid genre robs women of their contributions to the novel as an overall genre. Studies like mine insist that we see women novelists’ innovations—particularly in narrative form—as part of the historical trajectory of the novel. I specifically focus on women 11 novelists’ use of the embedded text as a response to the increasing presence of women editors in the publishing realm.

George Dekker, in his study The Fictions of Romantic Tourism (2005), links the formal play of the Romantic novel to his focus on tourism. He describes one hallmark feature of Romantic literature at large, and the novel in particular: “One defining characteristic of Romantic literature is a vigorous and fruitful revival, mingling, and reconstitution of genres” (65). Noting the fusion inherent in M.H. Abrams’s demarcation of the Greater Romantic Lyric, he claims that the novel functions similarly:

The Romantic novel can be considered a parallel reformation of literary

genres that extends the emotional and intellectual register of the novel

form, speaking polyphonically with the voice now of the Greater

Romantic Lyric, then of Shakespearean drama, and at other moments of

the medieval roman d’aventure. In Bakhtinian terms, the texture of the

Romantic novel is heteroglossic. (65)

He cites the innovative form of the genre as being “wonderfully accommodating to the discourse of Romantic tourism” (65). Though Dekker links the formal experimentation to the theme of tourism, the subject of his study, his summation of the multifaceted nature of the Romantic novel is particularly relevant to my study. Departing from other critics’ censure of such structural play, Dekker recognizes the success of the Romantic novel’s multiple identities. Like Dekker, I celebrate the Romantic novelists’ formal strategies, though I focus on the intersection between the novel and the working world, rather than the leisure of tourism, for I argue that the narrative play of the Romantic novel is an 12 access point for understanding how the novel formally inculcates the shifting roles of women in the writing and publishing worlds.

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman also examine the formal innovation of the Romantic novel through a New Historicist lens. In their 2008 collection, Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780-

1830, they consider the historical link between fiction and culture: “[S]uch experimentation was never simply aesthetic, but the result of the way Romantic fiction, like Romantic poetry, struggled to find innovative strategies for representing the social and intellectual upheaval of its times” (42). Like Favret, they also consider how the hybridity of the novel relates to the status of differing genres. Heydt-Stevenson and

Sussman declare that the embedding of poems in novels of the period suggests a larger change in prose: “The very phenomenon of incorporating poetry into novels reveals a certain redefinition of prose, one that includes texts within texts and requires a reader to think of novels and poems as genres that overlap and that are to be embraced as equals”

(15-6). They acknowledge the ways in which novelists such as Ann Radcliffe, Sir Walter

Scott, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley include both poetic epigraphs and poetic allusions in their novels (16), but their discussion is largely limited to a ranking of generic status. My study examines how such embedding is indicative of more than a generic hierarchy: embedded texts prompt readers to recognize the surrounding, contextual editorial activities that show the textual and narrative potential bound up within embedded texts. I examine such exchanges with respect to heroines and contemporary discussions of gender to highlight an intriguing point of dialogue between 13 the narrative structure of the Romantic novel and the increasing number of women editors on the literary scene.

Thus, scholarship of the Romantic novel—both older and more recent—suggests hybridity to be a defining element of the genre. I, too, recognize hybridity as a foundational characteristic of the genre of the period, but I want to employ a new critical lens to examine it: feminist narratology. This burgeoning field, largely ignored by scholars of the Romantic period, allows us to study the formal innovation of the

Romantic novel in a new light, especially in regard to the textual and narrative power of

Romantic heroines. Whereas other critics often get bogged down in defending the formal structure of the novel in comparison to poetry or discuss hybridity in terms of the insertion of poetry into the novel, I focus on the inclusion of embedded texts—physical documents—and the exchanges between women and these texts. By employing feminist and corporeal narratology, which I discuss in the next section, I bring new attention to the physicality of both the heroines and the narrative device of the embedded text. I argue that these body/text exchanges are representative of the growing presence of women editors in the Romantic period and suggest a new way to interpret the hybridity of the

Romantic novel at large.

Methodology: Feminist Narratology and the Romantic Novel

Narratologists identify narrative levels in their studies of embedded narratives and frame stories. However, even narratologists cannot agree on a universal system to refer to these complex systems of narrative layers. Two of the foremost narratologists, Gerard

Genette and Mieke Bal, employ different taxonomies to discuss stories within stories; 14

Genette uses the term metadiegetic, though Bal employs the word hypodiegetic to refer to the embedded level (Fludernik 100). This debate highlights one of the vulnerabilities of this critical field. Susan Lanser addresses the problem of narratology’s lexicon in

“Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology”: “My experience in mediating narratology to non-narratologist theorists, scholars, and students of literature suggests that narratology’s specialized language often becomes a barrier to the use of narratology’s contributions to the discipline” (58). The distancing jargon is just one limitation Lanser explores. She also, more famously, calls upon narratologists to widen their canons.

In her 1986 essay “Towards a Feminist Narratology,” Lanser argues that conventional narratology has arisen out of a male-centric canon that failed to address the question of gender, a level of context, in any capacity, and overlooked women’s texts completely. She proclaims, “A narratology that cannot adequately account for women’s narratives is an inadequate narratology for men’s texts as well” (678). Lanser does not want to employ essentialist strategies in arguing for the inclusion of women-authored texts simply because they were penned by women, but instead argues in favor of a wider view of the world surrounding narrative. Noting the “more general tendency in narratology to isolate texts from the context of their production and reception” (677), she imagines a discipline that “would study narrative in relation to a referential context that is simultaneously linguistic, literary, historical, biographical, social, and political” (678).

Lanser demands that narratologists admit the potentially profound connections between narrative and context.

Despite Nilli Diengott’s dismissal of Lanser’s call for a feminist narratology, a bevy of projects that examine the relationship between context and narrative, through 15 gender specifically, soon followed. Robyn Warhol’s Gendered Interventions (1989) and

Kathy Mezei’s Ambiguous Discourse (1996) a collection of narratological essays, cemented the necessity for and the methodology of feminist narratology. Proponents of a strict understanding of narratology continue to question the legitimacy of such a sub-set of the field, but Ansgar Nünning alludes to the growing popularity of new practitioners:

Though Lanser and other feminist narratologists have incurred the displeasure of

those to whom this sounds suspiciously like an ideological balkanization of

narratology, the new approaches have raised pertinent new questions which have

proved to be of greater concern to a larger number of critics than the systematic

taxonomies, typologies and models so dear to the hearts of narratologists. (254-

55)

Indeed, Lanser’s essay has opened new and productive fields of narratology and narratological criticism, though such new directions may veer away from the standard language of conventional narratology.

In this project, I revisit the blind spots of narratology that Lanser identifies: the classification system and the conspicuous absence of women. In my focus on both women-authored texts and the portrayal of Romantic heroines, I will study the ways in which heroines’ interactions with embedded narratives in the Romantic novel suggest their textual and narrative power. I also employ a burgeoning theory, corporeal narratology, to direct attention to the contextual situation surrounding the embedded narratives of the Romantic novel.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest usage of context occurring in the fifteenth century, when it meant “the weaving together of words and sentences; 16 construction of speech, literary composition.” The use of weaving in this definition emphasizes physicality in writing, implying that individual words and sentences are like threads woven together to form a greater whole. Context also refers to “the whole structure of a connected passage regarded in its bearing upon any of the parts which constitute it; the parts which immediately precede or follow any particular passage or

‘text’ and determine its meaning.” Both of these definitions underscore a more concrete definition of context by highlighting the construction of a text and the “parts” that surround it, rather than referring to more abstract forces and issues that may help shape a text. Furthermore, interpreting context in a more literal way emphasizes the physical presence of texts themselves. Narratives are not solely stories but can also be real, physical texts—documents worthy of study. The physical presence of a text, I argue, is fodder not only for study of the narrative within it—the traditional purview of narratology—but also a study of the action and power surrounding this text. Who finds the text? Who possesses the text? What happens to the text? Though I borrow from

Lanser’s suggestion to add context to the study of narratology, I will employ a more physical understanding of context as I consider the parts (or things or people) that literally surround a text.

Narratologists and book history theorists have considered the physical contextual elements of books. Genette’s study of paratextual elements includes, for example, a book’s title page, comments on its back cover, notes about the author, and so on. In his essay “Introduction to the Paratext,” he writes, “One does not always know if one should consider that they belong to the text or not but in any case they surround it and prolong it, precisely in order to present it, […] to assure its presence in the world” (261). Such 17 analysis focuses on the packaging of books, which seems important in a consideration of how a book might appeal to a potential reader. However, this approach to paratextuality limits itself, for it restricts the definition of narrative to a published book. Instead, narratives appear in many places and forms, with varying types of contextual matter surrounding them. I want to shift the focus from contextual studies that focus on book packaging and presentation to analyze the ways in which authors already provide contextual material for those narratives that appear within other narratives—those elements that assure the physical presence of the text in the fictional world.

I will examine the context of embedded narratives, particularly those who read and hold this embedded text. Though I find no narratological studies on the physical presence of embedded texts within their narratives, Daniel Punday adds a valuable term to the field of narratology in his Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology

(2003). Punday assesses narratology’s openness to “extraliterary forms of cultural and folk representation,” but notes the curious absence of the body in narratology: “And yet, we have no ‘corporeal’ narratology—no serious or sustained attempt to give the human body a central role within narrative” (2). Punday charts the history of narratology, and, using Bal’s terminology, claims that the field has been more interested in “aspects” of narrative, rather than “elements” of narrative (3). Narratologists’ willingness to ignore these elements, such as “the actual events, actors, and places that make up the story,” is part of the oversight of the human body in narratology (3). However, Punday argues that the body is fundamental to any study of narrative, as his study examines the corporeality of characters, spaces, and the very nature of narrative and how we define it. He claims narrative “is corporeal [...] because the ways in which we think about narrative reflect the 18 paradoxes of the body—its ability to give rise to and resist pattern, its position in the world and outside of it, and so on” (15).

Punday notes that the obvious place to start in discussing bodies and narrative is in discussing characters. He follows typical narratological form by classifying different types of character bodies, but suggests that such categories are often ill-founded because they do not adequately account for the differing historical and cultural understandings of the body. Furthermore, Punday argues that such taxonomic models fail to provide a full understanding of character, particularly in regard to the experience of the reader.

Referring to the work of Elizabeth Grosz, author of Volatile Bodies: Toward a

Corporeal Feminism (1994), Punday discusses how a model of touch corporeality emphasizes “the ways in which individual bodies engage in an ongoing exchange,” rather than thinking of them as “spatially separated and distinct” (76). He argues that this touch exchange is a means of interpreting a reader’s entry into a text: the reader’s physical connection with a particular character body in a text. Punday claims that this “ongoing contract between reader and character” actually “provides the hermeneutic atmosphere of the text” (77). Thus, the corporeality of characters allows readers—bodies themselves— to find a connection with a text and enter into it, which then furnishes the means for particular readers to understand and interpret the text.

Punday’s theory of corporeal narratology highlights not only the importance of the human body in the study of narrative, but also—and what is most relevant to my study—the importance of tangibility and touch, in both physical and abstract terms.

Punday focuses his study of corporeality on the human body, but I want to extend this emphasis to consider the physical importance of other “bodies,” such as texts. Indeed, 19 even the word corporeality suggests the interplay between texts and bodies. The Oxford

English Dictionary cites a reference to corpus, occurring as early as the eighteenth century, referring to “a body or complete collection of writings or the like; the whole body of literature on any subject.” Thus, Punday’s theory allows us to understand texts, particularly embedded texts, as corporeal objects. My purpose here is not to suggest that texts are embodied or sentient; rather it is to propose that their bodily presence often prompts other bodily exchanges—circumstances in which characters touch and hold these texts.

Women novelists’ use of embedded texts encourages readers to see Romantic heroines as editors, those who have important, non-authorial exchanges with texts. The hybridity of the Romantic novel emphasizes heroines’ interactions with texts as we see them find, possess, assemble, and distribute texts throughout Romantic novels. The embedded text formally invokes new opportunities for textual and narrative power for heroines.

Romantic Heroines: Editors & Master-Narrators

As noted earlier, other works of feminist narratology, chiefly Robyn Warhol’s

Gendered Interventions (1989) and Kathy Mezei’s Ambiguous Discourse (1996) extend

Lanser’s work and help inaugurate the critical field of feminist narratology, making studies like my own possible. However, this field has followed the patterns set by other critics and has largely ignored the Romantic novel. Warhol’s study is exclusively

Victorian in focus and Mezei’s collection, though it begins with three essays on Austen, includes more analysis of modernist literature. The double layer of change in the 20

Romantic period—the rise of the novel and the rise of the woman writer—makes the

Romantic novel acutely significant, a site ripe for feminist narratology.

Alison Case surveys the Romantic and Victorian eras in her feminist narratological study, Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and

Nineteenth-Century British Novel (1999). My focus on women editors and the Romantic novel finds a natural counterpart in this work, which explores a mode Case identifies as

“feminine narration.” Case contends, “Feminine narration [...] is characterized by the restriction of the female narrator to the role of narrative witness; that is, by her exclusion from the active shaping of narrative form and meaning” (4). Case states that feminine narration cannot be restricted to one particular technique (such as epistolarity, direct addresses to the reader, or diary-writing), arguing that this type of narration exists in the larger relationship dynamics between female narrators and those she labels as “master- narrators,” narrators who have “confidence, competence, and control” (4). She argues that feminine narrators produce only “raw material of narrative, which requires an external authority to give it shape and significance” (3), rather than a unified and polished story. She concludes that her reading of the female narrative voice in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel is at odds with the typical alignment of the rising number of women writers and the rising number of novels during this time period.

Though Case’s study raises interesting questions about the role, structure, and possible bias against female narration in the development of the novel, I would argue that her study largely overlooks the Romantic novel—Clarissa (1748), Humphrey Clinker

(1771), Redgauntlet (1824), Charlotte Bronte's novels, Aurora Leigh (1856), Bleak House

(1852-3), Armadale (1866), The Woman in White (1860), Dracula (1897), and The Ring 21 and the Book (1868-9) make up her list of primary texts. Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet is the only Romantic novel included, and even Case seems to admit that it and Smollet’s

Humphrey Clinker function for her practically as place-holders, “two epistolary or partially epistolary novels written between the publication of Clarissa and Jane Eyre— the next crucially influential text in the evolution of the female narrative voice in the

British novel” (71). Although Case’s dismissal of any other Romantic novels is typical of the criticism that the genre has endured, it leads to a skewed reading of women and narration during the period.

This project addresses the gap in Case’s study and in scholarship at large, for it pairs study of the Romantic novel and feminist narratology. Rather than discussing larger dynamics relevant to narration, as Case does, I focus on one particular narrative technique: the embedded narrative. Because the Romantic novel represents such a hybrid genre, attention to individual formal elements, such as the embedded text, presents an entry point into the multi-dimensional genre. Though the Romantic novel is often faulted for its multiple divisions into sub-genres, the embedded text is common to them all. I arrange the following chapters by sub-genre to highlight the particular ways in which novelists manipulate the embedded text across the Gothic novel, the historical novel, and the epistolary novel, but also to demonstrate the breadth of this formal device in the Romantic novel. Employing a feminist narratological critical lens allows me to chart a formal trend throughout many different novels of the period, as well as to show how this trend invokes the historical rise of the woman editor during this time. Thus, my project shows how Romantic novel heroines often were “master-narrators,” to borrow 22

Case’s terminology, and were so via their editorial exchanges with the embedded texts of the hybrid novel.

My first chapter surveys the accomplishments of women editors during the

Romantic period by examining the contributions of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. I demonstrate that their varied editing enterprises incorporate both physical exchanges with texts—through the processes of selecting, assembling, and distributing documents—as well as opportunities to use written compositions to frame texts. Thus, the narrative power that results through editing often combines both the touch exchange and the power of the pen. I also explore Mary Shelley’s work editing the compilations of works by her late husband, Percy Shelley. I point to Mary Shelley as a point of intersection between the historical and fictional worlds, for not only is she an editor, but she also incorporates women editor figures in many of her novels.

Frankenstein, Matilda, and The Last Man all point to the significance of women editors, though Frankenstein and The Last Man feature male protagonists. I suggest that

Shelley’s prevailing focus on women editor figures reflects her own editorial enterprises and the rising prevalence of women editors in the publishing world. Thus, Shelley’s novels function as an opening lens for the following chapters, which highlight the editorial capacities of heroines throughout several sub-genres of the Romantic novel.

I study the hybrid nature of Gothic novels in Chapter Two. Challenging Ellen

Moers’s delineation of the “Female Gothic,” I depart from both the essentialist and the psychoanalytic readings of older scholarship of the Gothic novel to consider the narrative innovations of novelists Ann Radcliffe and Mary Robinson. I argue that the physical 23 settings of Gothic novels are themselves narrative, and in turn compel heroines to make critical discoveries: narratives that are literally embedded within the Gothic space and then become embedded texts within the novel. These finds highlight the questing nature of heroines, a trait that stands in contrast to Diane Hoeveler’s interpretation of Gothic heroines as typically passive. The embedded text of the Gothic novel is more than just another layer of mysterious deferral, for it often becomes the key to the mystery of the heroine’s identity. The Gothic heroine’s negotiation of textual power suggests that editorial exchanges with texts can yield greater self-knowledge.

I turn to historical narratives in Chapter Three, in which I focus on Sophia Lee’s

The Recess (1783-5). The novel recounts the lives of twin sisters, Matilda and Ellinor, supposed daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots. Though many critics cite the double narrative voices of both twin sisters at work in the novel as evidence of a united, comprehensive recording of events, I argue that Lee promotes a divided sense of narrative. She privileges the narrative power of Matilda, for the elder twin is able to maintain possession of her testaments of birth longer than her sister, and Lee implies that textual possession leads to narrative power. Matilda’s editorializing narrative bookends

Ellinor’s memoir, which itself is fragmented—the tangible representation of her loss of both textual and narrative power. Unlike Ellinor, Matilda maintains textual possession of these important documents longer, and therefore, becomes the dominant editor of the sisters’ dual memoirs. Through the final confrontation between Matilda and King James,

Lee suggests that women’s editing power can become a corrective force to patriarchal discrimination and misinformation. 24

Next, in Chapter Four, I consider the relationship between the embedded text and the epistolary novel. I suggest that we can read the individual letters of epistolary novels as embedded texts, which I first introduce in my discussion of Shelley’s works in Chapter

One. This lens enables us to see that the narrative form promotes more than just dialogue and exchange of ideas between letter-writer and addressee. Through my analysis of Eliza

Fenwick’s Secresy (1795) and Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), I argue that the form of epistolary novels highlights the heroines’ textual power of possession.

Both Caroline Ashburn and Emma Courtney repurpose letters written to them to teach other, male readers a lesson. Thus, they lift letters out of the traditional epistolary narrative, treating them as embedded texts that are distinct from the surrounding narrative, and refashion them into collections to function as primers for new readers. The heroines’ textual power leads to narrative power, for these women control the narrative formed in the new collections of documents.

Finally, I look ahead to a late-Victorian novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to show the long-ranging influence of the woman editor of the Romantic novel. Heroine Mina

Harker—like those Gothic, historical, and epistolary novel heroines before her—assumes an editorial role as she lends her talents to the team attempting to stop the infiltration of the vampire Dracula. Stoker’s novel emphasizes the importance of Mina’s efforts to translate and compile documents, and her narrative authority proves more powerful in their quest than the men’s powers combined. Although many scholars have analyzed the

Gothic qualities of Dracula, I offer a new reading, by suggesting that the form itself is distinctly Romantic and thus creates a Romantic heroine, even in the midst of the New

Woman debates of the 1890s. 25

Throughout all of these chapters, as I discuss the feminist narratological implications of the embedded texts of Romantic novels, I also point to the ways in which heroines’ textual and narrative authority often invokes feminist thought more generally.

In her essay “On Novel Writing” (1797), Mary Hays writes, “Fictitious histories, in the hands of persons of talents and observation, might be made productive of incalculable benefit; by interesting curiosity, and addressing the common sympathies of our nature, they pervade all ranks; and, judiciously conducted, would become a powerful and effective engine of truth and reform” (244). The heroines I survey in this project often employ texts in their own quests for truth and reform—amid questions of identity, justice, and education. I argue that by privileging these women’s textual and narrative powers,

Romantic women novelists often implore us to see not only the authority of women editors, but also the cultural and social import of their agency. As such, the novels themselves, as Hays writes, “might be made productive of incalculable benefit.”

26

Chapter One

Women Editors: Factual and Fictional

Fashioning a wreath of ivy on her twentieth birthday, Elizabeth Barrett

Browning’s eponymous heroine, Aurora Leigh (1856), crowns herself a poet. When she soon thereafter refuses her cousin Romney’s marriage proposal, her determination to succeed as an artist stands in stark opposition to the more traditional role of woman as wife, mother, and helpmate. Browning’s Victorian verse novel chronicles the rise of the woman artist, one who lives by the work of her pen. However, we would be remiss if we believed that authors only exert narrative power. Indeed, a larger consideration of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world of writing and publishing compels us to see the many contextual actions that can potentially influence written texts.

Though I champion the textual and narrative agency of editorial work throughout this study, many denizens of the Grub Street literary scene were not so complimentary: the hack work and intense pressure of the profession often elicited parallels to the factory scene. William McCarthy notes that authors such as John Aikin and Robert Southey both used forms of the word “manufacture” to describe their literary enterprises:

“‘Manufacture’ was a term of wry contempt; it was an up-to-date idiom for expressing the old Grub Street view that writing for hire was a chore, not an act of invention” (409).

Anna Letitia Barbauld, who I will discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, also refers to this terminology in her dialogue entitled “On Manufactures,” included in Evenings at

Home (1793). The father, explaining the differences between manufacture and 27 production to his daughter, notes that the term “manufacture” is used derisively to critique those literary works that are assembled from the texts of various authors, rather than penned by just one—“so that it was not produced by the labour of his brain, but of his hands.” Barbauld’s reference to this debate resists the simplistic approach to viewing the distinction between authorship and editorship: the work of the head (or “brain”) versus hands. I suggest, and I imagine that Barbauld does as well, that the products of the hands—those tools that find, select, and assemble texts—bear the stamp of the editor’s narrative authority, which can be just as influential as authorial agency.

The Romantic period witnesses the flourishing of women writers like Mary

Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Barbauld, and Mary Shelley, and, as authors, they make great contributions to various genres of the era. However, they also often engage in direct interactions with texts that shape the ways by which we read others’ works. By serving as various types of editors, these authors step beyond direct authorial power to demonstrate the narrative power that results from editorial exchanges with texts. The editorial tasks of selecting, collecting, and distributing texts help give narrative shape to these texts, as well as determine the intended audience. Furthermore, these processes prompt the further framing with the editor’s pen, for editors often combine the work of the hands—the handling of these texts—with framing words. Though denounced as mere

“manufacture,” these corporeal actions influence the narrative shape of texts and also legislate accompanying opportunities for editors to extend their textual and narrative influence.

This chapter will detail the new editorial endeavors open to women during the

Romantic period. By charting the contributions of Wollstonecraft, Hays, Barbauld, and 28

Shelley, I show both the prevalence of women editors and the potential for them to exert influence, in a fashion markedly different from that of a traditional author. The advances in women’s editing during the Romantic period are worthy of attention in their own right, but they are especially relevant to my study in terms of their influence on the fictional world. Other critics, such as Mary Waters, have considered the power of such influence to shape the British canon, which I also touch on in my discussion of historical women editors. I add to the scholarship on women editors by showing the crossover of the figure of the woman editor to the fictional depiction of her in many Romantic novels. I argue that the increasing popularity of women editors influences not only the inclusion of such figures as characters in the Romantic novel, but also informs the narrative experiments of the genre during the period.

The figure of the female editor as a controlling narrative force is particularly compelling in my study of the hybrid nature of the Romantic novel. Editors usually exert a stable locus of power at the center of any collection. The hybridity of the Romantic novel, while reveling in multiple layers and/or mixing of genres, also needs a grounding force to maintain unity and stability. In Caleb Williams, William Godwin allows the hero to assume the editorial role in subsuming all voices into his: “I shall interweave with Mr.

Collins's story various information which I afterwards received from other quarters, that I may give all possible perspicuity to the series of events. To avoid confusion in my narrative, I shall drop the person of Collins, and assume to be myself the historian of our patron” (66). Though he describes this process of collecting the sources, Caleb announces that he will be the primary narrator, asserting his authority both in composing the narrative and in assuming the singular narrating voice. Though other Romantic 29 novels do not assume one unifying voice, there is often a character who wields editorial authority as s/he has interactions with the multiple layers of the novel. Romantic novelists, drawing upon cultural precedent, often feature women as editorial figures, which highlights their textual and narrative power. First, I will survey notable achievements by women editors during the period to show how the work of editing usually encompasses both physical interactions with texts and the addition of the editor’s surrounding words.

Historical Women Editors

Scholars have recently welcomed the opportunity to study the rise of women novelists during the Romantic period, yet they have not yet studied the collective agency of another growing group: women editors. Whether working for one of the popular review periodicals or collecting texts for publications, women editors gained opportunities throughout the period. As a result, their work, though distinctly different from the authorial enterprise, helped shape the face of literature and reading during the latter years of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century.

Women editors were not entirely new on the literary scene. Eliza Haywood,

Frances Moore Brooke, and Charlotte Lenox worked during the middle of the eighteenth century. However, as Caroline Franklin declares, such work was confined to a “feminine niche.” The magazines they served—Female Spectator, Old Maid, and Lady’s Museum, respectively—were directed to a specifically female audience (63). However, the women editors of the Romantic period direct their work to a more expansive audience—one not dictated by gender. Furthermore, their male peers enlist their services in a bevy of 30 editing projects, including selecting texts for review, writing reviews, preparing others’ reviews for publication, assembling new reference materials, and compiling posthumous collections of respected male writers’ life works. These editors demonstrate the narrative power of both direct physical contact with the texts that they select and collect, as well as the opportunity to integrate their own words in the projects.

When Mary Wollstonecraft, just dismissed from her employment as a governess, began working for Joseph Johnson in 1788, she became one of the first women editors of the period. Initially, Wollstonecraft served her employer by working with children’s literature and translating French (Waters 90). With the launch of the Analytical Review in 1788, however, Wollstonecraft worked as an editor’s assistant and quickly assumed more and more duties on staff: “Though periodical literary reviewing was still almost exclusively a male occupation, Johnson was willing to extend Wollstonecraft’s responsibilities as quickly as she could prove herself capable of meeting them” (110).

She obviously continued to prove herself quite capable, and Johnson allowed her greater jurisdiction than just writing reviews. Waters details Wollstonecraft’s status and responsibilities:

Often the only reviewer of certain genres and regularly the most prolific

contributor in several others, Wollstonecraft seems to have had charge of a

variety of departments at times, especially those that would fall under the

rubrics of belles-lettres, education, and moral and religious topics. In this

position, she would have exerted considerable sway not only in the content

of the individual reviews, but in deciding what books to call public

attention to in the first place. (110) 31

Though Wollstonecraft may have been only an editor’s assistant, her interactions with the texts up for review and inclusion warrant a discussion of her work as an editor.

Wollstonecraft’s editorial contributions are twofold, for they represent the product of both corporeal interactions with texts and the presence of her own words in the periodical. Her selection of books to be reviewed fundamentally shapes the content of the journal—a choice that underscores both her physical negotiation of the potential texts and also the power concurrent with such a selection, for her choices dictate the assignments for the staff writers. Thus, Wollstonecraft wields influence over the texts at her disposal and the writers who must adhere to her choices for the periodical. Rather than being a mere factory hand, as the contemporary understanding of literary manufacture suggests, Wollstonecraft demonstrates the editorial power possible through the hands and the pen. In addition to overseeing the selection of primary texts,

Wollstonecraft also writes many reviews herself. Waters declares that through reviews,

Wollstonecraft “direct[s] the taste and influenc[es] the thinking of a wide public” (92).

Wollstonecraft’s work on the Analytical Review illustrates the two-part contributions of many editors during this time, for they not only physically engage with texts through processes such as selection, they also deploy their own words in the edited text. Though

Wollstonecraft’s contributions demonstrate the work of her hands and her pen, these efforts are largely exclusive of one another. Other women editors, however, combine the touch exchange and the power of the pen—an intriguing intersection that highlights the power of the editor to interject her narrative influence at multiple levels.

Another reviewer on the Analytical Review, Mary Hays, steps beyond the literary journal to wield her editorial prowess in the creation of the Female Biography; or, 32

Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically

Arranged (1803). This six-volume series is the culmination of Hays’s work in selecting, arranging, and penning the sketches—which ranged from two to two hundred pages in length. This work illustrates the dual power of Hays’s editing: the composition of the individual pieces and her framing preface amid the corporeal processes of selecting subjects and arranging the biographical essays.

Hays’s selection of women to be featured has often drawn scrutiny. Critics such as Andrew McInnes and Gary Kelly have discussed this work in terms of its notable absence: Hays’s choice not to include friend and mentor Mary Wollstonecraft among the number. Undoubtedly, the backlash following Godwin’s publication of Wollstonecraft’s memoirs, combined with the intensely politicized events of the 1790s, led to Hays’s famous elision of Wollstonecraft from the collection. Hays’s choice is a pragmatic editorial decision—an attempt to ensure that her editorial efforts would not raise any red flags among her audience.

Though she avoids a contemporary backlash by not including Wollstonecraft, she distresses critics with the arrangement of the individual entries. As Jeanne Wood notes, the last segment of the title, the phrase “alphabetically arranged,” underscores the importance of this process in the collection. Wood recounts the unfavorable reviews the

Biography garnered, one of which cites this arrangement as being troublesome because it creates unpleasant connections among the subjects: “In the alphabetical arrangement, the great and the little, the good and the insignificant, not to say the censurable, are linked together, like good and bad neighbours” (451). With both Hays and reviewers directing 33 so much attention to the arrangement of the collection, we too must consider the implications of Hays’s chosen form.

A consideration of form raises the question of genre in regard to Hays’s collection. Wood, charting the history of the biographical dictionary and its employment of alphabetical arrangement, argues that Female Biography is a biographical dictionary.

She notes that “the biographical dictionary’s generic features had solidified by the turn of the nineteenth century” (121). However, alphabetical arrangement was a contentious issue for some critics, and was “frequently called into question by reviewers” (123).

Thus, the critique of Hays’s Female Biography was not unprecedented, though it raises questions about the intersection between form and content. Wood argues,

The subtitle of Female Biography, “Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated

Women of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged,” implicitly

announces Hays’s collection as a biographical dictionary, arguably the

first compiled by a woman and the first to bring the dictionary’s

controversial broad-ranging selection of subjects and arrangement in

alphabetical order to a middle-class female readership. (124)

Because the genre was often revered for its didactic qualities, the alphabetical order, especially in a work about women, posed problems for reviewers. The reviewers yearned for an order more in keeping with general conventions regarding status and morality; dismayed by Hays’s choice of arrangement, one reviewer demanded a second “chaste” edition (119).

Though Wood examines Hays’s work in the context of the history of biographical dictionaries, I point to Wood’s focus on the arrangement of Female Biography to 34 highlight the editorial nature of Hays’s work, which, as noted, she emphasizes in the subtitle. Her choice of alphabetical arrangement creates a new sisterhood of sorts—one that dismisses traditional distinctions among women in favor of a non-biased, uniform method of collection. As such, her choice of subjects is not as revolutionary as her grouping of them. Like Wollstonecraft before her, Hays wields editorial authority in assembling and organizing the collection of biographical sketches. Wood notes that the genre “gave Hays the scope to challenge cultural orthodoxies about middle-class women’s education and conduct” (131). And, because Hays concentrates largely on literary women, her narrative authority legislates the opportunity to select and organize a new history of women’s literary accomplishments. Just as Wollstonecraft employs her editorial power to engage with the literary productions of the day, especially novels, Hays weighs in on the history of women writers through her editorial choices. Both women ultimately shape the texts under their editorial direction, even as they also influence the larger literary scene and history.

Anna Letitia Barbauld, like both Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft before her, also contributed reviews to the Analytical Review and followed up with the publication of sixty-five reviews in volume one of the Annual Review, published in 1803. Yet, her work turned from reviewing to editing in 1804, when she was commissioned to edit a collection of Samuel Richardson’s letters. Barbauld seizes the opportunity to establish narrative power through the process of collecting and sorting the letters, as well as adding her own voice in the opening biographical essay.

The project was massive, for Richardson’s collection amounted to perhaps two thousand letters, of which Barbauld chose to print about a fifth of them: “The idea was to 35 print those parts of the letters that could still engage readers fifty years later, shorn of the minutiae of time, place, and circumstance that mattered only to the original writers and readers and also of anything that might invade the privacy of people still living”

(McCarthy 413). Thus, Barbauld’s selection and assembly of letters demonstrate the narrative elements of the collection: “The result would nudge the letters toward fiction, producing effects similar to those of Richardson’s novels” (413). Though distinctly different from Richardson’s authorial power in his novels, the narrative agency of

Barbauld’s editing choices produces similar results in The Correspondence of Samuel

Richardson.

Barbauld’s work extended beyond choosing and collecting, since she also wrote the introductory biography for the collection. McCarthy asserts that Barbauld follows the example of Samuel Johnson in his composition of The Lives of the Poets, a move that highlights the import of her editorial contribution: “Undertaking a Johnsonian kind of project, she took on the mantle of Johnson with it” (416). Like Johnson, Barbauld incorporates criticism amid her recounting of important biographical information;

Barbauld devotes nearly one half of her opening biographical section to discussion of

Richardson’s three novels (416). Of special interest to this study, she discusses at length various narrative modes, detailing both the advantages and disadvantages of choosing among omniscient narration, first-person point of view, and epistolary format. Though the focus of the prefatory section is Richardson’s life, Barbauld also stakes her claim as a burgeoning narrative theorist with her particular attention to form.

Barbauld’s achievements in editing the Richardson letters, especially in following the successful critical model of Johnson before her, ultimately land her a more ambitious 36 job—the editor of the fifty-volume British Novelists, with an Essay and Prefaces,

Biographical and Critical, published in 1810. Catherine Moore notes that Barbauld’s editorial voice is among the first to offer a comprehensive, critical approach to the genre, for she gives “a coherent voice” to the “fragmented” and “scattered observations of authors and critics” that had up to that point “appeared incidentally in magazine reviews of individual novels” (384). Her opening essay, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-

Writing,” and her twenty individual essays that introduce twenty-one novelists and twenty-eight novels offer Barbauld an influential platform to discuss the genre and the most notable novelists. Moore argues that Barbauld uses this opportunity to assert “the artistic values of the novel at a time when the literary reputation of the genre had not yet entirely outgrown the widespread disapproval common in eighteenth-century criticism” and to advocate for women novelists, “who as a group were yet to be taken seriously”

(384). Barbauld’s role as editor allows her to frame the conversation surrounding the new genre, notably in terms of its form and the contributions of women novelists.

Barbauld’s work of editing Richardson’s letters and of establishing the latest novel collection is important in terms of her status as a respected woman editor.

However, it is especially relevant to this study for her editorial choices highlight the narrative opportunities inherent within making crucial decisions regarding selecting, assembling, and framing texts. McCarthy, who recognizes the narrative latent within

Barbauld’s editing of Richardson’s letters, also reads her collection of novels as suggesting a narrative progression: “Thus, the contents of The British Novelists imply a story: in the century since Defoe, the earliest writer included, the British novel has evolved from a mostly masculine to a mostly feminine form; it has become a preeminent 37 stage for the display of female genius. In fiction, the story says, the leading writers are now women” (426). The British Novelists has narrative properties, which Barbauld employs to chart the command of one type of novelist in particular: the woman novelist.

My focus on the twin nature of editing—both the physical exchanges with texts and the literal words editors often use to frame texts—points to the narrative nature of not only framing thoughts, but also those actions that came first: the processes of finding, selecting, and assembling texts. Though we often focus on the narrative qualities of written words only, we must also consider the potential of other editorial actions, for these elements all work together to tell a story. These examples of successful editorial enterprises show the growing popularity of women editors during the period and the potential of their editorial exchanges with texts. I now turn to another author-turned- editor, Mary Shelley, to examine both her contributions as an editor and the ways in which she incorporates the editor figure into much of her fiction. Though the women in

Shelley’s novels are not editors, per se, they engage in bodily touch exchanges with texts—interactions that usually contribute to the development of the narrative. Just like

Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Barbauld, Shelley and her characters often wield narrative authority by virtue of having the texts in their hands.

Mary Shelley: A Point of Intersection

Mary Shelley was no stranger to stories when she began her editing career. She had already written what is now the most canonical Romantic novel, Frankenstein, when she was a mere nineteen years old. However, her narrative ambitions took a different turn when she was left a widow after Percy Shelley’s death in 1822. The grieving 38

Shelley embarked upon preserving his literary legacy and published Posthumous Poems in 1824, the same year in which she began writing The Last Man. Percy Shelley’s father,

Sir Timothy Shelley, was furious and threatened to withhold money from his grandson,

Percy Florence Shelley, if she were to again publish anything bearing her late husband’s name. Sir Shelley eventually relented, and Mary Shelley published two editions of

Poetical Works in 1839, as well as a two-volume edition of his Essays and Letters from

Abroad, Translations and Fragments.

These collections, the assembly of works of the late poet with the editorializing presence and voice of Mary Shelley, represent hybrid works. Susan Wolfson celebrates the synthesis that results from the pairing of Mary Shelley’s editing and Percy Shelley’s writing: “Shelley’s integration of her work with her husband’s effected a new and compelling composite” (198). This hybrid venture does more than just revive Percy

Shelley’s reputation, for it also demonstrates the narrative potential of an editor’s voice.

Mary Favret maintains that we should look beyond the naïve approach of considering such a project just the work of a grieving widow, for Shelley’s editorial maneuvers also establish her own narrative agency: “The labor of love is also the labor (and construct) of an experienced writer of fiction. She saw the work as her own responsibility, her property, her product” (18). In this section, I argue that Shelley capitalizes upon her editorial narrative agency in two ways: through the physical acts associated with the role of the editor, like finding, sorting, and collecting texts, and through the framing words that she inserts into the collection of her husband’s works.

When picturing Shelley handling her husband’s works and considering how to assemble them together for publication, it is easy to compare her to her most famous 39 protagonist: Victor Frankenstein. Favret describes Shelley’s role in the 1839 volume:

“[S]he ‘animates’ this body of work. The woman who wrote Frankenstein now constructs a life that holds together these scattered pieces” (17). Susan Wolfson notes that both Frankenstein and Shelley’s editing projects were “tale[s] of creation from fragments” (197). Wolfson details how arduous the editing process was for Shelley, for so many of Percy Shelley’s manuscripts were scattered in various places and remained unfinished. These comparisons are apt, for Shelley’s physical exchanges with her husband’s various works do not produce just a collection, but a hybrid work that is distinguished by its narrative. Editing, though embroiled within the physical, material world, enables narrative—a more abstract concept—to shine through these new hybrid works. As Favret says, “She gives the poems a story” (17).

Yet Percy Shelley’s father made it difficult for Mary Shelley to give the poems a story. Though he eventually allowed the publication of the Poetical Works, Sir Shelley specifically stated that Mary Shelley was not allowed to write a biographical memoir of his lost son. Circumventing this prohibition, the widow inserts her own notes for these editions, “nearly fifty pages of commentary upon the poems,” what Mary Favret argues is often “the first published critical assessment of Percy’s works” (17). Favret also discusses the pathos of Shelley’s framing words: “According to the interpretive framework of the Collected Poems, the effectiveness of both poet and poetry depends entirely on the power of her prose to move us” (19). Though banned from crafting a biography of Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley’s editorial notes promote their own narrative— one that launches her voice as a critic and calls upon readers through the use of emotion to recognize her late husband’s talent. 40

The remainder of this chapter focuses on Mary Shelley and her other writings, for they also encourage us to see the link between hybridity and editing. Frankenstein famously features three separate narrators within a complex framework of nested narratives. The novella Matilda is a written confession that includes an embedded suicide letter. And, The Last Man builds a suggestive tension between an opening preface that spells out a specific prophecy and the remaining narrative of the novel that suggests the end of humankind. Perhaps more than any Romantic novelist’s oeuvre, Shelley’s novelistic canon provides a sampling of the genre that upholds the definitive qualities of hybridity that I outlined in the Introduction, and thus demonstrates the need for a grounding editorial force to provide unity and stability amid the various layers of narrative.

Shelley crafts pivotal female figures who often take on editorial roles in their interactions with the layers of the texts. Though not explicitly editors, or even the primary heroines of the works, these women illustrate the potential textual and narrative power within such editorial exchanges. In the following section, I survey the ways in which these editor figures, like their historical predecessors, engage in both the physical touch exchanges with texts and the opportunity to add a framing voice to hybrid collections. Editors demonstrate their narrative potential through both types of actions.

Shelley—in her editing of her husband’s works and in many of her most popular novels—thus becomes a primary lens for my argument. She herself participates in the new editing opportunities popular among Romantic women writers, and she crafts women editor figures in many of her most popular novels. I do not want to suggest that the presence of these figures in the earlier works Frankenstein and Matilda foreshadows 41 her own forthcoming editorial work. However, I point to the presence of these figures to support my argument that just as female editors become more prevalent during the

Romantic period, novelists take notice and incorporate the flourishing profession for women within the pages of their novels.

I now turn to my close readings of Shelley’s most popular novels: Frankenstein,

Matilda, and The Last Man. These interpretations reinforce my reading of editing, like

Shelley’s own editing of her husband’s collected works, as a corporeal process that legislates the opportunity for an editor to have textual power and to include her own story. I have discussed how editors like Wollstonecraft, Hays, Barbauld, and Shelley were heavily involved in the tangible work of finding, selecting, assembling, and framing the journals and collections under their direction. As I move to a discussion of the representation of editing in fictional works, I focus on the ways in which formal hybridity unleashes the opportunity for an editorial presence. With respect to Shelley’s canon, I examine the ways in which she privileges the importance of texts in all three of the works

I discuss—both in terms of plot and through the formal devices of nested narratives, embedded letters, and a framing preface. Her emphasis on the life-changing nature of texts suggests the power of the touch exchange—how human beings’ contact with texts often leads to other actions, usually those associated with the role of the editor. Shelley’s focus on texts in these novels helps us see the importance of textual possession, distribution, and framing—concepts that other Romantic novelists often invoke in their depictions of heroines’ interacting with texts. Thus, in Shelley’s works and in other novels throughout the period, the hybrid nature of the novel allows novelists to show how women exercise editorial control in various capacities. 42

The Peripheral Editor of Frankenstein

Near the end of Frankenstein, Victor, in dialogue with Walton, declares, “Since you have preserved my narration [...] I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity” (179). Victor’s careful attention to his memoir sharply contrasts with the abandonment of his own creature, to whom he gave life. Though Victor yearns to learn the secrets of life and natural philosophy, he flees the scene when he finally succeeds because he is horrified by the ugliness of his own handiwork. Yet Walton’s record of

Victor’s story offers him a second chance to enter the annals of history, though this time with a more perfect creation. Edited text replaces mutilated creature as Victor recognizes that textual and narrative power can be more certain and lasting than other powers, even his own potential to create life. Victor’s realization is one of the many ways in which

Shelley privileges the physical presence of texts—a material reality that stresses the power concurrent with textual ownership.

Opening the novel with a series of letters formally emphasizes the importance of texts in Frankenstein from the outset. Walton, setting out for an exploration to the North

Pole, chronicles the beginning stages of his journey for his sister, Mrs. Saville, in these opening letters, which are complete with dates, greetings, and salutations. Walton draws attention to the act of writing, noting “I write a few lines in haste, to say that I am safe, and well advanced on my voyage” (33) and “My swelling heart involuntarily pours itself out thus” (34). In his third letter he remarks on the method of transit for his letter: “This letter will reach England by a merchantman now on its homeward voyage from

Archangel” (33). These references remind us of the physical nature of writing and the resulting texts themselves. The opening letters of the novel, the only means of 43 communication between the explorer brother and his sister residing in England, provide an introduction to Walton, but they also foreground the idea of textuality in the beginning pages of the novel.

Shelley extends these opening descriptions of texts by showing the life-changing effects of texts on each of the three major characters: Walton, Victor, and the creature.

Walton first developed his love of seafaring when reading in his uncle Thomas’s library, perusing histories of sea voyages of discovery, volumes which were his “study day and night” (29). Disappointed by his father’s injunction that he should not adopt a life on the sea, Walton found comfort and calling in poets, “whose effusions entranced [his] soul, and lifted it to heaven” (29). Though trying his hand at poetry himself for a year—and failing—Walton draws inspiration from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient

Mariner. He writes, “I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets. There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand” (33).

The histories of sea voyages and Coleridge’s poem powerfully shape Walton’s identity as he becomes both an explorer on the seas and a storyteller.

Victor also owes his identity to texts; he notes the turning point in his life occurring when, at the age of thirteen, he finds a particular volume while on a trip to

Thonon: “[T]he inclemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to the inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind” (46). Victor is so enamored with this volume of natural philosophy 44 that he returns home and obtains the complete works of Agrippa, as well as those of

Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. He recounts, “I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few beside myself”

(47). His discovery of Agrippa leads to a burgeoning fascination with the secrets of

Nature and launches a system of self-education in the field.

Though clearly lacking the education and guidance that both Walton and Victor enjoyed in their youth, the creature also relies on texts in his own self-education. Finding a pormanteau filled with volumes, he reads the classics Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter while living outside the De Laceys’ house. Reflecting upon reading them, he says, “I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest of dejection” (115). The creature’s reactions to these texts highlight his profoundly human nature. Yet, another text becomes a more concrete lesson in self-awareness. The creature, abandoned by Victor, learns of his creator through the letters and journal left in Victor’s coat. The journal records

Victor’s disappointment and horror in his creation, which fuels the creature’s own depression and isolation. The creature possesses them when he finally shares his narrative with Victor:

Here they are. Every thing is related in them which bears reference to my

accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances

which produced it, is set in view; the minutest description of my odious

and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own

horrors, and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. (117) 45

Text becomes the means of self-knowledge as the creature reads his birth story, though it only affirms his own isolation. Left without a companion or a creator, the creature holds only Victor’s record of disgust over his new creation.

The opening focus on the physical reality of texts and the narrative arcs that highlight the influential nature of texts on each of the three main characters raise a sense of meta-awareness in the text. Can this text—which Walton is writing and Victor is presumably editing—have a similar effect on a reader? Shelley’s formal choices encourage examination of the structure of nested, embedded narratives throughout the novel.

Mrs. Saville is often a forgotten character in the novel that records three males’ narratives, yet her name appears in the first words of the novel, when Walton addresses the first letter to her. These opening words establish the letter form, and thus, Mrs.

Saville’s role as recipient of this narrative. Though reception connotes a passive act when put in contrast to the more active agency of writing, the novel is repeatedly invested in having a listener or reader present to validate these stories. Walton himself notes that the mere act of writing pales in comparison to having a true friend present: “I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling” (31). Though his sister cannot be a kindred spirit with him on his voyage, the letters to her formally recognize her as in relationship with Walton, not just a passive vessel. Frankenstein features a chain of characters receiving narratives: Victor listens to the creature recount his life story, Walton hears Victor chronicle his adventures as well as the creature’s, and Mrs. Saville presumably receives Walton’s narrative that gathers all of these stories together. This line of narrators, who also include others’ stories within 46 theirs, could potentially keep going, but it reaches a terminus in Walton’s choice of recipient, Mrs. Saville.

By addressing the narrative to his sister, Walton puts the narrative into her hands and grants her textual ownership of the fantastic tale. Though she appears only at the periphery of the novel, Mrs. Saville’s textual possession represents the convergence of the three main characters’ significant interactions with texts, which Shelley describes by detailing the specific setting and circumstances in which each character finds life- changing works. Because all of the main characters largely owe their identities to textual discoveries and ownership, it is necessary to read Mrs. Saville, she who wields the textual possession of the entire narrative, as more than just a peripheral character. Gayatri

Spivak describes the importance of Mrs. Saville and her narrative function: “[T]here is a framing woman in the book who is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor yet encircling”

(909). She cites Mrs. Saville as being “the occasion, though not the protagonist, of the novel” (909). I would extend Spivak’s characterization to consider her role beyond acting as just the beginning impetus of the text since the promise of her textual possession acts as a closing frame, silent though it may be. Indeed, as Spivak notes, Mrs.

Saville does not close the frame with any concluding thoughts, but her textual ownership promises a lasting posterity that goes beyond the final page of the text.

Posterity is a key theme in Frankenstein. Walton trusts in the permanence of the text he addresses to Mrs. Saville, believing that he will one day reread it: “The manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest pleasure: but to me, who know him, and who hear it from his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day!” (40). And, as I noted in the opening of this section, Victor also recognizes 47 that Walton’s record can have a future life and thus plans to take great care in editing the manuscript. Of the three main characters, only the creature is ignorant since he believes that his suicide will signal the final event in the tale: “He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish” (189). The great irony is that the novel concludes with the creature’s final words and his plans to commit suicide and so end this disastrous narrative that Victor first began; however, his death does not signal the true ending, for the narrative lives on through the person of Mrs. Saville.

The silence of Mrs. Saville makes it hard to understand her character fully, though she obviously stands in contrast to the major figures of the novel. Rather than sharing the questing, adventurous spirits of both Walton and Victor, she remains rooted in England.

Since both men seem to learn their lessons throughout the narrative, her stasis marks her as wise and restrained, rather than foolish and adventurous. She also figures as a foil to the other women characters in the novel, for she lives on though Victor’s mother, Justine, and Caroline all die within the course of the narrative. Mrs. Saville, though silent, becomes the stable grounding force of female power in the novel.

And Mrs. Saville’s power has the capability to live on beyond the close of the text. The lack of the frame, though it suggests a breakdown in symmetry or a missed opportunity for a pronouncement, formally enacts the textual power that carries on beyond the final word of the narrative. Mrs. Saville, by virtue of the beginning address and form of the novel, now holds Walton’s letters, his record of Victor’s narrative, and 48 presumably Safie’s letters in her hands.2 Her textual ownership emphasizes her role in the narrative, for the record is the only surviving testament of the story since both Victor and the creature have died. Walton enjoys some textual agency because he records the transcription of Victor’s tale, and Victor certainly takes full advantage of editing the narrative that will survive him, but Mrs. Saville ultimately has full ownership of the text.

The figure of Mrs. Saville—the silent woman at home who seems to merely be on the periphery of the action—suggests Shelley’s larger emphasis on women’s textual power. Anne Mellor makes a compelling observation about Mrs. Saville’s name:

“Frankenstein is narrated in a series of letters written by Walton to his sister Margaret

Walton Saville (whose initials, M.W.S., are those Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin coveted—and gained when she and Percy Shelley were married on December 30, 1816).

In this sense, the novel is written by the author to an audience of one, herself” (54). By placing her own initials (or at least those she hoped to have) at the forefront of the novel

2 In her article “‘They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale’: Safie’s Letters as the Feminist

Core of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Joyce Zonana notes that these letters become the means of proof, for the creature shows his copies to Victor and Victor passes them on to

Walton, and she infers that they will become evidence for another reader, too: “Safie’s letters are the only tangible, independent evidence of the truth of Walton’s tale […] For

Mrs. Saville, who has seen neither creature nor creator, the letters will carry all the burden of proof of her brother’s fantastic report” (170). She links the integral letters that the letters play in the form of the novel to her claim that they represent a

Wollstonecraftian legacy.

49 and in the character of she who wields the ultimate textual possession of the narrative,

Shelley privileges the potential textual power of not only herself, but also of so many women who during the Romantic period were grappling with issues of textual power and access. Walton ensures that his sister has access and ownership of the narrative, but how many women in England were granted such license? Indeed, Frankenstein can be read as the unleashing of women’s textual power, perhaps what some people viewed as grotesque and unnatural. The creature finally meets his end in the novel, but Mrs. Saville remains, holding the narrative—and figuratively, greater textual access and ownership—in her hands.

Editing an Identity: Matilda

In my discussion of Frankenstein, I focused on the power of textual possession, a concept that I will revisit in Chapters Two and Three, as I discuss how Gothic heroines and the primary heroine of Sophia Lee’s The Recess enjoy both the agency and self- knowledge made possible through textual possession. As I turn to Matilda, however, I look to different touch exchanges with texts that suggest narrative power. Whereas Mrs.

Saville potentially enjoys the reception, and thus possession, of the entirety of the novel

Frankenstein, the title heroine of Matilda embeds a critical text into her memoir, which she apparently hopes will be distributed. These processes of arrangement and distribution suggest the physical acts of editing.

As in Frankenstein, letters play a pivotal role in the narrative structure of the novella Matilda. The titular figure, a young girl who loses her mother a few days after her own birth, endures her father’s escape into his grief and his consequent abandonment 50 of her. The letter he left behind becomes a source of comfort for her: “I copied his last letter and read it again and again” (159). However, when Matilda’s father returns and eventually admits his incestuous feelings for her, the next letter he writes is his last. The form of the letter turns from being the source of comfort to the announcement of tragedy.

Finally, Shelley relies on the form of the letter for the overall narrative, for Matilda recounts her life story in a letter to her friend Woodville.

When Matilda becomes sick and knows that she will not survive the year, she begins her memoir for Woodville and embeds her father’s suicide letter at the center of her text. She writes, “You have often asked me the cause of my solitary life; my tears; and above all of my impenetrable and unkind silence. In life I dared not; in death I unveil the mystery” (151). Though Woodville is her intended reader, Matilda encourages the idea of a larger audience. She suggests that this approach is a testament to Woodville: “I do not address them [these pages] to you alone because it will give me pleasure to dwell upon our friendship in a way that would be needless if you alone read what I shall write”

(151). She notes, “I shall relate my tale therefore as if I wrote for strangers” (151).

Though these declarations are ostensibly directed to Woodville and his care and compassion as a friend, they also invoke the editor’s plan, and possibly, her hope, for a wider audience. In this capacity, writing her story trumps verbal communication because it can live on after her—a record that many can read and share. The text allows Matilda to move beyond her alienated sadness and imagine a large readership—a community where her textual and editorial power seemingly overpowers her grief.

Though Matilda falls victim to the tragedy of her father’s unnatural passion for her (though, notably, no act of incest actually occurs), she ultimately retains a sense of 51 power over him. She embeds her father’s letter within her narrative—the letter that tells his complete story and one that he presumably did not share with anyone else. This letter fully explains the mysterious turn of her father’s character—the first discrete instance of a character relying on the written word to provide a full account rather than a verbal explanation, though in truth, the whole novella functions in the same fashion. Thus,

Matilda’s narrative suggests not only her own self-fashioning through writing, as Ranita

Chatterjee notes, but also the deployment of her narrative power over her father. She shares not only her story, but also her father’s, and embeds it in the middle of her narrative. This form allows her to highlight her own intuition, for she immediately recognizes that the letter is a suicide note, though her father does not explicitly say so.

Matilda also has the power of revelation; whereas her father willingly went to his grave with the burden of his story, Matilda shares both hers and her father’s with Woodville.

The formal structure of embedding the narrative literally shows her power over his story and her choice to disclose it to her reader.

Finally, Matilda highlights her own editorial nature as she collects various quotations throughout her memoir. She frequently includes references to Wordsworth,

Dante, Byron, and Coleridge, among others. In this nature, Matilda parallels many other

Romantic novels that inculcate a sense of intertextuality. As I noted in the Introduction,

Gary Kelly reads these myriad references as women novelists’ attempts to establish their literariness. I extend Kelly’s point to argue that they also function to establish the editorial nature of many of the heroines of Romantic novels, like Matilda herself.

My discussion of the editorial qualities of Matilda and The Last Man, which follows in the next section, also raises significant points regarding Shelley’s own role as 52 an editor, which makes her such a fitting opening topic for this study. Scholars such as

Pamela Clemit recognize the autobiographical elements of Shelley’s novella—complete with the dead mother, the idealized Godwinian father figure, and the young poet

Woodville as a would-be stand-in for Percy Shelley. These connections continue, for

Shelley first found inspiration for Matilda in one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished fragments, the “Cave of Fancy.” Like Matilda with her father’s first letter, Shelley herself may have enjoyed the comfort of reading and copying one of her mother’s works.

As such, Shelley takes on both an authorial and editorial relationship with her mother’s unfinished text.

Shelley would continue editing the narrative, for she produced two quite different versions of the novella. Initially, she penned “Fields of Fancy,” in which an unnamed narrator in the Elysian Fields hears the now immortal Matilda tell her tale, which concludes with the young girl’s wish to reunite with her father. Clemit claims that the embedded narrative counters the overall didactic tone of the text: “This discrepancy between the instructive tenor of the frame and the wish-fulfillment of the inset narrative reveals the unreliability of Mathilda’s account and establishes her story as a warning of the dangers of excessive feeling” (38). Clemit argues that Shelley’s change to the form of the novella Matilda represents a more subtle means to convey her message: “Mary

Shelley’s abandonment of the frame narrative indicates her rejection of overtly didactic fiction in favor of the indirect educative purpose of the Godwinian confessional mode”

(38). Clemit reads the shift in form as yet another way in which the novella is autobiographical and a fulfillment of the parental legacy of Wollstonecraft and Godwin. 53

Though Clemit reads the revised narrative structure as reflective of a more typical

Godwinian mode of narrative, I maintain that the form of the letter puts a special emphasis on the acts of writing, embedding, and distributing. This focus on texts and textuality runs throughout Shelley’s canon, and I maintain that it suggests the changing role of women in the publishing industry, both at large and in Shelley’s own career.

Chatterjee also reads Matilda as autobiographical in this way: “For the essentially motherless Mary Shelley, the way to restore her subjectivity and separate herself from the memory of an absent/dead mother was not to identify with the mother, for this would mean her own death, but to write her “self” in fiction” (132). Chatterjee claims that both

Shelley herself and the motherless Matilda “create an identity through the act of writing”

(132). In Matilda, the written word becomes the only conduit for the heroine to tell her story, and in effect, establish her identity. Whereas Chatterjee focuses on the individual act of writing, I add that in Matilda and elsewhere Shelley focuses on the many processes surrounding texts—both authorial and editorial.

The Author-Editor of The Last Man

Between finishing Matilda in February of 1820 and beginning to write The Last

Man in the spring of 1824, Mary Shelley endured the tragedy of her husband’s death in

1822, which prompted her to publish her edition of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems in June

1824 (Paley xvii). I point to this timing of events, for her nearly simultaneous work on

The Last Man and her first edited collection of her husband’s poems informs the narrative structure of the novel. Though Wolfson and Favret align Shelley as editor with her famous character Victor Frankenstein, as I discussed earlier, another parallel suggests the 54 similarity between Shelley and the editor narrator of The Last Man. Shelley illustrates the narrative power of an editing figure who engages in the many physical touch exchanges I have introduced: finding, collecting, and assembling texts—processes that will form the bulk of the chapters that follow. She also demonstrates the potential for an editor to add her own framing voice to a text.

The Introduction to The Last Man chronicles the story of two unnamed travelers who visit Naples in 1818 and stumble upon the Cumaean Sibyl’s cave. Perhaps Shelley’s opening narrative for the novel recalls Coleridge’s 1817 volume of poetry entitled

Sybilline Leaves. In the preface to that volume, Coleridge declares, “The following collection has been entitled SIBYLLINE LEAVES; in allusion to the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which they have been long suffered to remain” (i). Coleridge relies on editorial contextual material to affirm the fragmented nature of his works. Yet in The Last Man, Shelley deftly reverses the fragmentation associated with Sibylline leaves to promote narrative agency and coherence instead.

Though Shelley avoids using any gendered pronouns, autobiographical elements permeate the opening narrative. As Morton Paley notes, the stated date of the tour to the

Sibyl’s cave—December 8, 1818—exactly coincides with the date that the Shelleys themselves, with Claire Clairmont, visited the cave (xx). Furthermore, the narrator sustains the loss of her companion, undoubtedly a reference to the death of Percy Bysshe

Shelley. Many scholars, including Gilbert and Gubar, therefore assume that the unnamed and ungendered narrator refers to Mary Shelley herself. A biographical reading posits a woman as the narrative agent who collects and edits the Sibylline leaves to form the narrative that follows in the rest of the novel. 55

The narrator and her companion, like the Gothic heroines I will discuss in the next chapter, find texts. In addition to promoting character agency, the Sibyl’s cave is a fundamentally narrative space because it is quite literally filled with narrative: “On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark, and other substances, were traced with written characters” (5). The travelers, recognizing the value of their discovery, take these precious texts from the cave: “We made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand; and then, laden with our treasure, we bade adieu to the dim hypaethric cavern” (6). The narrator notes that they frequently returned to the cave to add to their collection of texts. Shelley stresses the corporeality of these prophecies, for they are actual texts that the travelers can take into their own possession.

The references to the tangible reality of the prophecies—“leaves, bark, and other substances”—categorize these texts as the raw materials of Nature. The emphasis on primitive elements highlights that these prophecies are simply fragments, forgotten and unavailable to others in their present state. The wide variety of languages employed in the prophecies, including “ancient Chaldee” and “Egyptian hieroglyphics,” also attest to the inaccessibility of these texts (5). The unfinished, incomprehensible state of the texts demonstrates the necessity of an agent to translate them, literally, to a more polished, coherent product. The narrator describes her work in transforming the Sybilline prophecies: “Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form” (6). Exerting editorial control, the narrator takes the unfinished fragments of text and fashions them into a narrative.

The narrator’s work in modeling the fragments into a unified narrative surely illustrates her narrative agency, yet it also raises the issue of comparing the work of the 56

Sibyl and the narrator. Though the Sibyl is recognized as divine, her prophecies remain forgotten, abandoned, and unread in the cave until the narrator and her companion arrive.

The more corporeal acts of taking the texts, translating them, and assembling them together—though more earthly and less divine—ensure that these prophecies will have an audience. Her manipulation of the Sibylline leaves implies that the editor becomes more dominant than the Sibyl, an ageless priestess-prophetess, as she takes the oracle’s fragments and refashions them into the narrative that follows.

Lionel Verney’s narrative, the story that the editor produces from the Sibylline leaves, also impels the reader to consider the potential power of the editor. The introduction states that the oracle’s leaves are found and assembled together in the year

1818, though Verney’s traumatic story of survival occurs in the twenty-first century.

Though the Sibyl was the first to predict Verney’s doom-filled survival, the editor becomes the one who deciphers and distributes the story, making her voice the cautionary voice of warning. The editor, thus, becomes someone who hopes to and can potentially change the course of events predicted by an ancient prophetess.

Furthermore, she takes ownership of her particular talents and likens her editing role to that of an artist, one who adds his own voice to the work:

Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe

their present form to me, their decipherer, as if we should give to another

artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael’s

Transfiguration in St. Peter’s; he would put them together in a form,

whose mode would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent. (6) 57

The narrator’s characterization of her role emphasizes both her individual effort and its inherent artistry. Though initially the Introduction stresses the mutual work of the travelers together and privileges the translating abilities of her lost companion, by the end of the opening narrative, the narrator assumes full responsibility for shaping the Sibylline leaves into the form that follows. She has moved beyond one who simply physically collects texts from the cave to one who artfully inscribes her own voice as she builds narrative connections among the fragments. The narrator’s comparison of her work to

Raphael’s mosaic illustrates the potential of the fragment, for it becomes the means to artistic unity, and, in her case, narrative agency.

The cryptic Introduction has drawn a variety of readings, though most are biographical in nature. Gilbert and Gubar interpret the narrator’s fictionalized account of the journey to the cave and her reconstruction of the Sibylline leaves as symbolic of the woman artist’s potential agency and the matrilineal tradition —“the story of the woman artist who enters the cavern of her own mind and finds there the scattered leaves not only of her own power but of the tradition which might have generated that power” (98).

Thus, Shelley’s Introduction presents the possibility “for the woman poet to reconstruct the shattered tradition that is her matrilineal heritage” (98). Though I agree that the

Introduction specifically highlights the potential of the woman artist, I find that a more corporeal reading—one that assumes the Sibylline leaves to be actual textual fragments that need editing and collecting—allows for a biographical reading that considers

Shelley’s own work during this period, namely the editing of her late husband’s works, as well as other women writers who turned to the field of editing in the Romantic period.

58

Though Shelley’s approaches throughout the novels vary, Frankenstein, Matilda, and The Last Man are all invested in the material presence of texts and the women who have direct touch exchanges with those texts. Though these interactions may seem to be only plot devices, they also formally determine the shape of the text. The combination of plot elements and structural choices suggest that these hybrid works reveal the power of women editor figures—reflections of the increasing number of women editors in the publishing sphere.

Mary Shelley, though a later Romantic, is an intriguing opening lens for this study of the Romantic novel. Her own life story, tied to so many prominent writers and figures of the period, makes her relevant in most discussions of the period. However, it is her own dual identity as novelist and editor that highlights the changing role of women in the industry discussed in the first half of this chapter and connects her to the fictional depictions of other novelists that I discuss throughout the rest of the study. Shelley and the women characters she creates both support my argument, and thus Shelley becomes the most logical starting point for a study of women editors and the fictional depiction of women editor figures in the Romantic novel.

Though I surveyed such peripheral figures as Mrs. Saville and the unnamed narrator of the Preface of The Last Man in this chapter, the rest of the study investigates the role of Romantic heroines who wield textual and narrative power. Shifting the focus to heroines entails examining how authors negotiate these issues of textual and narrative power among other plotlines. The following chapters examine how these heroines’ negotiation of texts and editorial practices are integrated among discussions of identity, marriage, and education. Women novelists suggest that textual and narrative agency, 59 especially in the form of editorial power, can be a corrective force to injustice, discrimination, and patriarchy. My study of the Gothic novel, the topic of the following chapter, shows how heroines’ textual discoveries often privilege the heroine’s voice over and against male injustice.

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Chapter Two

The Corporeal “Female Gothic”: Narrative Spaces and Found Documents

Though I noted the corporeal nature of texts and some characters’ touch exchanges with texts in Chapter 1, other critics have instead focused on the influence of the author’s physical body on the text. For example, in Literary Women (1976), Ellen

Moers reads Mary Shelley’s female reproductive body at the core of Frankenstein: “[N]o other Gothic work by a woman writer, perhaps no literary work of any kind by a woman, better repays examination in the light of the sex of its author. For Frankenstein is a birth myth, and one that was lodged in the novelist’s imagination, I am convinced, by the fact that she was herself a mother” (92). Though Moers notes that Frankenstein has neither a heroine nor a central female victim (92), she claims that the author’s sex, particularly her experiences as a mother, influences her tale.

Moers’s interpretation of Frankenstein illustrates her classification of a specific type of Gothic novel, what she labels the “Female Gothic.” Her definition of the category is expansive: “What I mean by Female Gothic is easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (90). She goes on to note that the definition of Gothic itself is problematic, but rests easy in her classification of Female Gothic as denoting those

Gothic works written by women. Since Moers’s demarcation of the Female Gothic, a host of psychoanalytic readings, feminist interpretations, and re-examinations of this category—including a 1994 special issue of Women’s Writing—have dominated studies 61 of the Gothic novel. Though Moers’s work prompts renewed academic interest in the genre, especially in light of feminist studies, her definition essentializes the sex of the author. I begin with this older scholarship to show that corporeality, even in regard to criticism, has always been underscored in Gothic studies, understandably so, for the

Gothic novel itself is obsessed with bodies. Like the mysterious skeletons and body parts that haunt Gothic narratives, Shelley’s maternal body haunts Frankenstein, according to

Moers.

Both Robert Miles and E.J. Clery feel that we should be wary of considering the female Gothic as a “self-evident literary classification” (132). Resisting the urge to essentialize this genre simply because it is dominated by women authors, we should instead investigate what women writers achieved by working in the genre, as Miles notes:

Gender, one may say, is the law of the Gothic genre. Its origins in

romance, the history of its readership, its obsession with plot-lines turning

on heroines suffering at the hands of patrilineage, its links with hysteria

[...] To describe the contours gender takes in the Gothic is no longer the

critical task (as it once was). The task, rather, is to unlock these shapes.

(134)

The critical discussions surrounding the Gothic novel have largely hinged on the question of gender and authorship, as critics such as Anne Williams and Maggie Kilgour have maintained these demarcations in their scholarship. Yet, I want to move beyond the typical pairing of women and texts in discussion of authorship to examine the more general pairing of women and texts within the plot and form of these Gothic novels, and thus shift focus from the corporeality of the author to the corporeality of narrative 62 elements and interchanges. Indeed, most often women authors themselves invoke these narrative innovations to highlight women’s textual power, which I will show by surveying Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), Mary Robinson’s Vancenza (1792), and Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791). I argue that the structure of the hybrid Gothic novel legislates authority for these Gothic heroines, largely through their physical contact with texts. By reading the narrative corporeality of certain tropes of the

Gothic novel, the recovered document and the Gothic setting, I argue that the Gothic heroine wields textual power, which often enhances her self-knowledge and suggests the larger potential for women to obtain power through texts. Such narrative manipulation, however, is not restricted to women Gothic novelists, as I will show later in my concluding chapter on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

The Gothic Novel & Romantic Hybridity

Many typical conventions of the Gothic novel find their origin in Walpole’s The

Castle of Otranto (1764), which Fred Botting suggests stands as the first Gothic novel that “condensed features from old poetry, drama and romance and provided the model for future developments” (48). Even in its birth, the Gothic novel represents an amalgamation of various elements and influences. Kilgour echoes many critics’ denunciations of the Romantic novel at large, which I discussed in the Introduction, when she critiques the form of the Gothic novel: “It feeds upon and mixes the wide range of literary sources out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself

[...] The form is thus itself a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled out of the bits and pieces of the past” (4). The plethora of source materials for the Gothic novel, which both 63

Botting and Kilgour describe, manifests itself through the proliferation of conventions in the genre. Though many critics focus on the stock elements of the Gothic novel as merely formulaic,3 I suggest that the dynamic interplay of conventions is representative of the hybridity of the Romantic novel specifically, and of the era’s literature at large.

Gothic novelists often weave together interpolated narratives, landscape descriptions, and embedded texts in their novels. Kilgour notes that novelists intentionally emphasize the forces of combination in their texts: “The narratives [...] thematise their own piecemeal construction, drawing attention to the relation of the story and unfolding of the plot” (4). As a result of the many narrative layers at work, readers often feel that they are working their way through metaphorical mazes of dark passages and secret rooms, like the Gothic heroines themselves. Though some critics, like Eve

Sedgwick and Kilgour, read such hybridity as distancing for the reader, I argue that the form replicates the journey Gothic heroines must take to find the secrets of their abode.4

3 Robert Miles summarizes his version of the Gothic formula: “[A] heroine caught between a pastoral heaven and a threatening castle, sometimes in flight from a sinister patriarchal figure, sometimes in search of an absent mother, and often, both together”

(131).

4 In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Sedgwick notes the work involved in

Gothic narratives: “Of all the Gothic conventions dealing with sudden, mysterious, seemingly arbitrary, but massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be most accessible, the difficulty the story has in getting itself told is of the most obvious structural significance” (14). Maggie Kilgour also describes the “narrative incoherence” of Gothic novels: “Made up of these assorted bits and pieces, gothic novels often seem to 64

The narrative discourse formally inscribes the heroine’s work of exploration and discovery.

In addition to inculcating a spirit of laborious adventure into the narrative, the hybrid nature of the Gothic novel also draws particular attention to the importance of texts in this sub-genre of the Romantic novel. Novelists often present their tales as found documents that have been translated or edited for the general reading public. In The

Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole begins the tradition of opening Gothic novels with a framing narrative that draws attention to the textual reality of the story to follow. In the first edition of the novel, Walpole casts his work as a found document: “The following work was found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529” (167). The phrase

“Translated by William Marshal, Gent.” follows the subtitle of the novel, “A Gothic

Story.” Walpole later apologizes for the artifice in the first edition and claims he sought refuge because of the experimental nature of his project of blending the ancient and modern kinds of romance. The frame narrative provides a manner of defense, for it employs textual reality as the means to establish veracity. Though the story of Manfred and the supernatural events happening in his castle seems fantastic, the frame narrative establishes itself as authentic by citing the reality of the found document.

In stressing the importance of a found object within the opening lines of the novel, Walpole appeals to the popularity of antiquarianism during the eighteenth century.

disintegrate into fragments, irrelevant digressions, set-pieces of landscape description which never refer back to the central point” (5).

65

Ruth Mack notes that Walpole often denounces the work of fellow antiquarians, yet she argues that Walpole helps theorize “the emergence of the object as a new kind of historical evidence” in The Castle of Otranto (370). Though Mack and Rosemary Sweet discuss the differences between historiography based on objects and based on texts, I would argue that Walpole and other Gothic writers stress the objectness of found texts.

The found document is not merely a record, but something that elicits human interaction, more than just reading. Walpole’s subtitle and frame narrative that detail the discovery and translation of the object are parallel to the actions of an antiquarian finding fragments of history and chronicling them for the general public. Ann Radcliffe follows Walpole’s example in her description of the editorial work that prompts the narrative of A Sicilian

Romance: “[...] I was permitted to take abstracts of the history before me, which, with some further particulars obtained in conversation with the abate, I have arranged in the following pages” (2).

Though Railo and Fred Botting read novelists’ manipulation of the found document in reference to time, creating a juxtaposition of past and present,5 I suggest that

5 Railo, in The Haunted Castle, discusses the popularity of such a device for Romantic authors, as they “accepted the artifice with delight, as it furnished them with an excellent means of bringing contemporary readers face to face, as it were with some figure from the past” (338). Botting asserts that it “became a crucial device in Gothic narratives,” and also reads its importance in reference to time: “The historical distance that is opened up by the device of the discovered manuscript returns readers to the neoclassical strictures and produces an uncomfortable interplay between past and present that both displaces and confronts contemporary aesthetic and social concerns” (49). 66 such frame devices emphasize the Gothic novel’s interest in textual reality, a type of corporeality that offers authenticity to the fantastic Gothic narrative. Just like antiquarian objects, these found texts prompt us to examine the human interaction with such objects and the agency that they elicit. By focusing on the objectness of these texts—often emphasizing the worn, fragmented, and indecipherable nature of them—Gothic novelists stress the work of those characters who find, translate, and edit them.

Walpole first deploys the motif of the found object as a framing narrative, but later Gothic novelists, particularly women Gothic novelists, would incorporate the recovered text into the main narratives of their novels. Rather than serving as a means of legitimacy in prefaces, the found text furthers the plot and, more importantly, develops the characterization of the heroine. The discovery of a recovered document literally puts textual power into the heroine’s hands. I argue that such finds showcase her agency as an active, questing character who is able to find, read, and use these texts to her advantage.

Gothic novelists often embed the discovered text into the larger narrative. The form of the embedded narrative further confirms the heroine’s agency in the narrative discourse of the novel. The found text takes on greater importance when the discovery becomes an actual part of the narrative, for it becomes the physical proof of the heroine’s successful quest. The nature of the embedded text demands a greater awareness of how it came to be a part of the larger narrative, forcing a reexamination of its context—namely, the Gothic heroine’s exploration of the Gothic space.

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Gothic Settings: Narrative Spaces

To consider the agency that Gothic heroines show in their exchanges with texts, we must examine the Gothic settings of these novels—those places where heroines reside, search for secrets, and often vanquish their oppressors. Most readers can immediately conjure the elements of a traditional Gothic setting: the ruins of an abbey or castle, dark passages, long-forgotten rooms, mysterious staircases, among other elements that heighten the macabre atmosphere of Gothic novels. Many critics interpret the traditional Gothic settings of castles and abbeys in symbolic terms.6 Daniel Punday, however, argues narrative theory in general should move beyond such a reductive reading

6 In “The Gothic Mirror,” Claire Kahane reads “the dark, secret center of the Gothic structure,” where “the boundaries of life and death seem confused” as representative of a maternal presence (334). She argues, “What I see repeatedly locked into the forbidden center of the Gothic which draws me inward is the spectral presence of the dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront” (336). Kahane’s psychoanalytic interpretation argues that the heroine’s search for her dead mother is her motivating force. In “Gothic

Possibilities,” Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman offer a reader-response interpretation of Gothic novels, arguing that for different readers the Gothic castle can suggest a maternal space, an idealized family space, or an inner space—all of which emphasize the tension between inside and outside (288). More recently, Frances A. Chiu suggests that Gothic castles represent reformist motives to dismantle British institutions and establishments.

68 of space, claiming instead that many spaces are inherently narrative: “[T]he meaning of a narrative space is important far more because of the kinds of movements that it opens up than because of the atmosphere or symbolism that it enables” (124). Whereas many would argue that the typical Gothic setting is simply another layer of suspenseful stage- setting or the main force of action itself,7 Punday’s corporeal approach to reading spaces implores us to interpret space by the types of kinetic movement that occur there—to see the tangible connection between space and human agency: “The types of spaces that a particular immediate location opens onto will define how a character can act and the type of information that he or she has available” (129). Reading Gothic settings as narrative spaces prompts a new interpretation of the Gothic heroine and her actions.

These cloistered spaces, rather than just setting a horrid atmosphere, present settings that need to be opened and discovered. Holland and Sherman approach this idea of buried secrecy when they discuss the potential symbolism inherent in the family castle:

[T]he gothic revels in unfamiliarity: the topos of the mysterious family

secret. Again, the genre offers us opposites, the known and the unknown,

and again, the castle provides a symbol for them. As the gothic

convention par excellence, its very structure exemplifies the stout, external

form, yet it conceals some hidden secret, knowledge of which will

7 Eino Railo claims that the castle reaches a new level in works by Gothic novelists

Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Ann Radcliffe: “With the trio this accompaniment

[the castle] becomes the central feature; in their works the haunted castle achieves a position of independence, becoming almost the action by means of which they develop their romantic visions” (27). 69

ultimately prove more important than the strength of stone and iron. The

secret allows us to project into the castle the deepest mysteries of life, its

origins, continuance, and destiny. (286)

Though Holland and Sherman focus on the reader-response impulse to read the castle as the metaphorical embodiment of life’s greatest secrets, and thus read it only as a symbolic setting, they are correct to link the setting and the secrecy of the Gothic novel.

Rather than reading the castle or the abbey ruins as having metaphorical meaning, though, we must first consider the very real and literal significance of the Gothic setting, for the locked trunk, the rusted dagger, and the hidden panel are tangible elements of the setting that have new importance when the secrets come to light. Furthermore, they are not merely abandoned items; rather, they are clues to a puzzle that needs a human being to decipher it. The Gothic space presents a setting that demands not just survival, but also a sense of adventure and acute skills of detection to unlock the secrets of the setting.

Characters’ interactions with the setting often help them gain knowledge that can help them in their quests to defeat their oppressors.

The Gothic space creates opportunities for characters to open these spaces and make their findings, thus elevating them from static beings in a space to agents of action.

Eliza Parsons’s The Mysterious Warning , for example, offers the story of Ferdinand following clues to discover a husband and wife confined in a basement chamber for over twelve years. In A Sicilian Romance, Julia finds her long-imprisoned mother in an underground cavern. These settings present scenes of horror, a fitting motif for the Gothic novel, but they also depict the human agency inherent in making these discoveries. 70

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a quasi-satire of the Gothic novel, playfully employs many of the conventions of the Gothic novel, most especially the representation of a Gothic setting as a narrative space. The title of the novel itself showcases the link between setting and narrative. However, the novel’s heroine, Catherine Morland, is not a traditional Gothic heroine, but instead an avid fan of Gothic novels. Discussing her passion for Mysteries of Udolpho with friend Isabella, she declares, “Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world” (25).

Catherine’s love for Gothic novels often translates to a fascination with Gothic spaces, which Austen shows is actually a yearning for the narrative potential implicit in such settings in the Gothic novel.

Catherine’s love of Gothic settings leads her to imagine the advantages of physically being in Gothic settings such as castles and abbeys. The Thorpes’ proposed day trip to Blaize Castle presents Catherine with the opportunity to explore “an edifice like Udolpho” (61). However, this delight is not merely the experience of witness or observation, for Catherine imagines how her own experiences in such a setting might mirror those of Gothic heroines. She pictures the joyful prospect of a hidden room or of the obstacle of darkness: “the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults, by a low, grated door; or even of having their lamp, their only lamp, extinguished by a sudden gust of wind, and being left in total darkness” (62-3). Yet, whereas these prospects usually foreshadow trouble in Gothic novels, Catherine wants to be a part of a similar narrative, presumably because she knows the conclusion—the victory of the questing heroine. When Catherine hears that the Tilneys live in Northanger 71

Abbey, she again relishes the thought of physically being within a Gothic space. She declares, “To see and explore […] the cloisters of the [abbey], had been for many weeks a darling wish, though to be more than the visitor of an hour, had seemed too nearly impossible for desire. And yet, this was to happen” (102). Looking forward to being the abbey’s “inhabitant,” she imagines that fully living in such a space is superior to merely visiting it.

Catherine’s love of Gothic spaces stems not from a deep aesthetic appreciation or architectural reverence; rather, her pleasure rests in her assumption of a connection between space and narrative. She hopefully predicts that Northanger Abbey may have a story attached to it: “[S]he could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun” (102). Henry Tilney, who recognizes Catherine’s zeal for Gothic spaces and her yearning for an accompanying narrative, uses it to cast his own playful prediction of what Catherine will find in the abbey. Obviously inspired by Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, Tilney narrates what excitement may be in store for Catherine when she explores her quarters and finds a long- hidden document:

At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a

roll of paper appears:—you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you

hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you

been able to decipher “Oh! Thou—whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands 72

these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall”—when your lamp suddenly

expires in the socket and leaves you in total darkness. 8 (116)

Prodded by Henry’s suggestions, Catherine assumes mystery lurks in every corner of her room, and upon examining a cabinet her first evening in the abbey, she finds what appears to be a document: “Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript, for half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters; and [...] resolved instantly to peruse every line before she attempted to rest” (124). After her candle unfortunately burns out and

Catherine awakens in the morning, she finds that the text is nothing more than a stack of receipts.

Though Catherine does not ultimately find an important document, as the other heroines who I discuss in this chapter do, Austen uses this trope to introduce the connection between secret-laden spaces and questing heroines so common in Gothic novels. For though Catherine’s discovery of the papers in the cabinet leads to nothing consequential, she does make more crucial hypotheses about Northanger Abbey that

8 The hidden roll of paper and the expiring lamp are reminiscent of Adeline’s experiences in Radcliffe’s novel, yet Austen adds a curious twist. Rather than Adeline finding the memoir of a male prisoner, she finds the narrative of the “wretched Matilda,” most likely a reference to Sophia Lee’s The Recess, which will be revisited in the next chapter.

Tilney’s collapsing of these two novels in his teasing predictions demonstrates how important both Radcliffe’s and Lee’s works were in establishing popular elements of the

Gothic novel, such as the appearance of written narratives, as well as foregrounding the important link between women and texts in Gothic novels. 73 prove to be more true than false. When she sees General Tilney excuse himself from visiting the late Mrs. Tilney’s favorite spot in the garden and halt her from exploring his deceased wife’s quarters, she reflects that this information “conveyed pages of information” to her (136). The secrets of these spaces lead her to make conjectures about

General Tilney, which, though not entirely correct, are accurate in their assessment of his character. When Catherine later learns the truth behind her rude dismissal from the house, the narrator notes, “Catherine […] heard enough to feel, that in suspecting General

Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty” (183). Catherine reads the clues of the Gothic space to see the true narrative at the heart of General Tilney’s character.

Textual Power & Tragic Knowledge

Though Austen satirizes the convention of the found document, she recognizes that it suggests a larger narrative that connects the agency of the questing heroine to the cloistered Gothic setting. Austen’s mocking signifies the popularity of the trope that other writers also use to illustrate this link, which I will discuss further as I now turn to two novels in which traditional Gothic heroines discover texts among typical Gothic spaces.

In Robinson’s Vancenza, orphan heroine Elvira makes a unique discovery of a text in her guardian’s castle early in the novel. Sitting down at a window in a gallery to observe the grounds below, she finds a poem etched on the glass: “The small panes of glass were alternately painted in a variety of devices, which made it difficult to decipher the characters; each square containing a single stanza” (88-9). The poem, inscribed on an 74 actual part of the castle, literally marks the space as narrative. The poem describes a speaker betrayed by love and left hopeless. Clearly awaiting only her eventual death, the speaker hopes that her daughter may one day think of her:

Perchance, when youth’s delicious bloom

Shall fade unheeded in the tomb,

Fate may direct a daughter’s eye

To where my mould’ring reliques lie;

And, touch’d by sacred sympathy,

That eye may drop a tear for ME! (89)

Though the poem seems a simple record of melancholy, the implicit narrative suggests some standard Gothic elements: a betrayed woman, her removal from the world, and the prediction of her own tomb and “mould’ring reliques.” As described in the concluding stanza, the speaker believes that “each future scene” shall be “cold and comfortless.” The inscription of the poem, which features Gothic elements, onto the window of the castle firmly establishes this setting as a Gothic space.

Elvira reacts emotionally and physically to this found poem, which spurs a new self-awareness. Emotion overwhelms her and elicits tears: “Something unfelt before seemed to take possession of all her faculties; the tenderness of love, the sympathy of sorrow, suffused the azure heralds of her soul with tears of pity!” (91). Though Elvira does not know of any personal connection to the poet, her physical reaction to the text suggests a link: “[T]he throbbings of her heart told her they were connected with some tale of wo [sic], in which she bore a part” (90). Ingrid Horrocks argues that Radcliffe often embeds poems in Gothic novels to show her heroine’s connection to a larger social 75 community, but here Robinson employs an embedded poem to prompt a heroine’s self- examination, which amounts to a lyrical turn inwards. Rather than looking outward,

Elvira recognizes her powerful emotional and physical reactions and instinctively feels that she has stumbled upon a text that suggests her role in some larger “tale” or narrative.

Elvira’s reaction highlights the formal innovation of the Gothic novel; both the embedded text and the heroine are elements of a larger narrative.

The poem also prompts Elvira to realize her agency in this secret tale. When she visits the poem again, she recognizes her role: “That some sad history was enveloped in the oblivious shroud of time, there remained not a single doubt; and her prophetic soul informed her, that she alone must unveil the fatal secret” (2.37). The phrasing suggests the tangible image of an actual history, presumably a text, being ensconced within the walls of the castle, and Elvira recognizes that she must unearth the secret. The Gothic setting, hiding a secret within its structure, creates a space that prompts the heroine’s active questing spirit.

The Count’s bequest of a mysterious key to Elvira upon his deathbed further signifies her role in literally unlocking the secrets of the castle. The key, which implies the presence of a matching lock, and more compellingly, some secret object held behind the lock, provokes Elvira to search the castle immediately: “Elvira soon quitted her pillow, and wandering through the gothic apartments of the castle, explored every corner, and tried every lock, in hopes of discovering that, which might receive the last gift of her lamented guardian” (2.36). Though not successful in her initial search, Elvira eventually finds a concealed panel hidden behind a family portrait. Dramatic phrases such as

“prophetic timidity,” “fatal pannel [sic],” and “petrified with horror” punctuate this scene 76 of discovery (2.112). Though Robinson elevates the Gothic horror to a thrilling crescendo in this moment, her heroine does not surrender to the emotion but continues to search for the secret by putting the key into the lock. The Gothic setting creates an intense atmosphere of terror as it pushes the heroine to look for the secrets within its walls, a tension that further celebrates the heroine’s bravery and spirit.

Elvira finds a written memoir, which Robinson embeds in the novel, in a locked casket behind the hidden panel and exclaims as she recognizes the handwriting of the mysterious poet: “Gracious God! I have seen these characters before! The sad complaint inscribed upon the gallery window, was imprinted on her brain: the exact similarity chilled her almost to instant annihilation” (2.117). The text details the life of

Madeline Vancenza, the younger sister of the Count and the Marchioness, who was seduced and abandoned by a family friend, the elder Prince Almanza. Though the Count promised to care for the young Elvira, the product of his unmarried sister’s affair,

Madeline never betrayed the name of her seducer to her brother.

Elvira’s tragic story betrays Robinson’s leanings toward didacticism. Though

Robinson, in the Preface, claims that she “disclaim[s] the title of a Writer of novels” for

“the species of composition generally known under that denomination, too often conveys a lesson I do not wish to inculcate,” Vancenza, which is sub-titled “Or, the Dangers of

Credulity,” presents the story of a heroine who must pay the ultimate price for her mother’s credulity (vi). Upon hearing the news of her identity, which means that her fiancé, the Prince Almanza, is indeed her half-brother, Elvira immediately falls ill and never leaves her bed again. She dies the night her beloved returns to the castle for the wedding, though the Marchioness never reveals the secret to him. 77

Elvira’s ultimate tragic death should not be read as the result of her discovering her mother’s memoir. The found memoir actually enables textual power for Elvira. The frank nature of the memoir’s full explanation contrasts with the many unknowns that are reconciled only when Elvira finds the memoir: The Count never knows Madeline’s seducer. The Marchioness never knows that her sister had a child or the circumstances under which she died. Elvira does not know the truth of her identity, why the Count provides for her, or why she feels so powerfully affected by the discovery of the poem.

Because Robinson embeds the memoir, the reader learns the answer to all of these secrets just as the Marchioness and Elvira do. The form highlights that a text can be the means to knowledge, which grants a special power to she who finds it. Though Elvira meets a tragic end, the found memoir grants her the knowledge of her identity and the many secrets surrounding her life. This knowledge saves her from committing incest by marrying her half-brother, though Robinson has Elvira die as a final reminder of the

“Dangers of Credulity.”

Finding Textual Power

In turning from Vancenza to Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, we move from one typical Gothic setting, the castle, to another, the ruins of an abbey. Gilbert and

Gubar claim “the passageways of a gothic abbey” stand as one of the “two traditional settings for female initiation” (129). The labyrinthine passageways among ruins provide the perfect backdrop for a young woman to prove herself as an active heroine. The

Romance of the Forest features the initiation of Adeline, a woman who seems to have lost the protection of her father and finds the support of a family in the La Mottes. Having 78 ensnared himself in financial difficulties, La Motte and his wife are on the run, attempting to escape the creditors searching for them. The group finds shelter in the ruins of an abbey, a space that showcases Adeline’s active agency and practicality.

Though Adeline first enters the narrative as a figure of mystery, the abbey and its grounds offer her the security and stability her life has lacked. Adeline, supplanting

Madame La Motte, manages the affairs of the household (34). She also trolls the books of La Motte’s library: “With one of these she would frequently ramble into the forest, where the river, winding through a glade, diffused coolness, and with its murmuring accents, invited repose” (35). Inspired by spots like these, Adeline often writes and recites poetry. The abbey and the familial atmosphere of their group help Adeline forget the pain of her past: “The time she had spent in this peaceful retirement had softened the remembrance of past events, and restored her mind to its natural tone” (45). Far from being a Gothic setting, the abbey initially functions as the space that helps Adeline reinstate order and family bonds to her life.

However, the abbey turns from a tranquil domestic space to a more mysterious one in her own dreams. She dreams of “a large old chamber belonging to the abbey, more ancient and desolate, though in part furnished, than any she had yet seen” (108).

Elements of the abbey—winding passages, large galleries, and chamber doors—appear in these dreams. Adeline’s nightmares suggest the abbey’s myriad layers of narrative power, for it functions as a dynamic setting in both the real world and in a supernatural realm. These dreams, presenting images of parts of the abbey she has not yet seen, emphasize the connection between the abbey and the seemingly clairvoyant Adeline. 79

Though it seems just to be a hideout for the family running from La Motte’s creditors, the abbey clearly has more narrative importance, especially for Adeline.

In both her dreams and in real life, the abbey provides the impetus for Adeline to show her bravery in the face of the unknown. When Adeline happens upon the secret quarters in real life, she explores room after room. Undaunted by the foreboding, nightmarish images of her dreams, Adeline perseveres until she makes her way through the many chambers. Adeline’s prophetic dreams imply that it is her fate to explore these secret quarters. Like Vancenza’s Elvira, Adeline recognizes the ways in which she has been called to investigate: “A mystery seems to hang over these chambers, which it is, perhaps, my lot to develope [sic]” (115). Both Robinson and Radcliffe employ the language and imagery of the supernatural to stress that the heroines have been singled out to explore their respective Gothic settings. The labor of both heroines proves successful.

Adeline’s explorations yield discoveries—broken furniture, a rusted dagger, and most important, a manuscript: “It was a small roll of paper, tied with a string, and covered with dust. […] She attempted to read it, but the part of the manuscript she looked at was so much obliterated, that she found this difficult, though what few words were legible impressed her with curiosity and terror, and induced her to return with it immediately to her chamber” (116).

The manuscript, though worn and undecipherable in many parts, records the last days of a prisoner held within the walls of the abbey. The many breaks in the text, denoted by asterisks in the Oxford edition, formally relate the fragmentation of the narrative. Adeline’s references to the work involved in reading the memoir—“With much difficulty Adeline made out the following lines” (131)—affirm her own power to 80 decipher and present her “translation” of the text. Adeline’s finding and decoding are testaments of her textual power.

The corporeality of the manuscript, fragmented as it is, stands in contrast to the many rumors surrounding the abbey. The neighboring townspeople have long believed the abbey to be haunted, for they think that a man was murdered within its walls. The physical manuscript is a concrete piece of evidence, one that confirms the people’s suspicions. The importance of this manuscript in determining the mystery of the abbey further validates Adeline’s exploration of the secret rooms, for she has found proof of the prisoner’s last days within the abbey. Radcliffe’s embedded narrative presents textual reality as authentic evidence and also validates the work of the heroine who brought such evidence to light.

Adeline’s rapt perusal of the document and her trust in its contents put her in stark contrast to La Motte. When Adeline reads the manuscript, she recognizes its truth:

“Some horrid deed has been done here […] the reports of the peasants are true. Murder has been committed” (140). Though she initially withholds the manuscript from the La

Mottes, reading it in within the secret confines of her room and not betraying her discovery until she has had sufficient time to read the entire record, Adeline eventually shares her finding with La Motte, who dismisses the document: “It appears to exhibit a strange romantic story; and I do not wonder, that after you had suffered its terrors to impress your imagination, you fancied you saw specters, and heard wondrous noises”

(144). La Motte’s rejection of Adeline’s faith in the text recalls the contemporary debates of the 1790s surrounding women’s reading habits, for he believes that she has been swayed by the “strange romantic story.” However, Adeline has not fallen victim to 81 believing a fiction; rather, La Motte has. Wrapped up in the schemes of the Marquis, La

Motte cannot escape his power. The text represents this sharp divide between Adeline, who finds and recognizes textual truth, and La Motte, who becomes beholden to a corrupt man.

Not only does Adeline find and believe this recovered document, she also practically realizes how best to put it to use. Though La Motte dismisses it as mere fancy, Adeline knows it is evidence of the Marquis’s diabolical character and would help

La Motte plead his case against the trumped-up charges. She is disturbed when she learns it has been left at the abbey: “This circumstance much distressed her, the more so because she believed its appearance might be of importance on the approaching trial: she determined, however, if she should recover her rights, to have the manuscript sought for”

(346). Adeline never has to follow through on her determination because the Marquis, besieged by guilt, takes his own life, a circumstance that gives La Motte his liberty, but her plans for the found memoir demonstrate the potential of her textual power. Far from being a silly woman reader, as La Motte implies, Adeline is a cognizant heroine who wields considerable textual power as she finds, reads, and uses the manuscript to help herself and others.

The Preservation of Relics

As embedded texts, the found memoirs in both Vancenza and The Romance of the

Forest occupy double narrative positions, for they are simultaneously set off from the narrative and also embedded within the narrative—both removed and integrated. In their conclusions to these novels, both Robinson and Radcliffe emphasize the individual nature 82 of these texts. In Vancenza, the Marchioness preserves the memoir, according to her sister’s wishes. This action moves the narrative away from Elvira’s deathbed, for the final lines of the novel describe the fate of the found text: “The mournful manuscript, was, by the Marchioness de Vallorie, after erasing the family name, deposited in the library of the University of Naples; where possibly it remains, a sad record of the fatal consequences of—MISTAKEN CREDULITY!” (151). Robinson reverses the beginning frame narrative of The Castle of Otranto as the Marchioness places the found document into a library, allowing for future discoveries of the recovered document.

Radcliffe also stresses the importance of the found text as an individual object. In the conclusion of The Romance of the Forest, Adeline’s future brother-in-law delivers her father’s memoir to her, having “preserved it with the pious enthusiasm so sacred a relique

[sic] deserved” (355). The OED defines relic as “the physical remains (as the body or a part of it) of a saint, martyr, or other deceased holy person, or a thing believed to be sanctified by contact with him or her (such as a personal possession or piece of clothing), preserved as an object of veneration and often enshrined in some ornate receptacle” (1a).

The religious diction invokes the great emotional attachment the text represents, since it is the only tangible connection Adeline has to her murdered father. The word choice also stresses the corporeal, physical nature of the text—its status as an object that will be

“preserved” and “enshrined.”

The placement of Elvira’s mother’s memoir in the library and the elevation of

Adeline’s father’s record to a relic underscore the physicality of these texts, which allows them to live on—in an abstract way—beyond the close of the novel’s narrative. The word relic can also mean “that which remains or is left behind, esp. after destruction or 83 wasting away; the remains or remaining fragments of a thing” (2a). Though we typically think of the ruins of Gothic castles or abbeys being the only fragments that potentially survive beyond the plot’s end of a Gothic novel, Robinson and Radcliffe both suggest that these texts—important as they were in the novel narratives—will be preserved for future generations, too.

The future life of these texts underscores the human agency that brought these documents to light. A celebration of the future fate of the recovered document reflects the actions of the heroines who made these crucial discoveries. The embedded text, even in its potential role beyond the close of the novel, demands that we consider the context of its appearance, especially she who finds and brings the text to the attention of others.

Such special care makes the process of “finding” possible for others, though without the labor and terror that the Gothic heroines endure when they originally discover these texts.

Critics often fault Gothic novels, especially those works written by women authors, for capping the potentially transgressive energy of these texts. These novels initially seem to challenge the prevailing themes of domesticity by exposing the violence inherent in the family and the patriarchal setting. However, the typical comic endings that resituate the heroine in a married, conventional life seemingly destroy any revolutionary message, as Kilgour describes: “In the female version of development, the female individual is usually brought safely into a social order which is reaffirmed at the end” (37). The heroine returns to a stable domestic environment, usually through marriage, and so Kilgour claims that the narrative posits a circular form (37).

Though the heroine’s conclusion often seems as disappointing as the explanation of all the mysteries at play in the novel, novelists emphasize that these found texts will be 84 preserved. The heroine may return to a confined domestic setting, but the recovered document has been unearthed and will be available for future readers. Perhaps we can read such conclusions as the triumph of the Imagination, a typically Romantic theme, for the novels celebrate the longevity of narrative, which seems to outlast the heroine’s active agency. I argue that the preservation of these texts commemorates not only the narratives inherent in them but also the Gothic heroine’s bravery and determination to find these documents. Gothic novelists assemble texts that reflect women’s agency, though not necessarily authorial, and showcase the pivotal link between women and texts in the

Gothic novel, which parallels Mary Robinson’s listing of women-authored texts at the conclusion of her Letter to the Women of England.

Texts and the Gothic Heroine’s Identity

I have argued that the formal hybridity at the heart of the Gothic novel, especially through the use of the embedded text, illustrates Gothic heroines’ agency as they find and share texts. The contents of these narratives, which unlock the mysteries of the novels, posit the Gothic heroine as the character who finds and shares the authentic reality of history, as opposed to the legends and rumors that often surround such settings.

However, the connection between the heroine and the content of these texts extends further, for the mysteries of these novels often concern the true identity of the Gothic heroine.

One of the stock conventions of the Gothic novel is that the heroine is an orphan, bereft of any guiding, protective force. Elvira of Robinson’s Vancenza has no knowledge of her biological identity, knowing only that she is the ward of the Count Vancenza: 85

“[S]he found herself, at the dawn of reason, the darling of the Count, the pupil of his sister, the companion of Carline, and the object of universal adoration in the castle she inhabited” (16-17). Since childhood she has enjoyed a sense of family harmony even though “her origin, her rank, and even her family name, were to her unknown” (16).

Adeline of The Romance of the Forest is also an orphan, though she mistakenly thinks that her father is an abusive man who has neglected her throughout her life.

Because the heroine’s identity is often just as much of a mystery as other secrets within the Gothic setting, the found text does more than simply clear up all the unknowns of the novel, for it often becomes the means of establishing the heroine’s true parentage.

The Gothic heroine’s emotional reaction to her discovery often bespeaks more than an influx of sensibility as it foreshadows the multi-faceted relationship between questing heroine and the product of her labor. When Elvira finds the poem etched upon the castle’s window, she feels an overwhelming connection to the poet: “[W]ould I had known her, I am certain I should have loved her” (91-2). Adeline also feels sorrow for the unknown author of the found memoir: “Your miseries, O injured being! are lamented, where they were endured. Here, where you suffered, I weep for your sufferings!” (132). Such emotional ties signify the parent-daughter bond made manifest in these texts.

Both Elvira and Adeline feel that some type of predestined, supernatural power plays a role in their discovery of texts so relevant to their lives. Elvira, as noted, repeatedly refers to Fate as she finds the lock that matches her key. Adeline, upon recognizing that the memoir writer was actually her murdered father, reflects on the presence of a greater plan: “When she remembered the manuscript so singularly found, 86 and considered that when she wept to the sufferings it described, her tears had flowed for those of her father, her emotion cannot easily be imagined. The circumstances attending the discovery of these papers no longer appeared to be a work of chance, but of a Power whose designs are great and just” (346). Both Robinson and Radcliffe employ the language of the supernatural usually associated with the Gothic, though they use it to reiterate the natural link between parent and child, rather than create a nebulous, macabre atmosphere.

These multiple layers of connection between heroine and text combine to highlight the Gothic novel’s investment in demonstrating a strong tie between women and textual power. On a pure content level, the heroine finds a recovered document, a pairing that pushes us to examine this relationship more closely. The corporeality of the found narrative stresses the physicality of the heroine and her active labor to find the tangible evidence. By employing the embedded text, Gothic novelists promote the heroine’s agency in presenting a form of valid authority in the face of the traditional

Gothic mystery. The biological ties revealed through these texts and the accompanying belief in divine intervention further emphasize the Gothic novel’s portrayal of heroines’ textual power.

The affirmation of the Gothic heroine’s textual power recalls the rise in women writers’ textual and narrative power during the Romantic period. An increasing number of women novelists parallels the growth of the Gothic novel, for David Richter claims,

“Roughly 40 percent of the works of fiction published between 1795 and 1820 would be classified as Gothic novels” (101). During this time period, women writers increasingly find their own textual power through the vehicle of the Gothic novel. Gothic novelists 87 formalize this historical shift by putting texts, especially embedded texts, into the hands of the primary women characters in their own works. The links between these texts and questions of identity allude to the shifting roles of women novelists and editors, those who—like the Gothic heroine—now find themselves with textual power.

It is surely no accident that Jane Austen’s most powerful defense of the novel appears in her semi-gothic work, Northanger Abbey. The narrative surrounding her heroine halts as the narrator interjects with a call to support novelists and their successful works. Appealing to other novelists, she says, “Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried” (23). Austen invokes the language of corporeality as she labels novelists “an injured body.” Though the word body ostensibly refers to the grouping of novelists, it also draws attention to their bodily presence, as well as the injuries inflicted upon that body. Though Austen does not gender this body, her references to particular works, like Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and Belinda (1801) suggest that she refers specifically to women writers. She chides those fellow novelists who have their heroines dismiss novels by laying them aside rather than celebrating their reading habits. She writes, “Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?” (23) Austen’s defense and her novel-reading heroine, who navigates Gothic settings and storylines, remind us of the powerful link between women and texts in Gothic novels—one that novelists manipulated through the use of the embedded text to emphasize the agency concurrent with heroines’ interactions with texts. These exchanges suggest not only the 88 increasing number of women novelists during the period, but also the expanding power of women editors.

89

Chapter Three

Textual Possession: The Generic and Formal Innovation

of Sophia Lee’s The Recess

In addition to her powerful defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey, Austen also presents discussion of another popular genre of the period: history. Heroine Catherine

Morland confesses her dislike of traditional histories: “I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome” (79). Catherine notes the irony of her reaction:

“[A]nd yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books” (79). Recognizing the fictional element of history, Catherine wonders that it continues to displease her. Miss Tilney replies,

I am fond of history—and am very well contented to take the false with the true.

In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and

records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as any thing that does

not actually pass under one’s own observation […] If a speech be well drawn up, I

read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made—and probably with much

greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine

words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great. (79) 90

Miss Tilney refers to the most notable histories published in the eighteenth century,

William Robertson’s History of Scotland during the Reign of Queen Mary and James VI

(1759) and David Hume’s History of England (1754-62). Her response to Catherine affirms the pleasure concurrent with inventive history, validating it as truthful as anything can be that does not stem from personal experiences.

Sophia Lee adds to the realm of inventive history with her historical novel, The

Recess, published in three volumes in 1783 and 1785. Within twenty years after its publication, the novel had been printed in Europe and North America, had gone through five English and two Irish editions, and had been translated into five languages (Alliston xix). Montague Summers lauds the now little-known novel: “[T]his romance is one of the landmarks of English literature, and it is difficult to understand how those who have not read at least The Recess and The Canterbury Tales can claim any right to be heard when they discourse upon and trace the history of English fiction” (164).

Though immensely popular, the novel also endured the censure of contemporary critics, especially in light of its appeals to truth and authenticity. April Alliston notes that

Lee’s “new form [of historical novel] was in competition” with histories such as

Robertson’s and Hume’s, and some readers failed to differentiate between the two (xvi).

In his preamble to Plexippus: or, The Aspiring Plebian (1790), Richard Graves mocks a lady who believed that The Recess was founded upon fact. He warns of the dangers of this new genre: “I take this opportunity of saying a word on what are called ‘historical romances’: in which some ingenious writers (especially amongst the French) have often mixed truth with fiction in such a manner as must necessarily lead young minds into error, and introduce confusion into all history” (viii-ix). In the midst of an otherwise 91 glowing review, Gentleman’s Magazine also raises concern over this new genre: “[W]e cannot entirely approve the custom of interweaving fictitious incident with historic truth; and, as the events related approach nearer the aera we live in, the impropriety increases”

(327). These references to mixing and interweaving truth and fiction highlight the hybrid nature of Lee’s novel.

Lee’s deployment of this emerging genre, as influenced by French women writers,9 marks an auspicious entry point for British women writers into the realm of history, and concurrently, the entrance of women as main subjects in histories. Anne

Stevens reads The Recess as part of a larger shift in historiography at this time, one that moves away from the “great man” model practiced by both Robertson and Hume.

Instead, histories become more expansive: “[T]he definition of history shifted from the narration of a series of actions to the description of the life of the past. Lee’s novel reflects this shift from action to description, from a verb-centered historiography to a new emphasis on adjectives and descriptive phrases, describing antiquarian topics, such as manners and customs, architectural ruins, costumes, pastimes, and everyday life” (267).

Departing from the histories of Hume and Robertson, Lee fashions an innovative novelistic form, which she uses to chronicle the complex lives and contributions of women in history. Patricia Meyer Spacks observes, “The Recess is emphatically a female

9 Alliston claims, “Lee takes her lead from an already old French tradition whose earliest innovators included the seventeenth-century Madeleine de Scudery and Marie de

Lafayette, by writing the matter of official historiography (as opposed to the other nonfictional genres, from devotional works to travelogues, that more commonly informed the early novel in England) as fiction” (xv). 92 book” (205), for women primarily populate the narrative: twin sisters, women royals, a surrogate mother, among other aunts, daughters, wives, and female friends who appear later in the novel. Austen’s subtle references to The Recess in Northanger Abbey are a testament to Lee’s accomplishment, for Catherine’s true complaint about history is the dearth of women amid a violent, male-dominated landscape.

I argue that The Recess chronicles the benefits of textual ownership and narrative authority, especially for women, and itself serves as a justification of Lee’s experimental novel. This chapter will explore how Lee negotiates her entrance into the historical realm. In both form and plot, through the use of embedded texts and many references to letters and messages throughout the novel, Lee emphasizes texts and their connection to her women characters.

Hybridity in Genre and Form

The Recess chronicles the trials of twin sisters, Matilda and Ellinor, who are the unacknowledged daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots. Lee opens the Advertisement for the novel with a frame story, appealing to its validity: “Not being permitted to publish the means which enriched me with the manuscript from whence the following tale is extracted, its simplicity alone can authenticate it” (3). She declares, “The characters interwoven in the story agree, in the outline, with history” (3). Alliston’s edition of the novel provides copious footnotes that chart the ways in which Lee’s fiction resembles and, less frequently, departs from Hume’s and Robertson’s histories. Noting the gaps in the narrative, Lee describes her own restraint: “An inviolable respect for truth would not permit me to attempt connecting these, even where they appeared faulty” (3). Lee strives 93 to prove the authenticity of the following narrative by aligning it with “history” and

“truth.”

Both Alliston and Cynthia Wall have noted the similarities between Lee’s novel and Hume and Robertson’s works, and, in the Advertisement, Lee states that the

“splendor and misery” of the royal Stuart line, a focus of the novel, “has been marked by an eminent historian” (3). Though unable to find Lee’s specific phrase in any particular history, Alliston declares that the general sentiment was expressed in most popular histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (332 n.4). The reviewer in

Gentleman’s Magazine notes how faithfully Lee portrays her characters by comparing them to the popular traditional historians: “The writer seems well acquainted with the times she describes. The truth of character is rigidly preserved, for the peculiarities of

Elizabeth and James are not delineated with more exactness in Hume or Robertson”

(327). By upholding many of the factual elements described in traditional histories, Lee lends more credibility to her hybrid historical novel.

Though Lee’s novel is often recognized as the first of the historical novel genre, and usually thought to be in competition with more traditional histories, Miss Tilney and others recognize how fabricated traditional history was. Wall claims that historians themselves were enmeshed in the inventive nature of history. She declares, “Eighteenth- century historians certainly didn’t seem to have a sense of ‘history’ as something fixed and stable, awaiting a chiseled recovery” (24). Focusing on Hume in particular, she says,

“Hume’s History has been viewed as either factually unstable, historically wobbly, or stylistically novelistic” (23). We often project our modern distinctions between history and literature on the study of these eighteenth-century works without considering the 94 level of interplay between the two realms at the time of their composition. Indeed, Wall argues that Hume’s History is “a sort of generic sister, an inspirational mirror” for Lee’s novel (24).

Traditional eighteenth-century histories and Lee’s historical novel are parallel in many ways, namely their appropriation of select historical facts, yet Lee’s project is more removed from historiography than Wall claims. Though Wall uncovers the inventive fluidity at the base of most traditional histories, she nods to the unified structure that historians employ so convincingly: “Eighteenth-century historiography might work to narrate coherence, but rarely presumed it” (24). Whereas historians remain committed to depicting the systematic unfolding of historical events, dubious though such timing and unity may be, Lee employs a novelistic structure, an obvious departure from Hume and

Robertson. Lee’s use of embedded texts creates a complex system of narrative layering that specifically highlights the novelistic form of The Recess. I argue that through this narrative form, which is hybrid because of the multiple narrative strands (aside from the historical element), Lee stresses the power concurrent with textual possession.

The narrative layering begins as early as the Advertisement to the novel. The most fabricated element of this Advertisement, the purported presence of an original manuscript, is reminiscent of the opening frame narratives of Gothic novels, which I discussed in the previous chapter. Like Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, Lee relies on the mythic presence of an original manuscript to add verisimilitude to her narrative. The speaker of Walpole’s preface describes the supposed originating text of

Otranto as having been “found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of

England” (167). He notes the time and place of printing, and conjectures at length about 95 the date and motive of original composition. However, Lee stresses only the simplicity and validity of the manuscript. By refusing to describe the particulars of how she obtained the text, she conversely stresses only her possession of it.

The Advertisement suggests the image of Lee holding an old manuscript, whereby textual possession leads to editorial agency. She writes, “I make no apology for altering the language to that of the present age, since the obsolete stile of the author would be frequently unintelligible” (3). She modifies the text and makes it available to a larger reading public. Casting herself as an editor, Lee’s possession of the text allows her to reach a wide audience of readers: “To the hearts of both sexes nature has enriched with sensibility, and experience with refinement, this tale is humbly offered; in the persuasion such will find it worthy their patronage” (3). Lee assures her readers, whom she assumes will be of both sexes, that they will find it “worthy” of their attention. Whereas Walpole stresses the validity of the found manuscript by encumbering his prose with dates, motives, and apologies for confusing elements of the narrative, Lee avoids giving an elaborate backstory, and rather emphasizes her own textual possession and resulting narrative power, so much so that she assures readers of their enjoyment. The device of the original manuscript thus not only attests here to the authenticity of this experimental genre, but also introduces the theme of women’s textual power, which has far-reaching effects throughout the novel.

Noting the many repeated elements throughout the novel, Anne Stevens claims that Lee’s version of historiography is cyclical—a departure from the traditional histories that are rooted in an Enlightenment model of progress. Stevens posits that Lee’s cyclical model is connected to the gender of her primary characters: “While Enlightenment 96 historians frequently structured history as a continual progress toward scientific advancement and bold activity, Lee’s novel suggests that women’s history may not conform to this model, instead presenting endless cycles of birth and death, persecution by men, and tragic love” (278-9). The Recess’s depiction of multiple generations of women suffering imprisonment and betrayal paints a bleak picture of women’s history.

Lee also inscribes the cyclical force of women’s history, as Stevens notes, in the form of the novel, which begins with Matilda on her deathbed, penning her memoir for her newly acquired friend, Adelaide. By beginning with the ending, Lee formally invokes the cyclical nature of pain and hardship that women face. Yet, this structure also promotes the theme of textual ownership introduced in the Advertisement to the novel.

Matilda writes, “Alas! your partial affection demands a memorial which calls back to being all the sad images buried in my bosom, and opens anew every vein of my heart”

(7). Matilda writes her memoir, though painful, for her young friend and creates the promise of textual possession for Adelaide—a circumstance that will have lasting power after her death. Through the Advertisement, the frame letter to Adelaide, and the form of the two sisters’ memoirs, Lee continually stresses the figure of a woman who possesses texts. Lee employs multiple narrative layers and embedded texts to highlight the textual possession that the myriad women throughout the novel enjoy, if only briefly. Women’s textual ownership, Lee suggests, is itself cyclical and can be a corrective force to the negative trends of women’s history that Stevens describes.

Lee raises the theme of textual ownership early in Matilda’s memoir to Adelaide.

She begins with the story of how she and Ellinor are kept hidden in an underground recess until they are young women; Mrs. Marlow, a woman who herself has benefitted 97 from the knowledge concurrent with possessing texts, raises them. Mrs. Marlow recounts the story of her wedding day when the arrival of a packet of letters drastically changed the tenor of the day: “I took up the papers, but had not read half as far, before I was insensible as himself [her husband]” (18). Via these letters, both bride and groom learn that they are in fact brother and sister. As for Elvira in Mary Robinson’s Vancenza, the benefit of textual possession and knowledge is devastating for Mrs. Marlow, though preferable to the alternatives of ignorance and incest.

Before she dies, Mrs. Marlow presents Matilda and Ellinor with invaluable texts, the proof of their parentage: “She delivered us a casket, which contained the papers she mentioned, and divers attestations, signed by herself, and the late Lady Scrope, and filled with all the ornaments of her youth. Then, after recommending us tenderly to Father

Anthony, she joined in prayer with him, and all her little family; and in the midst, expired” (36). The death of Mrs. Marlow spells the end of those who were immediate witnesses to the birth and true parentage of Matilda and Ellinor, so the documents become the only proof of their royal lineage and birthright.

Though interspersed with a few letters from the sisters’ friends, the majority of the novel is composed of memoirs penned by each sister. Alliston celebrates the “unique and sophisticated innovation in the epistolary form, unmatched either by imitators or predecessors” (xxii). Through this form, “Lee […] dramatizes the inevitable partialities of point of view in the perception and construction of historical character” (xxiii). Megan

Isaac also claims that through the form of embedded texts, “Lee presents an amazingly comprehensive and complex picture of female powers, potentials, and most importantly, problems within the patriarchal system” (204). Isaac argues that this form highlights the 98 necessity of women’s voice in history as well as the singularity of individual voices: “By narrating and interpreting events first through Matilda’s eyes and then offering the same events a second time through Ellinor’s eyes, the reader is forced to recognize that all histories are at best only selective stories—whether they are told by men or by women”

(216). Alliston’s and Isaac’s praise of Lee’s original form focuses on the differing depictions of character and perspective and argues that Lee presents a more comprehensive view of history through the twins’ double lens.

Yet I argue that more importantly Lee uses the sisters’ twin memoirs to present the dual sides of another issue: the power inherent in textual possession. The bifurcated reality of the twin sisters’ memoirs represents the power of have versus have not. By presenting the differing experiences of Matilda, who maintains possession of her testaments throughout the majority of the narrative, and Ellinor, who is stripped of ownership early in the plot, Lee emphasizes the potential power of owning texts.

Through the use of embedded texts, Lee demonstrates how Matilda’s textual power progresses to an editorial mastery, thus highlighting how women’s textual ownership can lead to opportunities for narrative power.10

10 Heather Lobban-Viravong, however, employs a postmodernist lens to argue that both

Ellinor and Matilda wither under the pressure to narrate the legitimate, or true, self through autobiography. See “Bastard Heirs: The Dream of Legitimacy in Sophia Lee’s

The Recess: Or, A Tale of Other Times.” 99

Ellinor’s Loss: The Innermost Layer

The narrative layering of The Recess is complex. The speaker of the

Advertisement, presumably Lee herself, possesses an old manuscript and uses it as the basis for the following narrative. The narrative proper begins with Matilda writing her memoir for young Adelaide, and her voice bookends the beginning and ending of the novel. However, the innermost layer, the memoir of Ellinor, is perhaps the most pivotal in my argument concerning women’s textual possession, for through Ellinor’s memoir

Lee presents the portrait of a woman who loses textual authority, and thus, narrative agency.

As I argue throughout this project, the language of physicality surrounding embedded texts encourages interpretation that focuses on the corporeal connection between body and embedded text. When Matilda returns home after being imprisoned in a foreign land and repeatedly asks her friend about Ellinor, Lady Arundel hands her

Ellinor’s memoir: “Whatever courage I had collected, I needed it all, when with that fearful pomp of preparation with which friendship ever binds up the wounds of fate, Lady

Arundel produced a number of papers, most of which appeared to be written by my sister.

I kissed the dear traces of a hand so beloved” (154). The text takes the place of the sister’s presence, and Matilda immediately kisses it, for it bears some form of bodily recognition—Ellinor’s handwriting.

Lee suggests further corporeal connections within Ellinor’s story, for Lee repeatedly refers to the effects of Ellinor’s loss of textual possession through bodily imagery. Whereas Matilda deposits her proofs of birth in a safe in her husband’s estate,

Ellinor chooses to wear them in a packet tied around her neck. While the decision to 100 wear them on her person and close to her heart obviously shows how deeply Ellinor values these texts, her choice also makes these texts—like her body—an easy target for an attack. The Gothic imagery of violent seduction underscores the intensity of Ellinor’s loss of her texts. When Elizabeth learns of the flight of both Lord Leicester and Matilda, she strikes at the remaining sister, throwing a book at her head, and Ellinor falls to the floor. Lee cleverly uses this attack—Elizabeth throwing a book at Ellinor—to demonstrate the literal power of a woman’s textual possession, which conversely emphasizes Ellinor’s loss. The physical disrobing and probing that follow suggest the severity of the incident :

The attendants were all called in, and my laces cut, as if I had fainted, the Queen

not chusing to avow a resentment so grossly expressed. A ribbon from whence

hung the dearer part of my existence, those testimonials of my birth, which were

one day to fix my rank in life, attracted the eye of Elizabeth. The ready attendants

disengaged and presented them to her hand, together with the packet containing

my correspondence with Essex. I was insensibly reviving when she perused the

first, but surely that moment half avenged me.—Never did mind or body undergo

a greater revolution—rage evaporated at once—surprize, grief, confusion, silence

succeeded; with a face pale as my own, trembling hands, and failing eyes, over

and over again did she examine the incontestable proofs of so surprising an event:

then wildly glancing over my features, she tore the papers into atoms, she never

thought small enough. (171)

Though analogous to a rape scene, the destruction against Ellinor is more tangible than the robbery of her innocence. Elizabeth’s rage leads her to shred the valued documents, 101 which robs Ellinor of the only proof she has of her birth and renders her completely powerless. In contrast to the Gothic heroines I discussed in the last chapter, who find texts that help them establish their identity, Ellinor is robbed of those texts that prove who she is.

The repetition of the description of this scene, which appears in a letter Lady

Arundel writes to Lord Leicester that is embedded in Matilda’s narrative, emphasizes how important this event is in Ellinor’s life. Though other events often appear twice in the novel, usually to showcase the sisters’ differing perceptions of them, this attack is described twice and both records are consistent with one another. Elizabeth’s discovery of the truth prompts a quick succession of events that lead to Ellinor’s downfall: the imprisonment of Ellinor, Elizabeth’s blackmailing Ellinor into marrying Lord Arlington to save the lives of Mary and Essex, and Ellinor’s being forced to sign a confession that she is not indeed the daughter of Mary.

Lee also suggests a truly corporeal connection between textual possession and

Ellinor. Amidst the chain of events sparked by Ellinor losing ownership of her treasured texts, Ellinor feels the effects physically: “It was surely at this tremendous crisis in my life, my fermented blood first adopted and cherished those exuberances of passion, which ever after warped the equality and merit of my character; that blood now boiling in my veins, joined with a disordered imagination to call around me a thousand visionary inconsistent forms, to whose voices my burning heart responded” (178). Though describing what amounts to a psychotic break, Ellinor refers to the physical effects on her body, namely the brain and blood: “[…] the deep melancholy which had seized upon my brain soon tinctured my whole mass of blood—my intellects strangely blackened and 102 confused, frequently realized scenes and objects that never existed, annihilated many which daily passed before my eyes” (182). Ellinor physically feels the effects of

Elizabeth’s robbery of her proofs of birth and the resulting turmoil she must undergo.

Lee also relies on the form of Ellinor’s memoir to demonstrate her deteriorating health and mental instability. Immediately following the reflection quoted above, the narrative breaks, marked by a line of asterisks; ten more such breaks occur in the second half of Ellinor’s memoir. These breaks emphasize the fragmented nature of Ellinor’s narrative, especially in contrast to Matilda’s, and allude to the disparate wanderings of

Ellinor’s compromised mental state. Dashes also permeate Ellinor’s writing, such as in the following fragment: “I dreamt of Essex—Ah!, what did I say? I dreamt of Essex?—

Alas I have dreamt of him my whole life long!—Something strangely intervenes between myself and my meaning—No matter, I am too stupefied now to explain it” (185). The multiple dashes, here and throughout Ellinor’s narrative and letters, suggest her desperate attempt to fashion connections between her thoughts, though in her narrative the dash itself is often only a visual bridge of punctuation, rather than a logical means of connection. Roxanne Eberle discusses the use of similar punctuation in Mary’s record of her rape in Mary Hays’s A Victim of Prejudice (1799): “The narrator conveys the horror of rape through fragmented sentences and dashes until finally language breaks off altogether, and she chooses to represent the unspeakable with a series of asterisks” (87).

Eberle claims that Mary represents the “unspeakable” actions of the rape in her punctuation choices, and similarly, Ellinor records the unnarratable consequences of

Elizabeth’s rape-like attack on her: the loss of her reason. 103

Ellinor’s loss of her birth documents signals a fraught relationship between herself and texts for the rest of the novel. In order to save the life of her mother, Ellinor acquiesces to signing a confession that renounces any claim to being the daughter of

Mary: “I rashly scrawled my name, and snatching that tremendous mandate he yet held before me, tore it into a thousand atoms, and sunk upon the ground in the most violent convulsions” (179). Ellinor destroys the death order for Mary, mimicking Elizabeth’s destruction of her proof of birth, but her action carries no weight; little does she know that her mother was indeed executed at this very time. Ellinor, recognizing her progressively deteriorating state, also does not force a façade of reason in her own narrative. In another fragment, Ellinor writes, “Oh, these cruel wanderings!—but I dare not attempt to correct or avoid them, lest in the very effort reason evaporate, and inconsiderate stroke should confuse my whole story” (185). Ellinor willingly forgoes an editorial attempt to correct her narrative—to make it more coherent—for she fears that such an effort could actually weaken the story through greater confusion. She chooses not to wield any greater power over her narrative than the simple recording of her thoughts, disjointed as they might be. In renouncing any further mastery over her narrative, she enacts Elizabeth’s original robbery of textual power, which was compounded by her signing the false confession. Thus, Elizabeth’s attack has far-reaching effects for both

Ellinor’s physical and mental state, as well as her fragmented narrative.

Ellinor voluntarily relinquishes narrative agency, and others willingly step in to exert authority over both her narrative and her person. Lady Pembroke assumes the first level of editorial power over Ellinor’s writing as she appends Ellinor’s final letters to her to the original memoir addressed to Matilda. Lady Pembroke writes, “Something seems 104 to assure me thou [Matilda] art still alive, and suffering; and for thy sake I will preserve these melancholy memorials: alas! perhaps it were truer kindness to destroy them”

(220). Within these two letters, though Ellinor seems to regain more rational thinking, there are traces of her mental instability; dashes and text breaks also appear in these epistles. At one point, Ellinor declares, “Oh! my shook brain, how wild it wanders!—” just before a line of asterisks (227). The second letter finally concludes with Ellinor’s impassioned and tortured response to news of Essex’s execution, an eight-line paragraph punctuated with twelve dashes and three exclamation points. Lady Pembroke’s words bookend Ellinor’s: “The trembling hand of the friend last invoked, takes up the pen to finish the woes of a fair unfortunate, who will never more be her own historian.—Alas, they had now reached their climax” (256). Ellinor’s narrative remains fragmented, for she cannot write her own conclusion, as opposed to Matilda and her narrative.

Lady Pembroke’s and Matilda’s willingness to editorialize both Ellinor and her narrative compromise her narrative authority further. Though Lady Pembroke praises the sweetness of her friend and mourns her personal tragedy, she does not hesitate to judge

Ellinor’s shortcoming: “When this heart-breaking narrative came to my hands, I could not but observe that the sweet mistress of Essex had a very partial knowledge of his character, or information of his actions” (256). Though Lady Pembroke is Ellinor’s closest friend, she claims Ellinor was blind to the faults of her beloved, which is a judgment that Matilda will extend in her reflection on Ellinor’s narrative.

The placement of Ellinor’s memoir as the most embedded narrative in the novel emphasizes her loss of textual possession and her lack of narrative agency. Kate Ellis says, “[I]n The Recess being ‘inside’ means being dominated” (70). Though Ellis refers 105 to physical imprisonment, her claim applies to more figurative places as well, for Matilda continues the domination over Ellinor’s memoir that Lady Pembroke begins. As I discuss in the next section, Matilda takes advantage of the opportunity to frame Ellinor’s narrative with questions, critique, and judgment.

Matilda’s Narrative of Mastery

Though two memoirs of twins comprise the novel, Lee’s form inscribes a power dynamic between the two. Matilda describes the act of embedding Ellinor’s memoir within her own: “Alas, those sheets are yet by me, and I need only subjoin them” (154).

Ellinor’s narrative has passed through the hands of Lady Pembroke, who dies, to her sister Lady Arundel, and then to Matilda. The multiple owners emphasize the objectification of Ellinor’s narrative, which Matilda highlights when she “subjoins” the

“number of papers” to her own text. Matilda’s narrative frames Ellinor’s memoir, and, through her comments, Matilda seemingly rewrites Ellinor’s version of their history.

Matilda’s textual possession of Ellinor’s memoir, especially in the wake of

Ellinor’s mental breakdown and eventual death, allows her to offer a revisionist approach to Ellinor’s observations. She first attacks her sister’s dislike of Lord Leicester:

The strange and unaccountable difference in my sister’s opinion and my own,

respecting Lord Leicester, supplied me a source of endless meditation: yet, as this

difference became obvious only from the time we arrived in London, I could not

help imputing her blindness to the same cause she assigned for mine.—Certainly

she imbibed the unreasonable prejudices of Lord Essex; whose ambition (however

fatally expiated) always inclined him to dislike a Nobleman born to supersede 106

him. I saw too plainly from the irritation and vehemence to which her temper

from that period became subject, how much a woman insensibly adopts of the

disposition of him to whom she gives her heart. (271)

Matilda blames her sister’s dislike of Lord Leicester on her partiality for the inferior Lord

Essex, whose own faults compelled him to dislike his superiors. However, in ascribing romantic partiality to Ellinor, Matilda dismisses the earlier part of Ellinor’s narrative in which she recounts how intensely she disliked Lord Leicester from their first meeting, months before she would meet Essex. Furthermore, Matilda attempts to excuse her own love-blindness by claiming Ellinor suffered from it as well, creating a sister victim and continuing the sibling blame game rather than considering that Ellinor had real reason to dislike Lord Leicester. Matilda notes her own moral ethos as she claims that she “had not however looked on [Ellinor’s] choice with the contemptuous asperity with which she regarded mine” (271). Earlier in her narrative, Matilda also blames Ellinor for their mother’s death: “Lovely, ill-fated sister, it was you then who accelerated our hapless mother’s death! […] I plainly perceive my sister indiscreetly wore the duplicate proof of our birth, its dearest and best testimonial, while mine is yet treasured in the secret cabinet at Kenilworth; and this in one moment destroyed her own peace, and determined the fate of her mother” (120). Matilda blames Ellinor for the fatal mistake of wearing that precious document rather than hiding it more carefully, as Matilda does. Because

Matilda embeds Ellinor’s narrative within hers, Matilda’s voice brackets Ellinor’s and

Matilda’s narrative becomes the dominant voice for the reader. Matilda’s editorializing 107 extends the chain of textual loss begun by Elizabeth’s violent attack, for Matilda’s corrective point of view dismisses Ellinor’s recounting of history.11

Matilda also recognizes the potential benefits of textual possession for her daughter, Mary. When she travels to Kenilworth to recover the proofs of her birth from their secret hiding place, she notes her hopes for them:

The next casket was a gift from the fond mother to the darling of her heart: it

contained all the testimonials of the Queen of Scots, and other parties concerned,

on the subject of my birth, with the contract of marriage between Lord Leicester

and myself. I felt rich in these recovered rights: and though prudence might

never permit me to claim alliance with King James, yet to bequeath to my

daughter the power of doing so, at whatever period it should appear advantageous,

was a great consolation to me. (276)

Textual possession becomes the equivalent of birth right, for these are the only means for young Mary to prove her royal lineage. However, Matilda never cedes complete control to her daughter, and thus makes a critical error. Upon arranging a meeting with King

James, Matilda presents him with the long-cherished documents proving their kinship:

“[Y]our Majesty will see in these papers the solemn attestations, the unquestioned

11 Though I point to these differences in point of view to highlight the sisters’ different levels of narrative power, Cynthia Wall argues, “There is a great rhetoric of sisterhood throughout the novel, but it is rhetoric only” (33). She points to the many differences between Ellinor and Matilda’s narratives, Matilda’s inability to save her friend Rose from suicide, and Matilda’s blaming their mother’s death on her sister.

108 handwriting of your royal mother; in these you will find corroborating testimonies of many noble and unblemished persons.—Peruse them cautiously, and oh, beware how you pre-judge me!” (301). Matilda’s language—calling upon her mother as author, pointing out the handwriting, and employing the term publish—highlights the novel’s connection between texts and women. Matilda makes the profound mistake of leaving the documents with James, and she learns the weight of her error the next day when Matilda and Mary, instead of being escorted to see the king, are taken to a prison, and James sends Matilda the confession that Ellinor had been forced to sign, testifying that the twin sisters were not of royal lineage. Matilda exclaims, “I knew the King to be mean, base, subtle, yet I madly delivered into his treacherous hands every thing on which our hopes, nay, even our vindication must be grounded” (306). Matilda later learns that James, like

Elizabeth, destroys Matilda’s treasured testaments.

Though both sisters eventually lose this form of textual power by having their documents of birth destroyed by their royal relatives, Matilda attempts to correct her own error in judgment, so different from the cruel attack perpetuated against Ellinor.

Matilda’s imprisonment merely becomes another instance in which she can showcase her editorial prowess. Though not allowed to have any writing instruments, Matilda relies upon her creativity to communicate with the guards secretly: “From the middle of a large book, which we had unmolested possession of, I took some of the printed leaves, and from the conclusion a blank one; out of the first I cut such simple words as simply conveyed my meaning, and sewed them on the last.—‘Assist us to escape, and we will make your fortune,’ was the substance of this singular but important billet’” (310).

Removed from her daughter, stripped of her long-kept documents, and not allowed to 109 have any writing instruments, Matilda makes the most of her resources so that she can communicate, relying on texts again to manifest power for her under the most dire of circumstances. Her use of a text written by another, yet repurposed for her own ploy, and refashioned by her hand, again shows Matilda’s editorial power. Sewing these words together to create the billets, Matilda literally demonstrates her own handiwork in creating new meaning through her arrangement of texts written by others, and the sewing also uniquely highlights how the editorial power can be coupled with one more distinctly feminine. The billets open communication between Matilda and the guard, assuring her of the safety of her daughter and finally ensuring her escape to the room of her daughter’s confinement, though Matilda effects her escape just in time to witness the dying breath of her daughter, who was poisoned by the jealous wife of her beloved Somerset.

Though Matilda must endure the pain of losing her daughter in their house prison, an event that Matilda feels will trigger the end of her life, this situation allows Matilda to recoup her textual power by converting her loss—both the loss of the testaments of her birth and the restriction on any writing elements—into a means of editorial power.

Whereas Ellinor deliberately chooses not to edit her own record, Matilda assumes editorial control, even in the face of pain, by deciding to write her own memoir, a potential substitute for the documents that the King had destroyed and a corrective to that false confession signed by Ellinor.

A Memoir for Adelaide

Matilda finally reveals the identity of her addressee, who is mentioned by name only at the outset, in the concluding pages of the novel. She instructs young Adelaide to 110 visit her unmarked grave in France and drop a few tears in her memory. It is significant that as Matilda directs young Adelaide to her unnamed grave, she passes on the story of her life, for the text will survive Matilda though her ashes will not be marked with her own name. Matilda’s plans for an anonymous burial are consistent with other deaths and burials throughout the novel: Mrs. Marlow must be buried in the recess with no identifying marker, Lord Leicester’s body is switched for another, and Ellinor fakes her death with a substitute body. The novel repeatedly demonstrates the ineffectiveness of a grave or body to honor the true identity of the dead. However, Matilda’s narrative provides a much more certain proof of the story and struggles of her life—a text that can be shared and read by others, rather than a stationary memorial.

By addressing her memoir to the daughter of a French ambassador, Matilda moves beyond the focus on familial succession so prevalent throughout the novel.

Though both Ellinor and Matilda entertain hopes of being restored to their rightful royal position, it is their very relatives, Elizabeth and James, who destroy any such opportunity for them. So many of Matilda and Ellinor’s misfortunes are results of their birth and the seemingly inherited curse of their mother and surrogate mother, Mrs. Marlow (Stevens

276). Matilda’s decision to bequeath her memoir to a non-relative illustrates how removed textual possession is from royal identity and legitimacy. By choosing a

Frenchwoman to receive her memoir, she also further distances herself from the English homeland that has continually threatened her life. Though her birth is never lawfully recognized, she benefits from textual ownership, and thus, narrative agency throughout her life, so she chooses to pass a text on to another woman through her own means— completely removed from any familial or national custom. 111

Furthermore, Matilda gives her memoir to a woman who has the means to ensure a wide readership. In her address to Adelaide, Matilda writes, “Yet consummate misery has a moral use, and if ever these sheets reach the publick [sic], let the repiner at little evils learn to be juster to his God and himself, by unavoidable comparison” (7). Lee’s opening and closing words to Adelaide are infused with moralistic messages, but more importantly, Matilda clearly anticipates a public audience. As the daughter of an ambassador, Adelaide would probably have far-reaching connections and could presumably publish Matilda’s narrative for the public. Hence Matilda has the potential to validate her identity and chronicle her struggle even beyond the grave. Her narrative, including the embedded memoir of Ellinor, showcases her fortitude in crafting a corrective force to King James’s destruction of her texts. Though Ellinor withers and signs a false confession in the face of Elizabeth’s tearing up her birth documents, Matilda writes and compiles the text that will survive her and tell their story. The

Advertisement’s reference to a manuscript, fictional though it may be, potentially refers to Matilda’s narrative itself, the record she gives to Adelaide. Thus, as Matilda anticipates, the manuscript finally reaches the public eye, though revised by another woman editor.

Passing Forth the Power

The Recess suggests that textual possession indicates not only narrative power but also freedom—another form of power. When Matilda and her young daughter are imprisoned in Jamaica, she mourns most for the lack of books in her daughter’s life. She valiantly attempts to familiarize her daughter with the concept of books though they are 112 without any: “I endeavoured to give her an idea of the nature and appearance of books. I every day made her repeat that word a hundred times” (148). Though Matilda and Mary never receive any books, Matilda suggestively follows her reflection on her desire for books with the news of their freedom. The next paragraph presents Anana relaying the story of her master’s death, and thus their release. Through this chain of ideas, Matilda links the concepts of textual possession and freedom, and more specifically, freedom from a male oppressor.

Though the freeing of Matilda and Mary is one of the most joyful scenes of the novel, its positive energy does not endure. As Isaac notes, “The Recess is not an optimistic novel” (204), rather “Lee is illustrating how women can better use the resources that are frequently available within the patriarchy to their own advantage”

(204-5). Though Isaac does not specify these “resources,” I argue that textual possession represents potential power in The Recess. Thus, Matilda yearns for books for her daughter and herself while they are imprisoned. Regardless of the circumstances, the women who populate the novel—including the editor figure presented in the

Advertisement, Mrs. Marlow, and the twin sisters—recognize the potential of textual possession, though perhaps Matilda benefits from it the most.

Matilda will not go to her grave without ensuring that she grants the power of textual possession to another woman, Adelaide. The epistolary format of the novel privileges the act of passing a text forward to another person. Stevens notes that letters were a popular vehicle for historical information; by the middle of the eighteenth century, antiquaries were “publishing numerous collections of personal letters for their value as historical sources” (271). Matilda certainly hopes that her memoir can be a corrective 113 force to the lies propagated by both Elizabeth and James about Ellinor and herself. Yet, the intimate nature of this form also suggests Matilda’s wish that circumstances might be different for the young Frenchwoman. She bequeaths her history to Adelaide with a heavy heart: “Yet, alas, it is with regret I present to your youthful eyes so melancholy a chart of my voyage through life.—Suffer it not to damp your hopes, but rather let it blunt your sense of misfortune” (325). Encouraging Adelaide not to allow the memoir to darken her hopes, Matilda’s address could be universal to all women—women who suffer through the seemingly endless cyclical mode of history that Stevens describes.

The epistolary form also recalls the historical figure of Mary and her embroilment in the casket letters affair. After her capture in 1567, servants discovered several letters and sonnets addressed to the Earl of Bothwell, attributed to Mary’s hand, which were used as evidence in accusations that she conspired to murder her husband, Henry Stuart,

Lord Darnley. Though some believed the letters to be authentic and evidence of Mary’s conspiratorial nature, others wrote the texts off as forgeries. The texts mysteriously disappeared a few years later; many believe that Mary and Darnley’s son, James, was behind the disappearance. This historical incident raises the question of textual possession and legitimacy. Through the confiscation of the letters, accusers wrested textual control from the incarcerated Mary and used them to blight her character. And, because most of the texts were letters, the seizure of the letters, if they were indeed authentic, violated the bounds of relationship between author and addressee inherent in the epistolary form.

Thus, Lee’s employment of the epistolary form takes on new historical significance. Jayne Lewis declares, “The Recess vindicates the casket letters not by 114 grappling with the question of their truth or falsehood, but rather by absorbing that unanswerable question into its own textual body” (145). Like Lewis, I do not think Lee is so much concerned with the truth of Mary’s involvement in the affair, but rather how the suspicions affect the “textual body” of The Recess. The multiple narrative layers, including the outermost epistolary layer that Matilda pens for Adelaide, all present the issues surrounding women’s textual possession and narrative authority. The historical

Mary lost her possession of the letters and had to suffer through others’ wielding narrative authority about her as they made their presumptions about her actions. Ellinor, too, notably loses her textual possession in the novel, and thus loses her own narrative authority because she suffers a mental breakdown. Yet, though Matilda eventually loses her testaments in a fit of blind trust, she at least recognizes the power of textual ownership, and so crafts her memoir for the Frenchwoman, which stands as a corrective force to the misinformation about her mother, Ellinor, and her.

In her narrative, Ellinor notes just how much of her history is the result of her being female: “Ah man, happy man! how superior are you in the indulgence of nature! blest with scientific resources, with boldness, and an activity unknown to more persecuted woman” (213). Though Ellinor suffers from the want of textual possession, her sister benefits from successfully mastering both textual possession and narrative power. Her final act of addressing the full memoir to young Adelaide perhaps will change the course of history for the young Frenchwoman by giving her a “resource”—the benefit of textual ownership and the hope of resulting narrative agency. As such, young

Adelaide, through her touch exchange with the sisters’ composite memoir, could potentially break the cyclical nature of women’s history. Lee suggests that texts can be 115 the means of establishing truth and support for women suffering at the ends of discrimination.

116

Chapter Four

Collecting Letters: The Embedded Texts of the Epistolary Novel

In The English Letter-Writer; or, the Whole Art of General Correspondence

(1771), the Rev. George Brown writes, “By this very useful art, we may lay open all the secrets of our hearts on a single slip of paper, and converse with those whom we are separated from” (xiii). Brown’s assessment of letter-writing focuses on the tangibility of the piece of paper, for the document has the potential to cross distances and reach those separated from us, like Matilda reaching out to young Adelaide in Lee’s The Recess.

Furthermore, letter-writing becomes the means of relaying “the secrets of our hearts,” giving fixed form to those abstract thoughts and feelings. Though early experts on epistolarity emphasized the powerful potential of the document itself, academic scholarship of the epistolary novel has focused on bodily, rather than textual, corporeality. The epistolary novel has historically been seemingly synonymous with women and women’s bodies, just as both fictional and authorial bodies has underwritten scholarship of the Gothic novel, as discussed in Chapter Two. Amanda Gilroy and

W.M. Verhoeven, editors of Epistolary Histories (2000), declare that scholarship “has subscribed to the fiction of the feminine, private letter” (3).

Mary Favret discusses this “fiction” in Romantic Correspondence (1993), claiming our typical understanding of the epistolary novel arises from an assumption that

The Portuguese Letters, the letters from Heloise to Abelard, The Life of Marianne,

Pamela, Clarissa, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Julie; or the New Eloise, Dangerous 117

Liaisons, and Evelina are the core texts of the epistolary tradition. Favret notes, “With one exception, these books are written by men; with one exception, they place a woman at the center of the plot” (34). Furthermore, these plots often raise questions of women’s sexuality, which further equates the epistolary tradition with the female body. In addition to novels, conduct literature, instructing women on moral issues, often employed the epistolary form and also established the link between epistolarity and female physicality.

Such an alignment of letters and women’s physicality has reduced the letter to a lower status. Michael Foucault denies letters that most necessary element of texts: the author. In his essay “What Is an Author?” Foucault claims, “As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the ‘author function, while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer—it does not have an author” (107-8). Elizabeth Cook, in Epistolary

Bodies (1996), reads Foucault’s comment as indicative of a mistaken alignment of the letter and the private sphere that has led to a dismissal of the public, cultural history of the letter. Foucault’s statement not only reinforces the skewed separation of private and public, but also suggests the willingness to dismiss the very textuality of a letter.

In this chapter, I argue that a focus on the textual corporeality of individual letters in epistolary novels prompts a re-examination of the genre, namely understanding it as reflecting the larger trend in Romantic hybridity that I have been discussing throughout this study. By recognizing the hybridity of Romantic epistolary novels, we can examine the characters’ interactions, especially women’s, with these individual texts. Eliza

Fenwick’s Secresy (1795) and Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) feature heroines who wield textual power as they assemble letters into collections. In contrast to 118 many of the works included in Favret’s canon of traditional epistolary novels, the heroines of Secresy and Memoirs do not primarily engage in letter-writing to further a love affair. Instead, these heroines, motivated by a purpose wholly different from the single exchange between author and addressee typical of the traditional letter—which is usually romantic, act as editors as they collect letters. These assemblies showcase not only the heroines’ textual power, but also their narrative power—for they create new narratives in their collections. Secresy’s Caroline Ashburn collects letters to relay the story of Sibella’s downfall, and the title figure Emma Courtney crafts a narrative to recount the story of her past passion as a cautionary lesson for her adopted son. Through both collections, the heroines seek to educate their addressees.

Corporeality & Hybridity

George Brown’s celebration of the usefulness of the letter-writing art quickly becomes diluted when scholarship restricts the tradition to only one sex and the narratives traditionally associated with women—friendship, love, and seduction. The letter becomes a vehicle of the feelings of the heart only, rather than a text in and of itself.

Bodily corporeality replaces textuality. Gilroy and Verhoeven argue that the tradition of the feminine letter bespeaks a greater connection between texts and bodies: “At the heart of this fiction [of the feminine letter] is the notion of transparency, of both language and woman” (3). Citing both Clarissa and Pamela as heroines who see letters as “a type of written mimesis of the heart,” they note that “the dominant critical tradition equates letters and love, women’s writing and the writing of the heart” (3). This idea of transparency between the letter and the woman’s heart elides any recognition of the 119 textuality of the letter itself. Epistles become merely representations of women’s bodies rather than concrete texts.

We often have no trouble trusting the textuality of letters referred to in non- epistolary novels. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth notes the appearance and length of Darcy’s letter of full disclosure: “Elizabeth opened the letter, and, to her still increasing wonder, perceived an envelope containing two sheets of letter paper, written quite through, in a very close hand.—The envelope itself was likewise full” (216).

These details referring to the physical appearance of the letter foreshadow the depth and thoroughness of Darcy’s explanations. The narrator also notes, “It was dated from

Rosings, at eight o’clock in the morning” (216). The proliferation of dates and place names in letters further emphasizes their physical nature. Indeed, later in the novel, one of Jane’s letters to Lizzy is misdirected for “Jane had written the direction remarkably ill”

(283). The letters of Pride and Prejudice relay pivotal plot elements: Mr. Darcy’s confession, Lydia’s plans to elope, and Mrs. Gardiner’s declaration of all that enabled

Lydia and Wickham to marry finally, among others. However, Austen also preserves the physicality of the letters in the narrative through such details concerning length, post, and dates.

Letters in novels such as Pride and Prejudice easily demonstrate their own textuality, yet study of the epistolary genre has fallen away from such attention to the physical presence of letters. The letters of epistolary novels insist upon their own textuality as well—often complete with greetings, signatures, dates, and mention of transport methods. However, traditional scholarship has forced a false reading of the genre, one that notes the narrative structure of epistles only to dismiss it as a feminine, 120 private narrative.12 I want to challenge such readings by exploring how the narrative form of the letter often legislates textual and narrative power, especially for women.

Reading the tangible textuality inherent in many epistolary novels presents a new understanding of the narrative structure of the letter form. As Gerard Genette notes in

Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, “[T]he letter is at the same time both a medium of the narrative and an element in the plot” (217). My analysis of how the letter functions in the plots of both Secresy and Memoirs of Emma Courtney demonstrates the potential for reading the letters of epistolary novels as embedded texts. Many narratologists believe that a hierarchy of relationships between framing and embedded narratives must exist for a narrative to be considered “embedded.” Genette’s model of narrative levels—including extradiegetic, intradiegetic, and metadiegetic—establishes the differences between levels of voice and narration. Narratologists employ these same degrees of distinction to discuss the myriad layers of embedded texts.

The letters of an epistolary novel, however, resist such classification because they all function on the same narrative level. Without framing narratives, letters are simply the means of dialogue and unfolding the plot in epistolary novels and do not give any indication of being embedded. Yet Genette’s description of the simultaneous roles of the letter—as both an element of the plot and a means of the narrative—opens a new lens for understanding the form of the letter. The plots of epistolary novels help us understand how we should approach the narrative form of the letter.

12 For example, see Ruth Perry’s Women, Letters, and the Novel (1980) and Nancy K.

Miller’s The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782

(1980). 121

The letters of the epistolary novel act not only to further the dialogue created by the exchange of letters, but also exist as independent texts that can be employed for other motives. Characters often show letters to others, hide them, or save them for future reading. These activities and the characters’ interactions with these letters stress their material nature—their physicality. This focus on corporeality emphasizes the individual textual component of these letters, a quality that remains even when letters are lifted out of the traditional narrative trajectory of the epistolary novel.

Because these letters can exist as independent texts and characters often remove them from the dialogic format of the epistolary novel, I argue that these letters should be understood as embedded texts in the genre. Approaching letters as embedded texts allows a new focus on the ways in which characters interact with and employ these letters for other means. The heroines whom I discuss in this chapter participate in the typical exchanges of epistolary novels; however, they also lift letters out of the traditional trajectory of the epistolary tradition, and instead collect letters, forming an anthology of assembled texts, to teach a lesson to someone other than the original’s letter intended reader. In such instances, reading epistolary novels as formally grounded in texts, rather than just a dialogue, becomes a necessity—for these letters are always texts, whether in their initial exchange between original parties or in other uses.

Recognizing the embedded nature of letters in epistolary novels also emphasizes the hybridity inherent in the genre. Multiple authors, multiple addressees, and multiple texts coalesce to form one novel. As I have argued throughout this study, the hybridity of the Romantic novel legislates textual and narrative power for women. Both Caroline of

Secresy and the eponymous heroine of Memoirs of Emma Courtney use letters to craft 122 new narratives as a means of education for their “students,” both of whom are male.

Textual possession leads to narrative authority, which yields a power dynamic that rewards women’s narrative power. I argue that these women, contrary to Case’s claim, which I discussed in the Introduction, do wield narrative power that qualifies them as

“master-narrators.”

Secresy: The Collecting Daughter

In one of its many interpretations, the title of Fenwick’s lone novel Secresy alludes to the secluded education of Sibella, a project overseen by her uncle, George

Valmont, who attempts to raise her as a submissive woman. He intends her to be the wife of his unacknowledged son, Clement. Mr. Valmont often reprimands Sibella for trying to challenge what he believes is her prescribed identity as a woman: “I tell you, child, you cannot, you shall not reason. Repine in secret as much as you please, but no reasonings. No matter how sullen the submission, if it is submission” (43). Though Mr.

Valmont attempts to raise Sibella to fit his view of ideal womanhood, Fenwick’s epistolary structure, which privileges the spirit of dialogue, presents a heroine who challenges and re-educates Mr. Valmont himself.

Critics have discussed how Fenwick’s novel, like Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), critiques Rousseau’s theories of educating women. Just as the epistolary form encourages dialogue and debates, it also presents the voices of both men and women. Because the male-female exchanges often discuss the controversy over women’s education, these conversations suggest an affront to Rousseau and Valmont’s theories of separate sex education. Furthermore, in the midst of these many voices of 123 men and women, one achieves predominance. Though some may read Sibella and

Caroline Ashburn as twin protagonists, the structure and plot of the novel champions

Caroline as the heroine. Caroline writes twenty of the novel’s seventy-five letters, securing her status as the chief letter writer among the characters. Author of thirteen letters, Lord Filmar ranks second in productivity. Caroline’s letters also appear at important sites of the work: her epistles open Volumes I and II, and her final letter concludes the novel. These formal elements regarding Caroline’s placement and number of letters underscore her dominant voice throughout the novel. Though Mr. Valmont assumes he is the leader in Sibella’s education, one of the novel’s major plotlines,

Caroline continually challenges his authority and becomes the voice of education and site of narrative power throughout the novel.

In a reversal of traditional roles that foreshadows her later power in the novel,

Caroline upbraids the men attending her mother, those hoping to marry Mrs. Ashburn and share her fortune.13 Caroline invites Henry Davenport, a young suitor, to a meeting and proceeds to undo him through a series of questions in which she demands his

“seriousness and sincerity” (144). The daughter assumes the role of a parent as she seeks to elicit his confession of duplicitous motives. Davenport eventually breaks down under

Caroline’s unremitting questioning and confesses his scheme to marry because he is in deep financial ruin, saddled with his beloved—whom he has been forbidden to marry— and an illegitimate child. Caroline later suggests that Davenport should take up a

13 Meghan L. Burke’s “Making Mother Obsolete: Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and the

Masculine Appropriation of Maternity” catalogs many gender reversals, specifically physical ones. 124 profession and directs him to the study of medicine, promising to support him and his little family financially until he can provide for himself. Caroline writes, “Thus have I saved Davenport” (165). Saving him from what would be a disastrous though lucrative marriage, Caroline instead teaches Davenport to provide for himself by learning a profession and gives him the necessary resources to succeed in this course, instructing him to follow a path of determination and perseverance rather than settling for an unhappy alternative.

Caroline’s educational success with Davenport is secondary to her primary goal: to teach Mr. Valmont a lesson. In the first letter of the novel, Caroline questions Mr.

Valmont’s educational project for Sibella. She couches her criticism in terms of enquiry:

As your seclusion of Miss Valmont from the world is not a plan of

yesterday, I imagine you are persuaded of its value and propriety, and I

therefore see nothing which should deter me from indulging the strong

propensity I feel to enquire into the nature of your system; a system so

opposite to the general practice of mankind, and which I am inclined to

think is not as perfect as you are willing to suppose. (39)

Though she acknowledges his “contempt of the female character” (40), she writes,

“Gladly would I divise [sic] a means by which to induce you to lay aside this prejudice against us, and in the language of reason, as from one being to another, discuss with me the merits or defects of your plan” (40). Caroline describes what she believes is the primary defect of Mr. Valmont’s plan, Sibella’s unhappiness, though her assessment promotes her own analytical perception: “[Y]ou seldom see her, and when you do see, you do not study her. I believe I know more of her mental temperament in our seven 125 days intercourse than you have learned in seven years, and I affirm that she is unhappy”

(40). The desire to help Sibella pits Caroline and Mr. Valmont against one another, and, within the first letter of the novel, Caroline establishes her authority.

Sibella’s first letter to Caroline, a letter of thanksgiving for obtaining Mr.

Valmont’s permission to allow this new correspondence between them, underscores

Caroline’s role as a teacher. Sibella asks, “How came it? – How have you prevailed? –

Oh teach me your art to soften his power, to unloose the grasp of his authority, and I will love you as—I believe I cannot love you better than I do; for have you not cast a ray of cheering light upon my dungeon?” (41). Wondering how Caroline could persuade Mr.

Valmont to allow such a correspondence, Sibella desperately pleads for Caroline to teach her the ways of this art. Sibella’s wonderment is justified, for as Ranita Chatterjee notes,

Caroline’s “narrative role is unusual” for “she is the only female character who is respected by the men in the novel” (52). Indeed, Caroline stands in stark contrast to the other female letter-writers of the novel. Sibella has been secluded for the majority of her life, and, as she says to Caroline, “But of the customs of your world, Caroline, I am ignorant” (250). The only other female interlocutor, Janetta Landry, is a coquette who attempts to secure her social status through her romantic affairs. Janetta, embroiled in numerous intrigues, serves as another foil to Caroline. She too wields power, though hers is scandalous and evaporates when she is found out for who she really is.

I would extend Chatterjee’s claim, for Caroline’s narrative role is unusual, not just for the respect she has as a woman, but for the narrative power she manifests. After Lord

Filmar’s abduction of Sibella in the midst of Caroline and Murden’s plan to liberate her from the castle, Caroline writes Mr. Valmont and sends him a packet of all the previous 126 correspondence she received from Sibella and the exchanges between herself and

Murden: “I lay them [the letters] before you, with the confidence that you will afford them a patient and temperate perusal” (336). Caroline willingly breaks the implicit contract of secrecy between letter writers to present the truth to Mr. Valmont. And, in laying the letters before Mr. Valmont, she presents a new narrative for him—a narrative of Sibella’s desperate situation and her and Murden’s attempts to free her from Mr.

Valmont’s imprisoning home.

The letters themselves, products of a correspondence that Mr. Valmont approved, become the means of education for Mr. Valmont. Though Sibella’s later letters to

Caroline detail her desperation over losing Clement a second time and her plans to form a natural marriage with him, her earlier letters question Mr. Valmont’s project more directly. She writes,

Why, if he meant me to degenerate into the mere brute, did he not chain

me in a cave, shut out the light of the glorious sun, forbid me to converse

with intelligent nature? […] A being superior to this only in a little craft,

did Mr. Valmont design to make me: a timid, docile slave, whose

thoughts, will, passions, wishes, should have no standard of their own, but

rise, change or die as the will of a master should require! Such is the

height of virtues I have heard Mr. Valmont describe as my zenith of

perfection. (156)

Because Sibella rarely has the courage to confront Mr. Valmont directly, Caroline’s packet of letters opens a new opportunity for Sibella’s voice. The master reads the reasoned logic of his supposedly inferior slave. Sibella continues by making a 127

Wollstonecraftian argument: “Then I found I was to be the friend and companion of man—Man the image of Divinity!—Where, then, are the boundaries placed that are to restrain my thought?—To be the companion, I must be the equal—To be the friend, I must have comprehension and judgment: must be able to assist, or willing to be taught”

(156-7). Sibella’s multiple dashes reinforce the many connections between her ideas, visually representing her steps of reason—the powers of reason that Mr. Valmont so vehemently denies her. The written letter highlights Sibella’s powers of articulation and reason, and Caroline presents these once-confidential letters for Mr. Valmont to see.

Caroline also sends the correspondence she carries on with Arthur Murden, the interchange that yields their plans to free Sibella from Mr. Valmont’s tyranny. In

Arthur’s first meeting with Sibella, he sees in her what Mr. Valmont cannot: “In the first moment of our intercourse, I saw the firmness of her character. I saw she knew not how to threaten: she could only reason and resolve” (264). Though madly in love with his fantasy of Sibella and what she represents, Murden immediately recognizes the strength of her person in the flesh. Caroline, cognizant of his emotions, writes: “Inexorable as you would persuade me you are, still I hope to conquer you. Yet it must be a future work” (301). Caroline’s plans for future work with Murden and her plans to conquer him are in keeping with her work with Davenport and Mr. Valmont, whose writing also appears in this interchange. He writes to suspend the correspondence between Caroline and Sibella and returns Caroline’s last two letters, unopened. Whereas Caroline sends packets of letters to further dialogue and debate, Mr. Valmont returns a packet of letters as an expression of his authority to disband communication. 128

Caroline not only presents the collection to Mr. Valmont, but also prescribes the way in which he should read it. She writes, “[F]or I think they will serve to convince you, as they have already convinced me by the unfortunate event to which they have led, that, however plausible and even necessary in appearance, yet artifice and secrecy are dangerous vicious tools” (336). She then urges him to read the collection as she does, as a narrative of cause-and-effect. Caroline claims that his educational projects formed the foundation for Clement and Sibella’s wrongdoing: “Your secrets were the preparatory steps to the errors of Clement and Sibella. Had Sibella never departed from strict truth and sincerity, she had never formed her rash engagement with Clement” (336). Caroline again becomes the teacher as she encourages Mr. Valmont to see Sibella and Clement’s mistakes for what they are—his mistakes. She too acknowledges fault: “And lastly, had

I not given way to the fatal mistake that secrecy could repair the inability of reason, I had, instead of availing myself of the ruin on the rock, ere now perhaps released Sibella by convincing you” (336). Though Caroline accepts blame for substituting secrecy for reason, her mistake again finds its root in Mr. Valmont, for he would not listen to

Caroline’s reasoning, pushing her to resort to secret plots to free Sibella.

Caroline’s collection is the culmination of the wish she declared in her opening letter—her desire to “divise [sic] a means” to have a reason-based discussion with Mr.

Valmont (40). Though not explicitly a discussion between Caroline and Mr. Valmont, this collection presents several epistolary discussions, all of which are evidence for

Caroline’s protest of Mr. Valmont’s gendered systems of education. Fenwick does not embed these chosen letters a second time, but instead relies on the reader to infer that Mr.

Valmont reads of Sibella’s unhappiness, her love for Clement, and her proposal to form a 129 natural marriage with him. The letters demonstrate Sibella’s great intellect, Caroline and

Murden’s devotion to Sibella, and Mr. Valmont’s ignorance of the schemes surrounding the liberation of Sibella.

Though Mr. Valmont initially resists seeing or pardoning Sibella, Caroline reports a startling turn of events in the final letter of the novel. She writes to Lord Filmar: “Mr.

Valmont is sick, sick at heart. He could not come to London; but he sent his steward with forgiveness, blessings, and an earnest request that Sibella would make her own disposition of her fortune, by which he has resolved most faithfully to abide” (357). In a novel where so many words have been recorded directly by their authors, including letters exchanged in person and written under cover of other letters, it is telling that Mr.

Valmont’s final message has not been included in the collection. Rather, Caroline speaks for Mr. Valmont, reporting his change of heart and his promise to fulfill Sibella’s final wishes regarding her fortune, an oath that counters his previous enterprise of grooming

Sibella to be Clement’s wife so that the fortune would remain in the Valmont family.

Caroline’s voice subsumes Mr. Valmont’s, and the final image of a dying patriarch sending his forgiveness and blessings spells the end of his enterprise: Sibella is on her deathbed, Clement has wasted himself on Mrs. Ashburn, and Mr. Valmont seemingly surrenders to Caroline’s reason.

Sibella’s dying words also affirm Caroline’s role as an educator, though she instructs Caroline to teach one whom Caroline has always thought ruined beyond hope,

Clement: “When you meet – Clement […] tell him to be sincere. Tell all the world so,

Caroline” (358). Sibella’s message betrays her hope that there is salvation for her beloved, yet her more comprehensive wish illustrates her hope that others can learn from 130 her mistakes and that Caroline can be the means of instruction to the world. Caroline’s final letter, addressed to Lord Filmar, again posits her as the teacher and signals the change in store for him. He, per Sibella’s request, will inherit her fortune, and Caroline writes to him, “[A]nd certain am I, my Lord, that you may find means of disposing of your time, that in real pleasure will beggar all comparison with those to which you have been accustomed” (358). Her tone states the promise of better things to come for Filmar, though it implicitly critiques his past conduct, a tacit warning for him not to fall into such ways again. Though Anne Close claims that the conclusion leaves “Filmar and Caroline at loose ends” (44), this last letter of the novel again demonstrates Caroline leading a man to a more profitable and rewarding path than that he had originally chosen. Caroline may mourn the loss of Sibella and Murden, yet just as Mr. Davenport and Lord Filmar learn from her wisdom, her collection of letters helps her teach a much-needed lesson to Mr.

Valmont.

Memoirs of Emma Courtney & The Mother Memoir

Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, a quasi-epistolary novel, also investigates the value and nature of education. The title heroine addresses her memoirs to her young adopted son as an educational lesson, and the emphasis on education pervades the entire novel. When Emma is a young woman, she reestablishes contact with her father, who, largely absent during Emma’s childhood, begins meeting with her weekly to help her improve her reading. Mr. Courtney wants to provide Emma with useful reading—history, theology, and philosophy. In studying these subjects, Emma first recognizes the power of collecting and arranging her thoughts: “[M]y mind began to 131 be emancipated, doubts had been suggested to it, I reasoned freely, endeavoured to arrange and methodize my opinions, and to trace them fearlessly through all their consequences: while from exercising my thoughts with freedom, I seemed to acquire new strength and dignity of character” (70). Emma quickly recognizes the connection between her character and the freedom to organize her thoughts.

Yet, her epiphany is cut short when she reads Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise and becomes engrossed with the story of Julie and St. Preux: “Ah! with what transport, with what enthusiasm, did I peruse this dangerous, enchanting work!—How shall I paint the sensations that were excited in my mind! – the pleasure I experienced approached the limits of pain—it was tumult—all the ardour of my character was excited” (70). Mr.

Courtney, infuriated by the threat of the sensational novel, snatches the dangerous work from her hands, forever withholding it from her.14 Rousseau’s sentimental epistolary work, a classic epistolary novel, stands as an obstacle in Emma’s education. In Hays’s essay “On Novel Writing,” she defines what a good novel should do: “A good novel ought to be subservient to the purpose of truth and philosophy: […] it is sufficient if it has a tendency to raise the mind by elevated sentiments, to warm the heart with generous affections, to enlarge our views, or to increase our stock of useful knowledge” (180-81).

14 Katherine Binhammer claims that Mr. Courtney should not have confiscated the novel, for “a woman is never entirely immune to the accidental text and she needs critical skills, not prohibition, to safeguard her virtue” (9). For her argument concerning the distinction between active and passive women readers see “The Persistence of Reading: Governing

Female Novel-Reading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern

Philosophers,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 27.2 (2003): 1-22. 132

Memoirs serves as a foil to La Nouvelle Heloise, for it is a work that the heroine puts into her son’s hands to inculcate a lesson, in contrast to Mr. Courtney snatching Rousseau’s work from Emma. Hays employs the epistolary form to craft a pedagogical text, rehabilitating the epistolary tradition from the culture of sensibility.

Hays discusses the letter form directly when questions of propriety fuel concerns over Emma and her correspondence. Emma’s uncle, Mr. Morton, schools Emma in the delicacy regarding a young lady writing letters to a man. When Mr. Morton learns that

Emma and Mr. Francis plan to maintain a correspondence, Mr. Morton immediately informs Emma of Mr. Francis’s lacking economic status and asks, “Has he made you any proposals?” (93). Emma laughs and retorts, “I considered Mr. Francis as a philosopher, and not as a lover. Does this satisfy you, Sir?” (93). Mr. Morton falsely assumes that

Emma’s plans to correspond with Mr. Francis imply a more tangible contract, concluding that the transmission of letters is equivalent to the union of bodies and believing that they must have reached an agreement regarding marriage.

Mr. Morton and Mr. Courtney both earnestly desire to steer Emma clear of the passionate world of letters—both in real life and in her reading. Their reactions demonstrate the dangerous intimacy seemingly inherent in the epistolary form. Yet

Emma’s reply distinguishes the foolishness of Mr. Morton’s assumption, for a letter is just a letter. Emma, considering a correspondence with a “philosopher,” hopes that a letter-writing relationship can increase her knowledge, quite the opposite from Mr.

Morton’s interpretation of the implications of any future correspondence. Emma’s distinction between lover and philosopher functions as a larger commentary on women and letters. Though Mr. Morton and others assume that letters belong to a feminized, 133 personal world, Emma interprets the text’s potential differently. The correspondence will help her further her education, what she terms “a source of improvement” (88).

Mr. Francis’s philosophical lessons are a “a source of improvement” for Emma and stress that she can be a means of improvement for others as well. Mr. Francis resists a vague and abstract approach to philosophy, focusing instead on the interconnectedness of all human beings and their effects on one another. He compels Emma to see the benefit of individual action among the larger system: “[E]very one in his sphere may do something; each has a little circle where his influence will be availing. Correct your own errors, which are various—weeds in a luxuriant soil—and you will have done something towards the general reformation” (100). In many ways, Mr. Francis’s philosophical letters do redirect Emma to the personal, though a personal realm far removed from the passionate intimacy imagined by Mr. Morton.

Mr. Francis’s letters help Emma see the value of the personal among the universal—a theme Emma takes up in her own project for her adopted son. Emma concludes the opening letter to Augustus with an injunction: “Learn, then, from the incidents of my life, entangled with those of his to whom you owe your existence, a more striking and affecting lesson than abstract philosophy can ever afford” (50). Putting her work in particular contrast to “abstract philosophy,” Emma privileges the personal, essentially claiming that her memoir—her experiences and her example—is more effective than any abstract philosophy. As such, Emma’s project reclaims the letter from the passionately personal and employs it as a lesson, albeit a lesson on the dangers of passions. 134

Memoirs opens with an impassioned letter to young Augustus, in which Emma emphasizes the trauma of her writing project: “Rash young man!—why do you tear from my heart the affecting narrative, which I had hoped no cruel necessity would ever have forced me to review?” (48). Emma recoils at the thought of rehashing her troubled personal history, but then writes, “But your happiness is at stake, and every selfish consideration vanishes” (48). With these words, Emma introduces the function of this memoir. It will not be a celebration of a happy life, or the many works of a hero, but it will be a lesson—a mother memoir. After Augustus’s fatal accident, he charges Emma with the care of his young son, and from then on Emma acts as mother to young

Augustus. Emma pens the memoir and collects the included letters to help young

Augustus in his time of personal heartbreak, after hearing that his beloved has married another.

A mother penning her memoirs as instruction for her children is a recurring image in the Romantic novel. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman

(1798), the heroine writes the story of her troubled childhood and her disastrous marriage to George Venables. The narrator notes that the memoirs “might perhaps instruct her daughter, and shield her from the misery, the tyranny, her mother knew not how to avoid”

(15). Amelia Opie, in Adeline Mowbray (1804), also presents a mother who writes her memoirs for her daughter’s benefit. Adeline hopes that “when she shall see in my mournful and eventful history, written as it has been by me in moments of melancholy leisure, that all my sorrows were consequent on one presumptuous error of judgement

[sic] in early youth, and shall see a long and minute detail of the secret agonies which I have endured,” she will learn the value of a woman following the honorable and 135 respected path (591). Both young mothers in these novels hope that their written histories will help instruct their children, to teach them to avoid the mistakes they made—mistakes which were often aggravated by an unjust and discriminatory society.

Though Memoirs stands in this tradition, and given the date of publication, may have helped originate the concept of the mother memoir, in many ways it remains different from the novels mentioned above. Opie relies on straight third-person narration, and the reference to Adeline’s memoirs remains just a reference, with no inclusion of the actual document. Wollstonecraft includes the text of Maria’s memoirs, though according to the plan for the unfinished novel, Maria’s history was to comprise only a section of one-third of the novel.15 Hays’s novel, however, points more directly to the textual reality of the mother’s history, for the entire compilation is the story of Emma’s life, framed by letters to young Augustus begging him to learn from the mistakes of the author’s life.

Hays often highlights a connection between texts and the body in Emma’s memoirs that further emphasizes the idea of the mother memoir. Emma describes the physical marking of text upon her body; the phrases “written upon my own mind in characters of blood” (48) and “engraven on my heart” (50) both occur within Emma's opening letter. Such descriptions illustrate the intimacy between author and text, and in

Memoirs, remind us of the maternal body—a body that itself is the site of production and transmission.16 Though Emma may not be young Augustus’s biological mother, she will

15 See the Appendix, which is attributed to William Godwin.

16 Though I argue that this bodily focus recalls the frame narrative and emphasizes

Emma’s narrative power, Peter Logan reads the opening letter—and the entirety of the 136 pen and pass on her memoirs in the hopes that they can help him. However, I want to note the distinction between this type of reference to physical corporeality and the type of physicality usually associated with the traditional epistolary novel canon. In Memoirs,

Emma’s references to her body reinforce a body-text connection, one that simultaneously emphasizes the importance of the narrative and her own narrative power in relaying it.

More conventional epistolary novels feature a victimized and seduced female body, one that becomes synonymous with the genre itself, though there is no such explicit connection between the text and the body. Hays reclaims the epistolary novel and uses it

memoir itself—as narrative self-violence, emblematic of women’s markedly different social experience from that of men. Noting that the memoir is constructed from sections of the letter she writes to Mr. Francis chronicling her tragic relationship with Augustus

Harley, Logan claims the memoir “is originally produced by a disordered mind as a supposedly rational explanation for the narrator’s actions” (69). Logan interprets the many references to corporeality as evidence of disease, hysteria, and a nervous, over- sexualized body. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the realization of Augustus’s secret, Emma herself claims, “I am, at least, a reasoning maniac: perhaps the most dangerous species of insanity” (211). However, days later, Emma retracts her statement:

“My conduct was not, altogether, so insane as I have been willing to allow” (215). Logan does not address this defense; furthermore, his seemingly feminist interpretation of

Memoirs—arguing that it exposes the hole in Godwin’s philosophy which did not differentiate for men’s and women’s different social experiences—rests upon a problematic foundation of reading the female body as over-sexualized and hysterical.

137 to privilege the presence of the female body, which in the novel, privileges the presence of the caring and reasoning mother—a contrast to the absence of both Augustus Sr. and

Montague.

Yet, as noted earlier, Emma does not simply write her memoirs in straight prose; rather, she collects together the letters she wrote and received during her youth and supplements them with narration. The form of embedded letters showcases Emma’s narrative power in assembling these myriad documents together, and they become an intriguing lesson for young Augustus. Emma’s narrative power rests not only in her power to manipulate and assemble letters, but also in the appeal to veracity inherent in her collection. For through the letters, and particularly in the lack of letters on some occasions, young Augustus learns just how his father acted in his intercourse with Emma.

In one letter to the elder Augustus, Emma states her query directly: “Yet, allow me to request:—ah! do not evade this enquiry; for much it imports me to have an explicit reply, lest, in indulging my own feelings, I should, unconsciously, plant a thorn in the bosom of another:—Is your heart, at present, free?” (137). She concludes the letter with an injunction: “Write to me; be ingenuous; I desire, I call for, truth!” (138). Tellingly,

Augustus avoids replying, and when he does, his response does not equal Emma’s clarity and directness. Augustus writes, “[P]erhaps, on some subjects, it was not necessary to be explicit” and that he “had better be silent” (147). Emma notes Augustus’s avoidance:

“This letter appeared to me vague, obscure, enigmatical. Unsatisfied, disappointed, I felt,

I had little to hope—and, yet, had no distinct ground of fear” (147). This exchange highlights the central tension in Emma’s and Augustus’s dialogue: Emma’s forthrightness versus Augustus’s silence. 138

Emma’s letters are a vehicle for not only her own narrative voice, but also the voice for women at large. In a dialogue between Emma and Mr. Francis, Emma voices the frustration of so many of her sex: “While men pursue interest, honor, pleasure, as accords with their several dispositions, women, who have too much delicacy, sense, and spirit, to degrade themselves by the vilest of all interchanges, remain insulated beings, and must be content tamely to look on, without taking any part in the great, though often absurd and tragical, drama of life” (145). Hays echoes Wollstonecraft when Emma laments what might have been: “The strong feelings, and strong energies, which properly directed, in a field sufficiently wide, might—ah! what might they have not aided? forced back, and pent up, ravage and destroy the mind which gave them birth!” (145). When

Mr. Francis, a character modeled after William Godwin, chides Emma for her torturous slavery to her emotions and Augustus, he calls her to independence, “the first lesson of enlightened reason, the great fountain of heroism and virtue, the principle by which alone man can become what man is capable of being” (209). Yet Emma questions this reproof:

“Why call woman, miserable, oppressed, and impotent, woman—crushed, and then insulted—why call her to independence, which not nature, but the barbarous and accursed laws of society, have denied her? This is mockery! Even you, wise and benevolent as you are, can mock the child of slavery and sorrow!” (213). She appends a quotation from

Godwin’s Caleb Williams to further her point.

This powerful exchange between Emma and Mr. Francis finds its origin in actual letters written by Mary Hays and William Godwin. The composition history of Hays’s

Memoirs begins with the author herself literally collecting letters. Hays includes excerpts of letters she had actually exchanged with Godwin, her philosophical mentor, and 139

William Frend, a love interest who did not return Hays's affections. She reworks the letters to represent the correspondence carried on by her heroine with her mentor and her love interest. Hays’s efforts to compile her letters mirror her heroine’s project to craft her memoirs.17 Such formal innovation casts Emma Courtney as a heroine as radical as her creator—wielding her narrative power in the interest of more opportunities, educational and otherwise, for women.

Teaching through Texts

I have argued that the epistolary form of both Secresy and Memoirs highlights women’s textual power in collecting letters as a means of education. The formal innovations of these novels stress women’s narrative power as they, in effect, create primers for their students. Notably, both addressees in these novels—Mr. Valmont and

Augustus Jr.—are male. Fenwick and Hays seek not only to educate, but to educate men

17 However, this innovative structure was not completely new to Hays herself. Hays produced a volume entitled “Love Letters,” a story that records her courtship with John

Eccles until his early death, a time spanning from 1779 to 1781. Gina Luria Walker claims that this volume grew out of her mourning for Eccles: “With her love life abruptly halted, Hays turned to imaginative experiments in the layering of texts and the positioning of real voices in the manuscript ‘Love Letters,’ extracting text from life and inserting it back again” (13). The weaving of real and imagined letters is a model for

Memoirs, and Walker notes “the ‘Love Letters’ express Hays's intimation of her vocation as a writer” (26). See Mary Hays (1759-1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind

(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 140 specifically. Caroline desperately hopes to correct Mr. Valmont’s mistaken, antiquated ideas about women’s nature, and Emma, though writing a cautionary tale for her adopted son, perhaps more convincingly teaches her charge about the plight of women in a patriarchal society.

The power dynamics of female narrator and male addressee in both Secresy and

Memoirs notably diverge from earlier educational epistolary projects, in which women are usually the addressees. Wetenhall Wilkes’s A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740) and John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) both feature male authors instructing young women. The power structure of these works reflects the male authors’ instructions for young women: “Along with a strong religious emphasis […] and practical advice on domestic economy, such texts taught ‘natural’ femininity in the negative terms of silence and repression; they valorize women’s capacity for feeling, so long as such feelings remain within the bounds of propriety”

(Gilroy and Verhoeven 2). The silent female auditor formally represents the “silence and repression” traditionally expected of women. Other women writers feature works addressed to those of their own gender; Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1773), Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education

(1790), and Maria Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) are all intended for a female audience. Yet, heroines Caroline Ashburn and Emma Courtney turn this tradition on its head as they craft their works for a specifically male reader. Through this simple reversal in structure, they foreshadow the revolutionary nature of their message to their male “students.” 141

Though this reversal of typical educational epistolary projects is important, it is more significant for this study to note that the power dynamic shift occurs in a novel.

Through the genre of the epistolary novel, Fenwick and Hays not only challenge typical pedagogical works, but also illustrate how the novel can be the means of such change— for both the written word and social reform. Romantic women authors’ formal innovations demonstrate how the hybridity at the heart of the novel of the period stresses the physical interchanges between heroines and texts—relationships that yield both textual possession and narrative power for women. The epistolary novel—as I argue, a collection of embedded texts—is not merely a woman’s text as prescribed by its genre.

Both Secresy and Memoirs of Emma Courtney demonstrate how such epistolary novels can feature women owning and using texts for revolutionary purposes, such as challenging traditional assumptions regarding women and education.

142

Conclusion: The Influence of the Romantic Novel

As I noted in the Introduction, Kiely concludes The Romantic Novel in England with a study of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), what he labels as “the masterpiece of English romantic fiction” (233). He goes on to describe what he believes makes this novel so special:

It is part of the distinction of Wuthering Heights that it has no “literary

aura” about it. Emily Brontë does not quote Shakespeare like Walpole

and Mrs. Radcliffe; she does not have her characters recite poetry like

Lewis; she does not allude to ancient epic or chivalric romance like Scott;

and she does not “discover” old documents, letters or confessions like

nearly all of her predecessors. (233)

In an ironic twist, Kiely labels a mid-Victorian novel as the masterpiece of Romantic literature, and then he celebrates just how un-Romantic it is. Kiely’s celebration of

Wuthering Heights’s supposedly non-literary qualities is especially puzzling following his pronouncement of its status as representative of the height of Romantic literature. I have argued that the emphasis on literariness is intrinsic to the Romantic novel, especially the last element on Kiely’s list: the presence of an editorial figure who makes a crucial discovery of a text.

Kiely’s choice of Brontë’s novel does suggest an interesting connection between the Romantic and Victorian periods—one that I would like to echo here. Though Kiely dismisses the standard Romantic qualities of literariness, I want to show how we can see 143 the influence of this Romantic focus in the Victorian novels that follow. In this concluding chapter, I argue that Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) exemplifies the Romantic era’s influence on the development of the genre of the novel throughout the nineteenth century.

Dracula is an especially interesting link in the chain of influence, for it is a point of intersection among the many sub-genres of the Romantic novel that I have discussed in this study: the Gothic, the historical, and the epistolary. Many readers can see a connection between Dracula and the Romantic novel through the vampire plot’s obvious ties to the Gothic novel in its focus on suspense, monstrosity, and excess; critics such as

David Seed and Fred Botting have noted the Gothic influence, linking the work to Ann

Radcliffe's novels. The prefatory note at the outset of the novel, much like the preface to

Lee’s The Recess, indicates that the history that follows is true and credible. And, the multi-media nature of the documentary-style novel shows the influence of the Romantic epistolary novel. Though a late-Victorian text, it bears a striking resemblance to many of the Romantic sub-genres.

I argue that the similarities between the Romantic novel and Dracula compel us to consider how Stoker’s text may also incorporate an editor figure, as so many of its

Romantic predecessors do. This consideration seemingly contradicts recent scholarship that discusses the modernity of Dracula, which focuses on new media and its engagement with the idea of the New Woman. Jennifer Wicke, in her essay "Vampiric Typewriting:

Dracula and Its Media," claims the novel can "be read as the first great modern novel in

British literature" (467), as she charts the haunting reality of mass culture that proliferates the novel. However, it is through the focus on the forms of media present in the novel 144 that we can see the influence of the Romantic novel on Stoker’s work. The various types of documents included in the novel formally inculcate the necessity of an editor figure to bring a sense of unity to the novel. In terms of structure and plot, Mina Harker emerges as the heroine, who, like Romantic heroines before her, engages in several corporeal editing processes, in addition to injecting her own voice at crucial moments to frame her textual product.

Mina Harker: Master Editor, Master Narrator

The Table of Contents of Dracula lists the many sources that form the documentary-style novel: journals, diaries, letters, and even a cutting from a newspaper.

Though these sources all seem straightforward, the modern underpinnings of the novel highlight the fragmented, inaccessible nature of many of the sources. The first text, an entry from Jonathan Harker’s journal, has the parenthetical notation “Kept in shorthand” at the outset (1). Lucy, like both Jonathan and Mina, also keeps a diary in shorthand.

When Van Helsing first sees her diary, he is unable to read it and must ask for help to decipher the text. Dr. Seward’s diary also poses an obstacle, for he records his thoughts on a phonograph. He himself recognizes the shortcomings of his project: “But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up?” (189). The author loses control over his own text because he has not mastered the chosen medium.

Though Stoker presents these challenges in accessibility, one character rises above the others to ensure that all of the texts become both readable and useful in the mission to destroy Dracula—Mina Harker. When Mina gives Van Helsing a typed copy 145 of the transcription of Lucy’s diary, he praises her abilities: “Oh, Madam Mina, […] how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me.

[…] Oh, but I am grateful to you, you so clever woman” (157). Mina also convinces

Seward to allow her to transcribe his phonograph diaries and then use his reflections in their greater mission: “[B]ecause in the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help we can get”

(190). Mina recognizes that these personal documents, journals and diaries, are the very types of knowledge that they need to compile for all to read and comprehend to capture

Dracula; thus, she is eager to make them accessible to all of the vampire hunters.

Mina also sees the value of fragments from other sources, notably newspapers.

She declares, “I remember how much ‘The Dailygraph’ and ‘The Whitby Gazette,’ of which I had made cuttings, helped us to understand the terrible events at Whitby when

Count Dracula landed, so I shall look through the evening papers since then, and perhaps

I shall get some new light” (192). The included cuttings in Dracula emphasize the modern nature of the novel, yet they also follow the tradition of the Romantic novel’s deployment of the embedded text. The August 8 excerpt from “The Dailygraph” is introduced with the parenthetical notation “Pasted in Mina Murray’s Journal” (65). The description calls attention to the physical nature of the document, both in the way in which it has been excised from its original source and by emphasizing the agent who chooses to repurpose the fragment for her own motivations. The clipping becomes doubly embedded—first within Mina’s journal, and then nested within the narrative of the novel. Thus, the thoroughly modern text of a newspaper clipping recalls the narrative experiments of Romantic novels that feature embedded texts to present women characters 146 who find, own, and repurpose texts. However, Mina’s compilation also stands in sharp contrast to the works of her predecessors; none of the other heroines I discuss in this study incorporated various forms of media in their collections. Mina’s editing suggests a more modern desire to exhibit editorial power over other media, as well as other texts.

Mina not only incorporates fragments such as the newspaper article into her own journal, but she is also responsible for sorting through all the individual documents to form one coherent narrative. In one of her initial exchanges with Dr. Seward, Mina declares, “In this matter dates are everything, and I think that if we get all our material ready, and have every item put in chronological order, we shall have done much” (191).

She recognizes the best system to organize the texts to assist them in tracking and capturing Dracula. Stoker emphasizes Mina’s assembly of the documents by having Dr.

Seward repeat the idea in his journal: “Mrs. Harker says that they are knitting together in chronological order every scrap of evidence they have” (192). Like Matilda’s sewing together of the billets to communicate with her guards in The Recess, the description of

Mina’s work as “knitting” highlights both the corporeal nature of the enterprise and her status as the lone female among the vampire hunters.

Though Mina is the only woman among the men, they recognize her value and celebrate her work. When Mina first gives the group narrative to Arthur, he asks, “Did you write all this, Mrs. Harker?” (196), and Mina nods in response. Mina herself notes in her journal that “[I]t does make a pretty good pile” (196). Arthur tellingly uses the word write though he could have just as easily referred to Mina’s efforts as typing, organizing, or transcribing. This slip, however, shows the greater narrative power inherent in Mina’s editing enterprise and foreshadows the authorial agency she exercises later in the novel. 147

Arthur and Mina also fail to note Jonathan’s assistance in producing the record, though earlier speakers suggest that the husband and wife team work together to produce the narrative. The praise is reserved for Mina alone, so much so that she is appointed secretary for the group at their next meeting (203).

Mina also crafts a memorandum that proves instrumental in tracking and capturing Dracula. She composes the memo while the men rest: "They were so tired and worn out and dispirited that there was nothing to be done till they had some rest; so I asked them all to lie down for half an hour whilst I should enter everything up to the moment" (301). Through editing and updating the record, she detects a clue: "I do believe that under God's providence I have made a discovery. I shall get the maps and look over them... I am more than ever sure that I am right" (302). The juxtaposition of the men resting and Mina working, though she claimed that "there was nothing to be done till they had some rest," emphasizes Mina's intellectual contribution to the quest for

Dracula, which is manifested through her narrative agency in updating the group record and authoring the memo. Upon the men’s waking, Mina reads aloud her memo, which becomes the only text that the entire group reads and/or hears together. When finished, her husband kisses her, the others shake her hand, and Van Helsing says, "Our dear

Madam Mina is once more our teacher. Her eyes have been where we were blinded.

Now we are on the track once again, and this time we may succeed" (304). Mina's memo becomes the corrective impetus for the men to finally capture Dracula. Her authorial powers motivate and direct the men's actions.

The plot elements regarding Mina’s editing and writing inform our comprehension of the narrative structure of the novel. I have pointed to the implications 148 of the many forms of media present throughout the documentary-style novel, yet I want to turn my attention now to the opening prefatory note, which bears a striking parallel to the openings of Romantic novels I have discussed that detail the discovery of an ancient manuscript or the composition of the following narrative. A note begins the novel:

How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in

the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a

history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may

stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things

wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly

contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of

knowledge of those who made them. (vi)

The speaker first addresses how the papers have been arranged, noting that the process will be illuminated through the reading of the documents. Emphasizing the collection of the papers, the note prioritizes it as a major element of the plot. By stating that “all needless matters have been eliminated,” the speaker stresses the importance of editing.

The processes of placement and editing work together to make the history “stand forth as a simple fact.”

Though the note promises accuracy, it remains anonymous. Who speaks to the veracity of the following narrative? The plotline’s rendering of Mina as both an editor and author implies that she is also the author of this prefatory note, thus inscribing her narrative authority into the form of the novel. She is editor not only of the vampire hunters’ group record, but also stands as editor of the narrative of the novel itself. Her 149 status as editor of the entire narrative elevates her, especially from the presentation of her as a stereotypical woman in the final text of the novel.

In his final letter, Jonathan speaks for Mina: she is no longer associated with any writing or media, and her primary role seems to be mothering. Furthermore, Van

Helsing, in the final words of the novel, repositions her place in the narrative: “We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake”

(326). Stressing her traditionally feminine qualities, Van Helsing casts her as the worthy damsel in distress who has been successfully rescued. Mina stands as the authentic text, the woman who was “so loved,” that she is the legitimate impetus for and living product of masculine heroism.

Mina here is reduced to a mere formulaic text—an easily “readable” woman, stereotypically representing the ideal of femininity: motherhood. Such textual objectification certainly robs her of her narrative authority. Jonathan has already dismissed the other “text,” the group’s narrative:

I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since our return

so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material

of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document;

nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later note-books of Mina and

Seward and myself, and Van Helsing's memorandum. We could hardly

ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a

story. (326) 150

Jonathan dismisses the authenticity of their group record, and he also notes his reluctance to ask any outsiders to believe his narrative. Van Helsing's closing lines, thus, shut down this narrative, implying that only Mina remains as a reminder and emblem of their vampire adventure, and that only little Quincey will ever "read" this tale by seeing his mother's bravery.

Yet this reductive ending—Jonathan’s refusal of authenticity and reluctance to show it to anyone, as well as Van Helsing’s sole focus on Mina—does not account for the distribution of the narrative. Jonathan’s assessment of their record implies that he places the papers back in the safe, leaving them to molder there for years to come. The closeting of the narrative is at odds with the beginning note of the novel that emphasizes the editing process and the implied textual distribution to believing readers. The final portrayal of Jonathan’s doubt, however, is relevant to my argument by highlighting the contrast between the beginning and ending of the novel, a contrast that actually illustrates

Mina's narrative authority over the entire text. By turning back to the beginning note, readers recognize the discord between the ending and beginning of Dracula. Whereas

Jonathan's final letter shuts down the narrative, implying that it remains unread, the beginning note shows the care put into preparing the narrative and the editor’s trust in its credibility.

Though Jonathan’s final domestic tableau revels in emotional excess, especially in its memorial to the fallen Quincey and the saccharine celebration of Mina as a mother, the prefatory note is more direct. Its main objective is an appeal to truth rather than feeling. The note’s insistence on veracity is reminiscent of Mina's modeling of ‘lady journalists’: “I shall try to do what I see lady journalists do: interviewing and writing 151 descriptions and trying to remember conversations. I am told that, with a little practice, one can remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day” (46). Mina’s desire to acquire the skills of lady journalists highlights her investment in writing as a professional enterprise, and the ruling enterprise of journalism is distribution. Jonathan may put the mass of typewriting back into the safe, but we are to infer that it is Mina who pulls it back out, testifies to its accuracy, and distributes it for the education of others.

Alison Case also cites Mina Harker as a female editor of the many documents comprising the novel, yet she argues that Mina is eventually re-feminized by the vampire hunters in an effort to subsume female narrative authority into a larger project that affirms and reinstates traditional gender roles. She claims that Mina loses what power she does possess once the group decides to withhold all information from Mina in an effort to protect her: “The decision to exclude Mina from further plotting is cast explicitly as a reassertion of conventional gender roles and a reappropriation of narrative authority. Indeed, it would be difficult to justify it on any other terms” (175). Reading

Mina's hypnosis sessions as “the epitome of feminine narration,” Case maintains that

Mina falls from being master-narrator to having little narrative contribution as a mere feminine narrator.

However, Case’s argument relies heavily upon the final chapters of the novel and completely ignores the prefatory note.18 The note stresses the collection of the fragments

18 Case admits that this memo problematizes her argument that Mina becomes what she terms a ‘feminine narrator’ in the novel: “This episode consequently resists any effort to read Mina's intellectual agency simply as destroyed or negated in the course of the novel”

(180). Yet, she claims that this plot element is just one of many when either the Count or 152 into a credible, worthy document—what the plot shows that Mina has created. Amidst the rise of ‘lady journalists’ and the New Woman debates of the 1890s, Stoker’s form recalls the innovative narrative experiments of Romantic novelists that cede power to women characters, just as he depicts Mina as an editor who collects the pieces of a puzzle together, leads the men to victory over Dracula, and distributes the text to share their, and notably—her—success. Indeed, many could read the 1790s backdrop of early Romantic novels and the 1890s as parallel periods: times of great debate and change regarding gender roles and decades on the cusp of major transition. As such, the documentary form of Dracula casts Mina as a Romantic heroine, though one whose skills—such as stenography and typing—compel us to see how thoroughly modern such Romantic heroines can be.

Corporeal Reality

I have discussed Dracula in this concluding chapter to illustrate the vast scope of the influence of narrative experiments in the Romantic novel. Yet this novel obviously

the men are using Mina: “Rather than simply reaffirming Mina’s reliability or power, then, this episode seems in part to exemplify the men’s superior ability to take advantage of all the shifting resources at their disposal” (181). However, I would argue that this assessment loses focus on the text of the memorandum itself, something that must be considered when making an argument concerning narration. Mina’s text, and the group's joint acceptance of it, highlight Mina's narrative authority, no matter how the Count or the men plan to use her or dismiss her in the future.

153 also shares an investment in the otherworldly realm. Dracula presents a ghastly story of an enterprising vampire who threatens to spread his kind throughout England. It revels in the fantasy worlds that it creates, transporting the reader to future and macabre times.

Though Dracula asks readers to suspend their belief to embrace the possibility of divine and supernatural entities, it also compels readers to recognize the true reality available in texts. Despite Jonathan Harker’s assumption that no one would believe the group’s record, the various texts all testify to the truth of this monster and his plans. Thus,

Dracula illustrates the influence of the Romantic novel’s narrative experiments and emphasizes the importance of textual corporeality in these novels. Texts become a touchstone of truth, a quality that reminds us to extend our belief in this veracity to consider the corporeal nature of these texts as examples of tangible reality.

The novel’s testament to corporeal reality is the foundation of my argument, for the heroines who interact with these texts recognize their truth, and thus, strive to find, possess, and collect these texts as a means of establishing and promoting truth. Textual reality, I maintain, is the access point for understanding the myriad narrative experiments of the Romantic novel. A fascination with textual corporeality is not exclusive to the novel during this period. Book V of William Wordsworth’s Prelude famously asks us to consider the longevity of books. Plagued by the thought that books “must perish” (5.21), the speaker listens to a friend recount the story of a man who dreams that two books— represented by a stone and a shell—must be buried to preserve them in the face of a coming flood. Wordsworth presents the question of the permanence of texts and their

“shrines so frail” (5.48) as a means of discussing the role of the author and his or her lasting influence. The physical object of the text is the impetus for considering the larger 154 relationship surrounding the text—the interaction between writer and reader. The speaker celebrates authors, whose powers are second only to Nature:

It seemeth, in behalf of these, the works

And of the Men who framed them, whether known,

Or sleeping nameless in the scattered graves,

That I should here assert their rights, attest

Their honours, and should, once for all, pronounce

Their benediction; speak of them as Powers

For ever to be hallowed. (5.214-20)

Thus, the question of the physical reality of the text itself prompts the speaker to recognize the lasting influence of the writer—an influence that promises to survive both the disintegration of the text and the death of the writer.

I point to this passage in The Prelude to demonstrate that textual corporeality resonates with larger issues, such as the role of the artist and questions of temporality, more traditionally associated with Romanticism, specifically Romantic poets.

Furthermore, the discussion of textual physicality leads the speaker to consider the greater context surrounding these texts, such as the place of texts in a changing world and the legacy of authorial influence. Similarly, the recognition of the corporeality of embedded texts in Romantic novels spurs consideration of the contextual relationships surrounding these texts, specifically how heroines often interact with these texts to demonstrate their textual and narrative agency.

The most fruitful result of underscoring the corporeality of embedded texts in

Romantic novels is a new understanding of women’s textual and narrative power in these 155 works. By employing Daniel Punday’s theory of corporeal narratology, we see that texts, like bodies, are tangible entities that have narrative capabilities, especially in terms of the characters who interact with these texts. The many ways in which Romantic heroines find, possess, and collect texts stress the growing narrative power of women characters and represent a cultural shift during the period, when many more women were embarking on authorial and editing enterprises.

Perhaps Anne Elliot of Austen’s Persuasion makes the most poignant critique of the paucity of women’s narrative agency in most books. Anne declares, “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands” (243). Anne equates narrative power with the possession of an object—the pen. Here, the idea of authorial power literally underwrites Anne’s conception of narrative power, and the instrument of the pen—which symbolizes the attainment of education and therefore narrative power—becomes the means of establishing men’s narrative agency. She recoils from the nature of truth presented in most books because male authors have shared only their stories by writing those books. The pen represents male dominance in the realm of narrative authority.

However, this study has focused on the narrative potential of another object—a text—though it does not function as an automatic signifier of authorial and narrative authority, as the pen does. I have attempted to show how the object of the text itself is not simply the narrative contained therein, but also the potential relationships that the object represents. The actions surrounding the object often encourage and unleash women’s narrative authority. Thus, though they may not always hold the pen that Anne

Elliot covets, the heroines of Romantic novels often find narrative agency through their 156 interactions with texts as objects. By reading embedded texts through the lens of corporeal narratology, I have stressed how interpreting their objectness as tangible leads to a more nuanced understanding of the narrative innovations of the Romantic novel, which is a promising intersection of corporeal and feminist narratology.

The tangibility of these embedded texts, suggestively more literal than the symbolic pen that Anne desires, presents another potential critical perspective for this study. Though I have consistently discussed these embedded texts in terms of narratology and narrative power, this project could also expand to consider the increasingly popular field of thing theory. Long-hidden memoirs, found manuscripts, bequeathed texts, letter collections, text-filled pieces of bark, and diary transcripts present themselves as intriguing objects, so much more than just simple narratives.

In 2001, Bill Brown first suggested a more literal reading of objects, and consequently, a more relational model in his provocative article “Thing Theory.” He notes that we “confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us” because that change highlights our relation to objects (4). He declares, “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (4). This study has examined the subject-object relation of heroines and text objects—whether letters, fragments, memoirs, or even media clippings and translations. By focusing on the physical interactions between heroine and texts— finding, holding, or collecting texts—I have demonstrated the resulting, though less tangible, effects of the subject-object relations, such as increased textual and narrative authority. 157

In The Ideas In Things (2007), Elaine Freedgood, however, argues that critics must affirm the independent nature of objects even as we explore their role in respect to narratives of novels: “[T]he object is investigated in terms of its own properties and history and then refigured alongside and athwart the novel’s manifest or dominant narrative—the one that concerns its subjects” (12). Freedgood, who focuses on the things of the Victorian novel, claims that “Victorian thing culture” itself makes her work possible (8). She develops a narrative of the history and context surrounding objects such as mahogany and calico, which then influences her reading of the roles of such objects amid the Victorian novel.

In contrast to the Victorian period, eighteenth-century Britain does not immediately conjure thoughts of the period’s cultural fascination with objects; however, recent scholarship suggests that eighteenth-century and Romantic literature are invested in the material reality of things. Edited by Mark Blackwell, The Secret Life of Things:

Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (2007) surveys the intersection between thing theory and “an odd subgenre of the novel, a type of prose fiction in which inanimate objects (coins, waistcoats, pins, corkscrews, coaches) or animals (dogs, fleas, cats, ponies) serve as the central characters” (10). Blackwell describes the role of things in these novels: “Sometimes these characters enjoy a consciousness—and thus a perspective—of their own; sometimes they are merely narrative hubs around which other people’s stories accumulate, like the stick around which the cotton candy winds” (10). Liz Bellamy explains that these works are often categorized as “novels of circulation” because they employ “a plot that focuses on the way that an object passes through a diverse range of hands” (118). And, as Blackwell 158 notes in his Introduction to the volume, the leap from reading about these objects to recognizing the objectness of the texts themselves is not that wide: “[I]t-fictions are also things themselves, print objects that formed part of both the literary and material culture of eighteenth-century Britain” (12). The scholarship on It-narratives highlights both the increased focus on objects in the eighteenth century and the potential to read texts as things. It-narratives, like the Romantic novel, though popular with their contemporary readers, have often been derided or overlooked (Blackwell 11). However, both prompt us to recognize that the eighteenth century, like the Victorian period that Freedgood describes, was also invested in things as objects and their cultural presence.

My study is particularly interested in the way in which the late eighteenth-century and Romantic periods perceived the objectness of texts. Texts were undoubtedly rising in popularity throughout the later years of the century. Franklin claims that “the last quarter of the eighteenth century seems to have been something of a golden age for authorship,” and thus, texts themselves (57). She writes, “By the end of the century the number of new titles being published was almost four times the Augustan norm of 100 new books a year” (57). And, this figure accounts for books only; one need only think of the pamphlet wars of the 1790s to consider the sharp increase in texts of other kinds as well. The rich history of textual production in the late eighteenth century, like Victorian thing culture, encourages a similar examination of the history and context surrounding the thingness of texts. Thing theory, in addition to corporeal narratology, offers another avenue to understanding the physical presence implied by embedded texts in the Romantic novel, and thereby, the important subject-object relationships between heroines and these texts. 159

I hope that this study of embedded texts and narrative structure helps to rehabilitate the reputation of the Romantic novel and the experiments that novelists, particularly women novelists, were willing to take. Whether through the lens of feminist narratology, corporeal narratology, or thing theory, reclaiming the Romantic novel critically changes our narrative of the history of the novel. Rather than discussing only key eighteenth-century and Victorian works, students of the novel benefit from acknowledging the place of the Romantic novel and its innovation, instead of dismissing the supposed monstrosity of a ‘Frankenstein’ text. Authors like Mary Robinson, Sophia

Lee, and Eliza Fenwick, among others, then become part of the trajectory of women novelists like Jane Austen and the Brontës who significantly contribute to the development of women’s narratives in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century novel.

160

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